We’ll read about Sean’s enlightenment experience in greater detail later. However, for our purposes, what’s interesting to note is what he told us after his third 0.3 mg/kg DMT session during the tolerance study. Almost as an afterthought, before we began his fourth and final dose, he said,
Oh yeah, there were people and guides. I was with a Mexican family, on a porch of a house in the desert. There was a garden scene outside. There were kids and stuff. I was playing with the kids. I was part of the family. I had a sense of an old man standing behind me or around me someplace. I wanted to talk with him, but he let me know somehow that it was more important to visit with the young girl. It was pretty laid-back, benign. It seemed so natural and complete as it was happening. It wasn’t a dream at all. I thought, “It seems like a pretty common day,” and then I stopped and thought, “No, I’m tripping.”
There were some black people, too, sort of pulling at me. There was a curious feeling of being extracted. It was a jarring feeling. I was being called away.
Trying to keep his train of thought going, I suggested, “It sounds like something out of Carlos Castaneda’s books.”5
It does, doesn’t it? No, I hadn’t thought of that.
Perhaps you think these perceptions are not so strange after all. We all dream of unusual places and things. However, our volunteers not only saw these things, but felt an unshakeable certainty that they actually were there. Opening their eyes at any time superimposed this reality with their now-manifest but previously invisible one.
Neither were they asleep. They were hyperaware and awake, able to tell themselves to do things in this new space. It’s amazing how often I heard them say, “I looked around and saw . . .”
Listening to these experiences also began stretching my limits as a clinical psychiatrist and researcher. I made few comments regarding people’s reports of these unseen realms. It was hard to keep up, and I didn’t know what to say. It was at this point that I began having to fight a tendency to regard these stories as dreams, or figments of their DMT-amplified imaginations. On the other hand, I also began doubting my own model for what exactly happens on DMT. Were people really somewhere else? What exactly were they witnessing?
These are not trivial questions. As we saw in the previous chapter, sensitive, empathic, and encouraging responses are crucial in working with people under the influence of DMT. An offhanded, doubting, or skeptical remark could make someone feel badly and disregarded, which could rapidly lead to a negative or frightening outcome. We get an intimation of this in Sean’s flat rejection of my suggestion that his Mexican family scene was based upon a memory of Carlos Castaneda books. He was with them; it wasn’t something else.
In addition to the need for close tracking and empathic responses to volunteers’ experiences, I also needed to help them understand what had happened to them. When it came to the invisible landscape, we all faced more difficult challenges in making sense of what was going on. As we’ll see in the next two chapters, this became an even more pressing issue when contact with beings predominated people’s sessions.
13
Contact Through the Veil: 1
The material in this and the next chapter is the most unusual and difficult to understand. It is the weirdest and the easiest for me to skirt when people ask “What did you find?”
When reviewing my bedside notes, I continually feel surprise in seeing how many of our volunteers “made contact” with “them,” or other beings. At least half did so in one form or another. Research subjects used expressions like “entities,” “beings,” “aliens,” “guides,” and “helpers” to describe them. The “life-forms” looked like clowns, reptiles, mantises, bees, spiders, cacti, and stick figures. It is still startling to see my written records of comments like “There were these beings,” “I was being led,” “They were on me fast.” It’s as if my mind refuses to accept what’s there in black and white.
It may be that I have such a hard time with these stories because they challenge the prevailing world view, and my own. Our modern approach to reality relies upon waking consciousness, and its extensions of tools and instruments, as the only ways of knowing. If we can’t see, hear, smell, taste, or touch things in our everyday state of mind, or using our technology-amplified senses, it’s not real. Thus, these are “nonmaterial” beings.
In contrast, indigenous cultures are in regular contact with denizens of the invisible landscape and have no problems with straddling both worlds. Often they do this with the aid of psychedelic plants.
Many modern-day scientists possess an abiding faith in the spiritual. However, these same scientists are caught in a profound conflict between their personal and professional beliefs. What they say and what they feel may contradict each other profoundly. It is difficult to be “objective” about matters of the heart and spirit. Scientists may compartmentalize their faith and can’t conceive of verifying or validating their spiritual intuition. In other cases they may water down the nature of those beliefs to maintain some consistency with their intellectual understanding. Perhaps they simply ignore the presence of angels and demons in essential scriptures, or regard them as symbolic or as hallucinatory manifestations of an overactive religious imagination.
Lack of open dialogue about these issues makes it much more difficult to even imagine enlarging our view of the reality of nonmaterial realms using scientific methods. What would happen to the study of spirit realms if we could access them reliably using molecules like DMT?
In addition to questions regarding the existence of nonmaterial or spiritual worlds, we also must consider expanding the notion of what we may perceive in them. Can our spiritual and religious structures encompass what truly resides within these different levels of existence? The stories we’re about to hear go beyond reasonably “straightforward” encounters with the Divine or angels, nor are they especially neat, tidy, or in accordance with what we consider within the realm of “expectable” spiritual experiences.
I’m hopeful that these reports will accelerate interest in the nonmaterial realms, using whatever intellectual, intuitive, and technological tools we possess. Once there is enough interest in, and even demand for, information about them, such phenomena might become an acceptable topic for rational inquiry. Ironically, we may have to rely more upon science, especially the freewheeling fields of cosmology and theoretical physics, than on our more conservative religious traditions for satisfactory models and explanations of these “spirit-world” experiences.
I had expected to hear about some of these types of experiences once we began giving DMT. I was familiar with Terence McKenna’s tales of the “self-transforming machine elves” he encountered after smoking high doses of the drug. Interviews conducted with twenty experienced DMT smokers before beginning the New Mexico research also yielded some tales of similar meetings. Since most of these people were from California, I admittedly chalked up these stories to some kind of West Coast eccentricity.
Therefore, I was neither intellectually nor emotionally prepared for the frequency with which contact with beings occurred in our studies, nor the often utterly bizarre nature of these experiences. Neither, it seemed, were many of the volunteers, even those who had smoked DMT previously. Also surprising were the common themes of what these beings were doing with so many of our volunteers: manipulating, communicating, showing, helping, questioning. It was definitely a two-way street.
As strange as the reports that follow are, our 1990s research was not the first in the scientific literature to describe DMT-induced “contact.” There also are reports from the 1950s quoting volunteers to that effect. These older DMT cases are remarkable in their foreshadowing of the stories we were going to hear almost forty years later. What is even more striking is that I have been unable to locate any similar reports in research subjects taking other psychedelics. Only with DMT do people meet up with “them,” with other beings in a nonmaterial world.
These older clinical excerpts derive from patient
s with schizophrenia, many of whom had been hospitalized for years, if not decades. They were not especially verbal, insightful, or personable. They received DMT in studies attempting to determine how similar the DMT state was to schizophrenia. Researchers also were interested in gauging whether naturally psychotic patients were more or less sensitive to DMT’s effects.
A patient with schizophrenia in a study at Stephen Szára’s former laboratory in Hungary reported the following after a high dose of intramuscular DMT:
I saw such strange dreams, but at the beginning only. . . . I saw strange creatures, dwarves or something, they were black and moved about.1
An American research team also gave DMT to patients with schizophrenia. Of the nine subjects, the only one who could say anything about her experience was an unfortunate woman who, after getting a robust dose of 1.25 mg/kg IM DMT, stated,
I was in a big place, and they were hurting me. They were not human. . . . They were horrible! I was living in a world of orange people.2
These little vignettes should keep us from becoming too complacent in believing that what our volunteers reported is purely a New Age, 1990sin- Santa Fe phenomenon. The spirit molecule revealed unseen worlds, and their inhabitants, to Western science long before our research began.
Karl’s early encounter with life-forms, like his visions of DNA described in the last chapter, offered a prelude to future, more elaborate stories from other volunteers. Karl was a forty-five-year-old blacksmith. He was married to Elena, whose enlightenment experience we’ll read about later.
Eight minutes into his non-blind high-dose injection, he described this encounter:
That was real strange. There were a lot of elves. They were prankish, ornery, maybe four of them appeared at the side of a stretch of interstate highway I travel regularly. They commanded the scene, it was their terrain! They were about my height. They held up placards, showing me these incredibly beautiful, complex, swirling geometric scenes in them. One of them made it impossible for me to move. There was no issue of control; they were totally in control. They wanted me to look! I heard a giggling sound—the elves laughing or talking at high-speed volume, chattering, twittering.
In the last chapter, we heard about Aaron’s experiences of unseen worlds. Let’s return to his first non-blind high dose of DMT. He looked at me about 10 minutes after the injection and shrugged, laughing:
First there was a mandala-like series of visuals, fleurs-de-lis–type visions. Then an insectlike thing got right into my face, hovering over me as the drug was going in. This thing sucked me out of my head into outer space. It was clearly outer space, a black sky with millions of stars.
I was in a very large waiting room, or something. It was very long. I felt observed by the insect-thing and others like it. Then they lost interest. I was taken into space and looked at.
Aaron summarized his encounters with these beings after a subsequent double-blind high dose:
There is a sinister backdrop, an alien-type, insectoid, not-quite-pleasant side of this, isn’t there? It’s not a “We’re-going-to get-you-motherfucker.” It’s more like being possessed. During the experience there is sense of someone, or something else, there taking control. It’s like you have to defend yourself against them, whoever they are, but they certainly are there. I’m aware of them and they’re aware of me. It’s like they have an agenda. It’s like walking into a different neighborhood. You’re really not quite sure what the culture is. It’s got such a distinct flavor, the reptilian being or beings that are present.
“How about the scary element?” I asked. “What’s the worst they could do if they are unleashed with access to you?”
That’s what it’s about. It’s the sense of the possibility that’s so strange.
In a later chapter, we’ll read about the physical problems Lucas encountered after his high-dose session. However, it’s interesting to review part of a letter he wrote to us a few days after that experience:
There is nothing that can prepare you for this. There is a sound, a bzzzz. It started off and got louder and louder and faster and faster. I was coming on and coming on and then POW! There was a space station below me and to my right. There were at least two presences, one on either side of me, guiding me to a platform. I was also aware of many entities inside the space station—automatons, androidlike creatures that looked like a cross between crash dummies and the Empire troops from Star Wars, except that they were living beings, not robots. They seemed to have checkerboard patterns on parts of their bodies, especially their upper arms. They were doing some kind of routine technological work and paid no attention to me. In a state of overwhelmed confusion, I opened my eyes.
It was at this point in Room 531 that Lucas’s heart rate and blood pressure plummeted to nearly unrecordable levels.
We will read about Carlos’s shamanic death-rebirth experience elicited by his first non-blind high dose of DMT in chapter 15. During one of his high-dose sessions, he also met beings who tried to help him with his anxiety:
There’s this whole different world with architecture and landscape. I saw one or two beings there. The beings even have gender. The skin was not flesh-colored. I communicated with them but there wasn’t enough time. I was so strung out, excited, agitated when I arrived there. They wanted to try and reduce my anxiety so we could relate.
Gabe, whose transport into a nursery or playroom we read about in the last chapter, felt an even greater sense of care and concern from “the spirits” during his first high-dose DMT session:
There was an initial sense of panic. Then the most beautiful colors coalesced into beings. There were lots of beings. They were talking to me but they weren’t making a sound. It was more as if they were blessing me, the spirits of life were blessing me. They were saying that life was good. At first it felt like I was going through a cave or a tunnel or into space, at a fast rate, definitely. I felt like a ball hurtling down to wherever it was.
Many volunteers’ encounters with life-forms in these nonmaterial worlds involved the powerful sense of an exchange of information. The type of information varied widely. Sometimes it concerned the “biology” of these beings.
Chris was thirty-five years old, married, and a computer salesman. He was quite artistically talented, too, and performed in local theater productions. He had taken psychedelics fifty to sixty times before starting our research. He hoped his DMT sessions with us would “propel me into a state of awareness I have been seeking during eight years of LSD use, but have only had glimpses of previously.”
His non-blind high dose was “the most reassuring experience of my life.” The separation of his mind and body was effortless, and he decided that “if death is like this, there’s nothing to worry about.”
Chris returned for the tolerance study a few weeks later.
He lifted the eyeshades after the first dose and said,
There was a set of many hands. They were feeling my eyes and face. It was a little bit confusing. There were more individuals. They were recognizing and identifying me. It was more intimate. At first I thought it was the eyeshades on my face, but it definitely was not!
Filling out the rating scale, he added,
To get to that space I had to get through some sort of a non-benevolent space. It felt like there were talons and claws there trying to guard it in a way.
These were long mornings and he needed encouragement. I let my intuition guide me: “If need be, let them rip you to shreds, then you can get on with it.”
Dismemberment is part of the shamanic initiation, isn’t it? I felt a dragonlike presence. And, there were the same colors—red, golden yellows.
“The colors can be like a drape or a prelude or a curtain. Even though they’re so pretty, you can get through them to the other side.”
Coming out of his second dose he looked stunned, and he grasped for words that seemed inadequate.
It was wild. There were no colors. There was the usual sound: pleasant, a roar, a sort of an inte
rnal hum. Then there were three beings, three physical forms. There were rays coming out of their bodies and then back to their bodies. They were reptilian and humanoid, trying to make me understand, not with words, but with gestures. They wanted me to look into their bodies. I saw inside them and understood reproduction, what it’s like before birth, the passage into the body. Once I established what they were communicating, they didn’t just fade away. They stayed there for quite a while. Their presence was very solid.
I had been hearing about lots of encounters by then and could at least validate his experience: “You wouldn’t expect it.”
I try and program it and I go in with an idea of what to see, but I just can’t. I thought I was developing tolerance, but then, Bang! There were these three guys or three things.
He looked awkward talking about his experience.
I empathized with his perplexity, saying, “It does sound odd.”
It sure does. I wasn’t sure as I was lifting my eyeshades if I wanted to talk to you about it.
Chris’s third dose was relatively uneventful. He stayed aware of his body, his heart beating in his chest, his stomach growling from hunger.
His fourth dose built upon the themes of the previous three and concluded with many features of a mystical experience:
They were trying to show me as much as possible. They were communicating in words. They were like clowns or jokers or jesters or imps. There were just so many of them doing their funny little thing. I settled into it. I was incredibly still and I felt like I was in an incredibly peaceful place. Then there was a message telling me that I had been given a gift, that this space was mine and I could go there anytime. I should feel blessed to have form, to live. It went on forever. There were blue hands, fluttering things, then thousands of things flew out of these blue hands. I thought “What a show!” It was really healing.
DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences Page 20