DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences

by Rick Strassman M. D.

  Cassandra lifted the eyeshades but kept her eyes closed. Then she opened her eyes half-mast, gazing straight ahead. She looked up at the ceiling and began crying again.

  “What are you feeling?”

  Everything will be okay. I don’t need to worry about all my doubts. Things like “Where will I go? What will I do?” It’s reassuring.

  “An optimistic feeling?”

  Yes, it’s very refreshing. It feels like there are thousands and thousands of separate parts of me and this drug brings them all together. It feels very complete.

  “You said you felt loved.”

  It was a feeling in my chest. It was warm. My whole chest felt inflated. It was a really good feeling. I was loved by the entities or whatever they are. It was very pleasant and comforting.

  Cassandra and I spoke a few weeks later by phone.

  She said, “There have been profound physical changes, very beneficial ones. It feels as if I got my stomach back. Now for the first time in years I’m able to breathe deep into my stomach. I’m more optimistic. That’s worn off a little bit by now, but not extremely. I can remember the optimism in meditation. It’s like having the deepest possible tissue massage. On the third trip I was really able to let go. I guess I was hurt in there when I was raped. That’s where I hide things and protect myself, constantly clenching them. Years of keeping those feelings tightly kept in my abdomen. I feel a lot freer.

  “DMT is far better than any therapy ever was for me. All therapy reminds me of is how bad things were and are. On DMT I saw and felt myself as a good person, as loved by the DMT elves.”

  I asked, “Elves?”

  “There was a sense of many visitors. They were jovial, and they had a great time giving me the experience of being loved. With each dose there was more and more of a fulfilling safe and comfortable familiar feeling.

  “It would be great to do DMT maybe once a year to put a perspective on things and see where I’m at and heal me. The freedom in my abdomen is still there. The clenching is back again a little bit, but on a more consistent basis I can remember that I was able to really clear it out.”

  I added, “It can be a useful reference point.”

  Freud coined the term transference, which refers to how people habitually react to others as if they were important figures from that person’s earlier life. In therapy, countertransference feelings are those in the therapist similarly projected toward his or her client.

  Cassandra’s life was full of transference feelings for those with whom she became involved. Because there’s never transference without countertransference, people reacted just as strongly to her. Sharing her comfort with me could be a trap or an opportunity. We needed to look at our relationship without the confusing dance of transference and countertransference.

  The next month Cassandra returned for the second half of the tolerance study: four consecutive doses of placebo.

  After we wrapped up the fourth dose of salt water, I said, “Thanks for your participation.”

  “Thank you. You’ve been easy to talk with.”

  I took this as an opening to do a little bit of work before saying goodbye. She was in a sober and steady condition, so I directly addressed the underlying theme.

  “I wonder if you had some difficulty at first trusting a male physician who was going to incapacitate you with a drug.”

  She answered, “I went for it. I trusted you. I never really was worried about it. You changed my life.”

  Knowing Cassandra put people on pedestals before knocking them down, I countered very carefully, “I helped create the context for you to change your life.”

  “I guess. DMT strips you down to your soul. I know that there is nothing to worry about. DMT showed me how to see beyond it all. Everything will basically be all right. I remember an idea of Samuel Coleridge: If you have a wonderful dream and bring a rose back with you and then you wake up and the rose is in your hand, that meant the dream was real. When I came home and saw the bruises and the holes in my arm I really felt like that—that it really did happen, and that I really was where I was, and felt what I felt.”

  Cassandra’s case shows us how critically important it is to respond appropriately to whatever issues DMT raises. I said the bare minimum to keep her process going, without trying to judge, take credit, or otherwise betray her trust. To do so would have derailed the important work she was doing, and most likely she’d experience it as another violation of her integrity.

  With Cassandra, there was a blending of several different themes. However, the primary one seems to have been reencountering the psychological trauma of her rape through the symptom of her abdominal pain. DMT made it easier for her to make the emotional contact with what her physical pain represented and, indeed, where it began. The spirit molecule helped her by demonstrating that she could lose control, particularly around a powerful man, and be safe and loved at the same time. The issues of who loved her and told her she was good, and the nature of that love, take us into other categories, such as contact with beings and spirituality.

  Both Marsha and Cassandra met up with clowns and presences who seemed to reside somewhere other than Room 531. Let’s now examine these other worlds, and their inhabitants, to which the spirit molecule may lead us. They are neither personal nor transpersonal in nature. Rather, they are invisible, and for the volunteers and research team, quite startling and unexpected.

  12

  Unseen Worlds

  In this chapter, we begin following the spirit molecule into more unexpected territory. This terrain is not so easy to recognize or understand because the experiences are less clearly related to the thoughts, feelings, and bodies of our volunteers. Rather, they suggest freestanding, independent levels of existence about which we are at most only dimly aware. These reports challenge our world view, and they raise the emotional intensity of debate: “Is it a dream? A hallucination? Or is it real?” “Where are these places? Inside or out?” These are the some of the questions we’ll begin pondering as we review the following reports.

  Volunteers have referred to these places already. Marsha journeyed to “the Taj Mahal,” and Cassandra was yanked into “the crazy circus sideshow” full of clowns and other beings. In this chapter, I will focus on this issue of “where.” Where does DMT take us by the hand and lead us to? This is a necessary part of mapping the spirit molecule’s territory.

  An interesting aspect to these reports is that they are mostly excerpts rather than records of entire sessions. Rarely did the DMT environment alone take center stage during someone’s trip. Certainly the spaces in which volunteers found themselves were highly unusual. However, more important was the meaning or the feeling, the information, associated with where they were. Of course, once other “life-forms” began to appear in these spaces, it was difficult not to be completely swept up in their existence, and these reports rightly are the subject of separate chapters.

  Despite their strange nature, these excerpts are introductory. They set the stage for the next layer of existence to which the spirit molecule leads. “Where” is the backdrop, the scenery. “Who” gets to the core of these matters. But first, let’s get acquainted with the landscape.

  At the most basic biological level was the perception of DNA and other biological components.

  Karl was our first dose-response study volunteer: DMT-1. He began speaking within 2 minutes of getting his first non-blind low dose:

  There were spirals of what looked like DNA, red and green.

  Philip, about whose harrowing 0.6 mg/kg experience we’ve already read, also recognized the familiar double-helix pattern, this time on his doubleblind 0.4 mg/kg dose:

  The visuals were dropping back into tubes, like protozoa, like the inside of a cell, seeing the DNA twirling and spiraling. They looked gelatinlike, like tubes, inside which were cellular activities. It was like a microscopic view of them.

  Cleo, whose enlightenment experience we will discuss in a later chapter, also met up with v
isions of DNA:

  There was a spiral DNA-type thing made out of incredibly bright cubes. I “felt” the boxes at the same time that my consciousness shifted.

  We will closely examine Sara’s entity contact experience in a subsequent chapter. However, it’s interesting to note her reference to DNA:

  I felt the DMT release my soul’s energy and push it through the DNA. It’s what happened when I lost my body. There were spirals that reminded me of things I’ve seen at Chaco Canyon. Maybe that was DNA. Maybe the ancients knew that. The DNA is backed into the universe like space travel. One needs to travel without one’s body. It’s ridiculous to think about space travel in little ships.1

  Some subjects experienced a less obviously biological representation of information than DNA.

  Vladan, a forty-two-year-old Eastern European filmmaker, was one of our busiest research subjects; he volunteered for many of the pilot studies in which we worked out doses and combinations of medications to use with DMT. He also received more psilocybin in our preliminary dosefinding work than anyone else.

  On a relatively low dose of DMT, 0.1 mg/kg, during the pindolol study, he encountered symbols that were rich with meaning:

  There were visuals at the peak, soft and geometric. They were 3-D circles and cones with shading. They moved a lot. It was almost like looking at an alphabet, but it wasn’t English. It was like a fantasy alphabet, a cross between runes and Russian or Arabic writing. It felt like there was some information in it, like it was data. It wasn’t just random.2

  Later, while participating in a pilot cyproheptadine session, Vladan received 0.2 mg/kg DMT and again saw alphabet-like figures.

  Like seeing panels with a cut-out shape, rounded edges, hieroglyphics of some sort. They weren’t painted on but more cut out, through which I saw the colors.

  Another striking example of the visual transformation of language and numbers comes from Heather. At twenty-seven years of age, she was one of our most experienced volunteers. Heather had taken psychedelics close to two hundred times, had over a dozen experiences with smoked DMT, and was quite familiar with marijuana, stimulants, and MDMA. In addition, she had drunk the DMT-containing tea ayahuasca ten times.

  Emerging from her first non-blind high dose of DMT, she began:

  There was a woman speaking Spanish all the time throughout the trip. She had quite a unique accent. Maybe it wasn’t Spanish, but it sounded like it. At one point she said, “Regular.”3 She threw a white blanket over the scene and then pulled it back repeatedly. It was really weird. There were numbers. It was like numerology and language. There were all these colors and then there were all these numbers, Roman numerals. The numbers became words. Where do words come from? The woman would cover them with her blanket—the words and the numbers.

  It started out typically as DMT but then I went past it, beyond where I’ve been on DMT. There is that ringing sound as you’re getting up there, and then I went to the language or number thing. It was totally inexplicable. Maybe it was trying to teach me something. The first number I saw was a 2 and I looked around and there were numbers all around. They were separate in their little boxes, and then the boxes would melt and the numbers would all merge together to make long numbers.

  Eli was a thirty-eight-year-old architect and one of our most fearless research subjects. He previously had “regressed under LSD through childhood to a point where I was sitting above the room, watching myself.” During a 0.4 mg/kg dose that he received during the cyproheptadine study, he noted,

  What’s interesting is that I began experiencing sets of hallucinations, and then I said to myself, “Ah, this is the Logos.” There’s the blue-yellow core of meaning and semantics, basically.4

  I laughed at his use of the word “basically”: “That’s easy for you to say.”

  I know! It’s like threads of words or DNA or something. They’re all around there, they’re everywhere. After the blue amoebic shapes, there were several pulsating places. I thought, “There are lots of these.” It’s a good feeling. Then it breaks into a ruffled reality. When I looked around, it seemed like the meaning or symbols were there. Some kind of core of reality where all meaning is stored. I burst into its main chamber.

  Trying to keep up with Eli, I wondered, “It seems like some kind of membrane you break through, into a feeling of meaning and certainty.”

  It is! I don’t know if it’s because of my interest in computers or not, but it seems like it’s the raw bits of reality. It’s a lot more than only ones and zeros. It’s a higher level, very potent bits.

  Eli went on to describe the “room” into which he burst. With this report, the view DMT provides now starts enlarging.

  I was in a white room, experiencing certain emotions and feelings that gave me an intense feeling of being a co-reality. Like a dream I had of bumping into some Hispanic kids with my car, into their car. They were really mad at me. I said to them “If you hate me, you hate yourself. Our cultures are merged, so there’s no defending against that.” Their culture, our culture, they were co-real, existing simultaneously. The white room consisted mostly of light and space. There were cubes stacked with icons on the surfaces, like a Logos of consciousness. It was light but there was a lot of other information coming in.

  Other volunteers found themselves in rooms that seemed like “playrooms,” or “nurseries,” some sort of holding space, made especially for them, full of meaning and depth.

  Gabe, a thirty-three-year-old physician, lived and worked in a remote rural community. He was one of the few volunteers who previously had smoked DMT. After receiving 0.4 mg/kg DMT in combination with cyproheptadine, he reported the following:

  There were some scenes or forms like in a nursery. No babies, but there were cribs and different animals, vibrant. I went to a childhood scene, or feeling. It was like I was in a stroller, kid images. It was sort of scary. I can’t describe it. I could draw it maybe. It was like being in a room, as a child, with a stroller. There were cartoonlike people in the room, but they weren’t what I wanted to see.

  Aaron was at the cutting edge of consciousness enhancement using legal technologies: electronics devices such as brain-wave-driving machines, supplements and vitamins, and Eastern spiritual disciplines. He was forty-six years old when he started working with us. Aaron was one of the few Jewish volunteers in our study, and I felt a certain kinship with him at that level. He was hopeful but skeptical, looking forward to the experience, but praying he would survive intact.

  During his DMT-plus-pindolol session, he beheld two elements of unseen worlds: the informational language aspect, and the nursery/playroom theme.

  There are no doors, there’s nothing to go through. It’s either over here—it’s dark; or over there—there are images. You just can’t do anything with them. It was Mayan hieroglyphics. It was interesting. The hieroglyphics turned into a room, like I was a child. There were toys there, like I was a kid. It was like that. It was cute.

  On a slightly larger scale, the spirit molecule led another volunteer to an “apartment” of sorts. Tyrone was thirty-seven years old when he participated in the dose-response study. He was a former student of mine, a junior psychiatrist I had supervised for a year.

  As he emerged from his double-blind 0.2 mg/kg dose of DMT, he reported:

  It was a scene of apartments from the future!

  He laughed at how unexpected it was.

  Like living quarters, they were gorgeous. Pink, orange, those kinds of colors, yellow, real bright.

  I asked, “How did you know they were of the future?”

  The places to sit, do things, the counters, they were molded out of the walls. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was really modern looking. The almost organic nature of the apartment was beautiful. It wasn’t just functional. There was life in the furniture, like it was molded out of something alive, an animal, a living being. I felt in awe of the apartments. An artistic appreciation, like looking at a beautiful painting and getting lost in it, l
ost in the happiness. At the end I went past, beyond the apartments. I entered into a space, a crack in the earth. It wasn’t horizontal, it was vertical. A crack in space.

  Aaron also participated in the EEG study. Several days after the session in which he received the 0.4 mg/kg DMT dose, he sent us handwritten notes that capture, better than mine, a description of where he went that day. Here we see some glimmerings of the inhabited nature of these strange spaces.

  There was no turning back. After a moment or two I became aware of something happening to my left. I saw a psychedelic, Day-Glo–colored space that approximated a room whose walls and floor had no clear separations or edges. It was throbbing and pulsing electrically. Rising in front of “me” was a podium-like table. It seemed that some presence was dealing/serving something to me. I wanted to know where I was and “sensed” the reply that I had no business there. The presence was not hostile, just somewhat annoyed and brusque.

  Phillip’s double-blind 0.4 mg/kg dose was definitely easier to negotiate than his 0.6 mg/kg overdose, and he remembered it well. In this session, the venue expands to include even larger-scale observations.

  The relentless scratchy, crackling visuals didn’t last long. Then I was above a strange landscape, like Earth, but very unearthly. Mountains of some sort. It was very friendly and inviting. It was so real I had to open my eyes. When I did the scene was overlaid on top of the room. I closed my eyes, and that removed the interference with what I had been seeing. It was like a super-bright Day-Glo poster, but much more complex. I was hovering miles above it. I had the very distinct sense of doing this, not just the visual perception. There were some telescopes, or microwave dishes, or water-tower things with antennae on them. I wish I could take you by the hand and show you. A vast expanse of horizon. The sun was different, different colors and hues than our sun.

  Let’s close this chapter with Sean’s description of a DMT world that seemed much like our own. However, that world had nothing to do with Room 531, and there were people other than Laura and me inhabiting it. I like this example because it combines the material from this chapter with the one that follows. In other words, it is “somewhere else” with “someone there” and “something happening,” but so familiar as to deceive us about its “otherness.”