Marsha later participated in the cyproheptadine study. When it came time for her fourth double-blind session we were nearly certain, taking into account the effects of her previous sessions, that this final dose would be an unadulterated 0.4 mg/kg.
She began by saying, “I hope to meet some of my ancestors today, to help me deal with my current life stresses.”
She talked about her marriage; her husband had been in therapy and his therapist was telling him to be more honest with her. As a result, he told her he didn’t like that she was getting “fat,” that it was a sexual turnoff. She wondered if I thought she was fat.
I sidestepped her question and suggested, “Maybe there’s more going on that just how much you weigh.”
She nodded, and we began preparing for the injection.
A few minutes before giving Marsha the DMT, her husband entered the room, ready to join us for the session. The atmosphere in the room was slightly sad, but also hopeful.
She began talking about 15 minutes after the injection.
I never would have imagined it would be like this. There was no transition. There was no universe with stars and a pinpoint of light like last time. You know what happened? I was on a merry-go-round!
There were all these dolls in 1890s outfits, life-sized, men and women. The women were in corsets. They had big breasts and big butts and teeny skinny waists. They were all whirling around me on tiptoes. The men had top hats, riding on two-seater bicycles. One merry-go-round after another after another. The women had red circles painted on their cheeks, and there was calliope music in the background. And there were some clowns, flitting in and out, not really the main characters, but busier, somehow more aware of me than the mannequins.
This sounded like a dream. It also was another encounter with clowns or jesters, something I had been hearing about for quite some time from other volunteers. However, they seemed less important than the merry-go- round and her feelings about it.
We had been talking about “therapeutic” issues before the injection. I decided to put on my therapist’s cap and see what happened. When someone comes into a therapy session recounting a dream, I usually ask, and did this time, “What did it feel like for you?”
That’s the wrong question, try another.
At that moment Marsha wasn’t ready to “do work” with the dream, so I responded to the more superficial aspects of her experience, the carnival atmosphere.
“Was it fun?”
Yes.
Could we go deeper? “Was it really fun?”
Yes, but it was no Taj Mahal. I hoped to see my ancestors, a temple, or that I would see tall African people in old clothing.
“Instead you were at a carnival at the State Fair.”
Big time! I was the only human there. They had these painted-on smiles, there was no change in their expression. I thought, “Hey, what’s going on?”
She added,
There was a sexual energy of wanting more, of being stimulated, of wanting more. I’ve never felt that way on DMT. I guess the mannequins were so beautiful that it was a turn-on.
She lifted her eyeshades and looked at her husband, blurting out,
Let’s fuck!
I laughed. “Sorry, you’ll need to wait until you get home.”
Her husband turned to me and said “Do people have sexual experiences during DMT?”
While a reasonable question, it did not quite fit in with the personal and emotional themes that were so active at that moment. I had to answer, but did so briefly and with the hope of regaining direction.
“There’s sexual energy, but not usually sexual-intercourse types of feelings.”
I knew I had to act fast if I were to be of any help in interpreting the dreamlike features of Marsha’s session. What was the spirit molecule trying to tell us?
“Were the mannequins white? Were they Anglo?”
Yes, they all were. There were no colored people in any of the things I’ve ever seen from the gay ’90s.
“It’s interesting. DMT seems to have its own agenda. What do you make of this?”
I just can’t figure it out. I’m exhausted and starved.
I ventured, “They sound like an exaggeration or a caricature of Anglo beauty. It’s interesting within the context of what we were talking about—your concerns about your weight.”
It’s true, maybe I should have fun with my figure.
She looked at her husband and said,
I told Rick about your thinking I was fat, that that was part of your therapy.
He looked a little embarrassed.
When I was young I was quite thin. When my husband and I met I was 20 pounds less than I am now. I looked like a stick figure. That’s not my culture at all. Rather, the desired form is heavy and full, big breasts and big waists and big rear. Skinny was terrible in my culture. They used a slang word that meant skinny but when they used it, I didn’t know what it meant. It seemed like they were talking about ugly, ill, not well.
Marsha’s husband excused himself to use the bathroom. Upon returning, he seemed to sense Marsha’s need to talk about these things without him in the room, and he returned to work. She and I continued this discussion for a while longer, and then drifted onto other topics.
I usually was not as directive with volunteers as I was with Marsha that day. However, her DMT vision seemed so perfectly related to her current conflicts that I could not ignore the message the spirit molecule was giving us. Marsha’s Anglo husband was comparing her with his image of the ideal woman, and she was lacking. Her figure was not “right.” However, the “mannequin” Anglo women and men were lifeless, painted images, going round and round aimlessly. Marsha remembered the pride with which her family greeted the full figure of womanhood, and tried owning that herself. She felt her inherent sexuality was good enough. She wanted to have sex with her husband, to reconnect at that basic level. Surprised and nonplussed, it was difficult for him to address her emotional needs at that moment. It was a miniature version of their ongoing problems.
Another way in which DMT affects the mind and body in potentially useful ways is through creating a controlled and supported traumatic experience. Trauma derives from a Greek word meaning “wound.” My dictionary defines trauma as “a severe emotional shock having a deep, often lasting effect upon the personality.”
Traumatic experiences usually are out of our control. For example, we do not choose our abusive childhoods, exposure to natural or manmade disasters, or real threats to our life. Once we have experienced such events, the mind’s natural tendency is to wall off the feelings of fear, helplessness, and anxiety that threatened to overwhelm us at the time.
Nevertheless, unprocessed trauma seeps out into our lives. We may find ourselves in situations that produce ghosts or shadows of those trauma-based feelings over and over again. It is as if we feel forced to repeat certain types of relationships that bring out feelings we couldn’t master or control the first time, usually when we were powerless children. For example, an abusive spouse recreates the feelings brought on by an abusive parent. We may notice it’s difficult to make deep emotional attachments because being close means being dangerously vulnerable.
If we are to move past the consequences of trauma, it is necessary to confront them head-on. Usually this requires a voluntary reexperiencing of the feelings caused by the trauma in a safe and supportive environment. The problem is how to access those feelings in the first place.
In many ways, a high dose of DMT is traumatic, bringing about a loss of control and annihilation of personal identity. “Shock” is a word we heard many times during the DMT studies. I even began using the term when I prepared people for their first 0.4 mg/kg session. Several volunteers recommended we print t-shirts with the words “I Survived 0.4” to hand out to those who successfully negotiated that morning’s events.
I am certain that many of our volunteers were at some level attracted to the DMT project because it promised an overwhelming but structure
d voluntary traumatic experience. By experiencing absolute loss of control in a safe and supportive situation, it might be possible to more fully contact, and thereby own and let go of, certain painful emotions. Cassandra was one such volunteer whose incompletely expressed and felt emotions from past trauma hindered her current life.
Cassandra was twenty-two years old, the next-to-youngest volunteer, when she signed on for the DMT project. Her manner and appearance brought out conflicting feelings in most people she met, and I was no exception. She dressed and carried herself in a somewhat masculine way, and she was bisexual. Both men and women found her pleasing face and lithe, androgynous body type attractive. Her studiously casual attitude toward appearance and self-care made her seem somewhat waiflike, and it was easy to feel caring and maternal toward her—the older nurses on the research ward wanted to feed her and give her a bath. She also possessed sharp intelligence, laconic humor, and a direct manner. Cassandra was a complicated young woman, and it took some effort to see with whom you were really dealing.
Cassandra suffered in relationships. Her parents divorced before she was a year old, and her mother raised her neglectfully. This came to a head at the age of sixteen, when her mother left her alone with her stepfather for a week. He raped her repeatedly during that time, and this cemented her stark ambivalence toward men and women: distrusting and hating them on one hand, but needing their love and protection at the same time.
After this, she developed symptoms of a post-traumatic stress disorder, experiencing flashbacks of the rape during sexual relations in her first long-term relationship. When she was twenty, she decided that she never wanted to have children and had a tubal ligation.
Cassandra had been in and out of many short-term therapeutic and romantic relationships. At first she would idealize and romanticize the therapist or lover. Then she experienced disappointment and contempt in his or her inability to provide the empathy she needed so badly. She was friends with one of our male volunteers, and they became sexually involved after they completed the tolerance study. Soon after that she left the country, leaving no forwarding address.
I include Cassandra’s story here although it could also belong in the entity contact or mystical experience chapters. Her sessions did include interactions with the “clowns” and led to a deep serene peace she had never previously known. However, the beings’ primary effect was to make her feel loved and happy, and the mystical resolution to her conflicts came only after a painful psychological process. Cassandra’s sessions were, like many of the ones I will present, hybrids of more than one type.
In addition, it felt as if I were doing psychotherapy with Cassandra, rather than spiritual counseling or interpreting “transdimensional” phenomena. So placement into the feeling-thinking, personal category of experiences relates to the type of response her session evoked in me as much as in her.
She had few stated expectations of her participation in our studies: “I want to see what DMT feels like.” Also, she requested we not ask her a lot of questions, “so I could simply enjoy the effects.”
We were not so offhanded in considering Cassandra’s ability to manage high doses of DMT. We knew she could be volatile, and that it was important to be especially careful to avoid making her feel we were forcing anything on her. We didn’t want to replay any rape themes in Room 531.
Cassandra’s screening low dose of DMT was mild and pleasant. We met the next day for her non-blind, 0.4 mg/kg high dose.
As she began coming down, she said,
Something took my hand and yanked me. It seemed to say, “Let’s go!” Then I started flying through an intense circus-like environment. I’ve never been that out-of-body before. First there was an itchy feeling where the drug went in. We went through a maze at an incredibly fast pace. I say “we” because it seemed like I was accompanied.
It was cool. There was a crazy circus sideshow—just extravagant. It’s hard to describe. They looked like Jokers. They were almost performing for me. They were funny looking, bells on their hats, big noses. However, I had the feeling they could turn on me, a little less than completely friendly.
I want to do it again. I want to see if I can slow it down.
I called Cassandra the next day.
She said, “It’s impossible to make sense of it. I’d rather do it again, to see what it’s like. It’s refreshing to get a change of perspective, to see how insignificant my everyday problems are. I felt peaceful this afternoon. There was a brief moment of wanting it to be over because it was so intense, but I remembered to breathe and settled back into it. It’s so weird, impossible to prepare for, to know what to expect. I’d rather not introspect too much.”
She agreed to participate in the tolerance study.
Cassandra was in a good mood when we met in Room 531 a month later.
She began, “I quit my job at the local restaurant where I’ve been working. I’m not sure what’s next in my life now. I met a woman whom I really like; I think about her a lot.”
I asked, “What are you thinking about the study today?”
“Coming down last month from the big dose, I really felt in my body for the first time in my life. I usually live in my head. I remember that feeling. It was therapeutic. I liked the feeling of being in my body.”
“Can you carry it with you?”
She answered, “It’s hard to do all at once. I’ve been out of touch with my body for so long, in a fight with it, I figure it will be a gradual process.”
It turned out that this first double-blind tolerance day was active drug. We could tell at the 2-minute point, when Cassandra’s heart rate and blood pressure jumped dramatically.
She didn’t say much about her first dose that morning. She seemed to be getting her bearings, keeping her cards close to her chest. As she finished answering the first of the four rating scales, she said,
I thought a lot about my new friend. That was good, but this next one I want to be all my trip.
Once she was able to talk after her second dose:
It’s funny. I let go more this time. This was no problem at all. It was all about feeling good. There was no revelation, no meaningful overtones. The body is a real hindrance, isn’t it? I definitely felt the presence of others. They were kind to me, nice and caring. They seemed small, as if they could enter my body and mind in that space. There was a total sense of losing my body, but the little presences know how to enter it somehow.
“How do you feel about the third dose?”
You should patent it. I guess it’s too late for that. If I could only hold onto this feeling. If everybody did this every day the world would be a much better place. Life would be a lot better. The potential for good is so great. Feeling good within yourself. I guess meditation is supposed to get you to the same place.
“I’m not sure that’s possible.”
Me neither.
Ten minutes into her third dose, Cassandra started smiling. Just then, there also was a horrible coughing out in the hall.
I can still feel it. I hold all this stuff, the shit, in the left side of my abdomen. I got the message this time to let go of all that. I can still feel the relaxation. It’s warm and tingly.
This seemed like an opening. If she retreated or attacked in response to my next few comments, I’d leave well enough alone. However, she seemed to be asking for some help.
“What do you hold on to?”
The pain.
“What pain?”
I guess all the pain.
She began crying.
I guess all the pain I ever felt.
“There’s a lot there?”
Yeah.
She began crying more heavily.
“It’s okay to feel it, and cry, and to let it go, too.”
That’s the good part, to let go of it.
At 15 minutes she sighed,
I feel like I have a new body. It’s so much more aware.
“It is yours.”
She laughed dryly,
then began crying more deeply.
These aren’t sad tears, they are tears of enlightenment.
“It doesn’t matter.”
I felt her bristle as she said,
Yes it does.
Reflecting back to her even more closely, I offered, “I guess they are a cleansing sort of tears.”
Yes. I’ll be a guru after this morning. You know how everyone’s quest is to find the meaning or the purpose of life? Well, it’s to feel this way. Life doesn’t cut it normally.
“What do you mean?”
Everything about life. It’s not very empowering. You aren’t taught to focus on yourself. To realize the strength you have in yourself. Life throws you into the victim role. I know that’s a trite expression, but I think it’s true. Things do happen when you’re out of control with your life. These DMT experiences are like the height of meditation, accessing inner power and inner strength. You know that question in your rating scale about “higher power or God”? Well, I’m uncomfortable with that idea because it implies outside, but I do contact something deeper and more inside. This session was more combined, in terms of the presences joining me and me being the focus of it more. The first trip was just me, and the second trip was more the presences; this was a combination.
“How do you feel about the fourth dose coming up?”
It’ll be the best, it’ll be even better. I am going deeper and deeper through these layers.
Immediately after giving Cassandra her last dose, people began talking loudly outside the door. At 6 minutes we heard a huge crash. Five minutes later she said,
I feel very loved.
“That’s a nice feeling.”
Yes, warm.
She looked sad and tapped the fingers of her right hand against the bed.
I’m feeling a lot.
There was a horrible sound outside the door, someone drilling in screws. I thought about how incredible it was that our volunteers could disregard all the chaos of a hospital ward and still have such profound experiences.
DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences Page 18