Mike was a thirty-year-old graduate student whose sessions were enjoyable but always a little anxiety-provoking. He wasn’t sure if he remembered his entire first 0.4 mg/kg session, and he didn’t like losing his bearings. He received placebo on the last day of the dose-response study, and I asked about what he had gotten out of his time with us.
He replied, “I think about that sometimes. When I read now, I’m increasingly interested in fringe areas of my field. When I took LSD when I was younger, it opened my mind to other possibilities I wasn’t otherwise aware of. DMT may have had some of that effect, too. Before the study, I was grinding away. Now I’m looking at other things. I can’t think of anything else that would have nudged me in that direction.”
However, he was less enthusiastic two years later:
“It was an experience of being poked and stuck and having my brain assaulted with chemicals—not a life-changing experience. Thoughts of the high dose might wander through my mind every month or two. I’ve not changed as a result, though. It only reminded me of taking drugs in my twenties, when I was more carefree and had lots of time on my hands.”
We read about Willow’s near-death experiences in chapter 15. After a low dose of DMT one day, she reflected upon her life since involving herself in the study:
“DMT’s teaching me about transition, change, and death. When my husband’s father died recently, it was clear to me that much has happened with my views about death. I knew he had transitioned rather than disappeared.
“DMT is about death and dying. I had a near-death experience on it. It’s not a blank death, it’s full. I liked it really. I no longer fear death. Not that I need to wait to die to be unafraid and know what dying is like. Rather, I’m more accepting and serene about living.”
Tyrone was the dose-response volunteer who found himself in the “organic apartment of the future.” During a placebo day, we had a chance to look back upon his participation.
“Maybe I get drunk less,” he admitted. “I still have one to two beers at night to get a little buzz, but drinking five at a time, on a Saturday or Friday night, I’m doing that less. Things are more or less as usual. My girlfriend wants to get married. I’ve never been married. It’s a big decision. I’m thinking more of settling down permanently. Maybe it’s a function of the study, maybe it’s a function of where I am now with my life. It may have helped a little, but not really.”
At follow-up two years later, he remarked, “There were some insightful thoughts at the time, but I didn’t necessarily follow through on them. They were pleasurable to think about, though. However, I haven’t really thought about it much since the first three or four months.
“I think overall I’m getting healthier, but I don’t see this as related to DMT. I went through a big move and career change after the study, although this was in the works all along. There haven’t really been any changes I can attribute to the DMT experiences themselves.”
Stan, about whose therapeutic experience we read in chapter 11, described some possible effects of his DMT exposure on his subsequent sensitivity to psychedelic mushrooms. We had this conversation toward the end of his double-blind low dose in the dose-response study.
Stan said, “I’ve taken mushrooms two times since I’ve been in the study, and I’ve never been so high on psychedelics before. I had the experience of going into and never coming out of the white light. Previously, I never felt the choice was mine to stay or come back. I saw how the white light is all there is, and that this world is just shadows and plays of light.”
“How about any positive emotional changes?”
“The psychic channels may have been opened,” he replied, “but the trips were mostly without content or insights. Maybe I’m a little more empathic, in tune, receptive. If that’s the case, it’s very subtle. And it’s not because of the DMT. Maybe if I looked at the last couple of months there have been some changes, but the DMT experiences themselves have not caused them directly.”
We followed up with Stan after he finished the tolerance study. He remained rather reticent about the impact of his DMT sessions:
“Maybe my self-concept has been affected. Taking a ride like that can cause you to feel a little better about yourself. However, it can go both ways. There weren’t any insights, however, neither spiritual or psychological. It did have a cleansing effect, though, and it laid the foundation for some other things.”
I’ve described some of Aaron’s experiences in chapter 12, “Unseen Worlds,” and chapter 13, “Contact Through the Veil: 1.” He received placebo one day during the pindolol study and had a chance to reflect on DMT’s effects on his life:
“The long-term effects are very interesting. It leaves me in a different state. It’s not altered, per se, but more open to synchronicity, magic, and unexpected opportunities.”
In the longer-term follow-up Aaron said, “DMT shook some things loose, as it was so shattering. I now find I have more control over my reality by letting go; it’s a paradox. I’ve found that the DMT experience intensified verbal, visual, and musical abilities. Overall, DMT showed me another level or process I needed to see. Nothing I thought or felt made any difference in terms of controlling the sessions. I learned the beneficial aspects of losing control.”
Sara, who made such complex contact with nonmaterial beings in the tolerance study, also participated in the pindolol study. On the last of those four sessions, we had a chance to look back upon her involvement in the research.
“Things have broadened out. I have an awareness of worlds on the other side of this reality. I have the feeling of remembering those entities. My experience of them was so real it doesn’t fade with time like other things do. They want us to come back and teach us and play with us. I want to go back and learn. I wish you didn’t control who gets DMT!”
Before Rex underwent his overwhelming 0.2 plus pindolol session described in chapter 14, “Contact Through the Veil 2,” he received a lower dose of DMT with pindolol. As that session wrapped up, I asked him how he had been feeling about his participation.
“I’ve had more creative urges,” he answered, “and I’ve been writing more. As chaotic as they are, the DMT sessions have helped me be more centered. Having gone through it gives me more of a sense of strength in myself.
“I have written some poems of the Other. Many were written before, but some after getting started in the study. DMT made me face aspects of my unconscious that I didn’t know were there, like my fear of dying.”
We read about Ken’s terrifying encounter with sexually violent crocodiles. A few months after that, I called him to see how things were. He sounded surprisingly philosophical:
“It’s really changed my feelings about death. I’m not nearly as afraid to die as I was before. It has also really changed my view of life—about how things are basically not as they seem. There is a certain falling away of expectations.
“I’m also less afraid of my own insanity. There’s this Jewish guilt to fit in and be normal but I feel less inclined to be that way now. I’m not as interested in people or social lubrication situations that don’t have a lot of meaning to me. Friendships that aren’t that important are fading away.”
We haven’t met Frederick before; his experiences with DMT were not especially noteworthy above and beyond the “average” 0.4 mg/kg encounter. One morning, however, after receiving a low dose of the spirit molecule, he had this to say about how the effects of DMT spread out over time:
“I’m more relaxed now in general after that 0.4 dose. It seems to have cleared out some energy blocks. The momentum from two years of pushing really hard at my job is hard to get rid of. When I was coming down from the big dose, I saw how the energy was blocked by fears and holding on to things. Nothing specific, but more alertness and awareness of my state. I’m not in such a hurry to get things done now. I am more relaxed in general. I am less goal-oriented. If things don’t get done now, they will sooner or later.”
Gabe, the physician
whose nursery and being contact experiences we read about earlier, described some positive repercussions from his meetings with the spirit molecule. This conversation took place during the morning he received four saline injections in the tolerance study.
He said, “I’ve been feeling a peacefulness from having been in the study. It’s a whole different realm than other high-dose psychedelics. I can access deep stuff in the psyche. It’s right there, it’s like a movie screen. It’s in your face. With LSD it’s not as much a movie as with DMT. For two or three weeks after the tolerance study, I was much more there for the people I work with. I was super-there.”
Philip’s 0.6 mg/kg DMT overdose occurred in the initial stages of the study, when we were testing to find the right dosages for “high” and “low” DMT sessions. He went on to develop over the next several months mild panic symptoms whenever he found himself in unfamiliar or uncertain circumstances. It was as if he had become overly sensitive to any inkling of losing control. Nevertheless, he worked these through himself and successfully negotiated his way through the dose-response project.
At his follow-up interview with Laura he stated,
“I now have a much more tangible sense of cosmic and divine consciousness with an altered sense of selfhood in relationship. A more real sense of connectedness to all around me. I am more integrated. My own divinity is less of an abstraction. Thinking and feeling overlap more now.”
While he also believed this had changed his capacity for engaging in psychotherapy with his clients, he didn’t believe it was outwardly obvious. Philip had reduced his use of psychedelics since his participation in the DMT work. He now took them every two or three months, instead of several times a month, and used them more carefully, in a supportive group context. He wasn’t sure how much of this was the result of other changes in his life—moving and getting divorced—and how much was from his DMT experiences.
Don was a thirty-six-year-old waiter and writer. His transpersonal highdose DMT sessions destabilized his world view so much that he stopped writing for the first time in years. As opposed to Elena, when Don met face-to-face the vast and impenetrable nature of the source of all existence, he despaired. Elena was steeped in Eastern mysticism, while Don was raised in, and continued believing in, the Catholic faith. Elena saw the love behind the “impersonal” void. Don, on the other hand, felt shocked, stunned, and betrayed by the absence of a personal God or Savior behind it all. DMT had knocked away his spiritual and philosophical underpinnings, and he found himself at a loss for something to replace them.
When I called to request his participation in additional studies, he declined, but updated me. He was feeling quite well.
He told me, “I’m doing better than I was before the study. I have more enthusiasm for life, as it was a death experience for me. I’ve gotten back into writing and found a patron to support me part-time. There’s a little bit of my DMT sessions in my writings, but not too much.”
We read a brief excerpt from one of Ray’s high-dose DMT EEG sessions in chapter 15, “Death and Dying.” When we spoke with him some years later, he had this to say about long-term effects of his high-dose sessions:
“I’ve adopted a few new words into my mental vocabulary to describe the psychedelic experience. I see people more as organisms. I think the DMT experiences validated certain spiritual ideas, particularly a belief in the value of the subjective, beyond or in addition to the validity and value of the scientific.”
He also sent us a photograph of his young son, whose middle name was Strassman.
Lucas, whose real-life near-death experience nearly ended in circulatory collapse, nevertheless felt he got something positive out of the session.
“I don’t see the world in quite the same way since DMT,” he said. “I’m more open-minded and laid-back. The experience reconfirmed my path and what I’m involved in. As far as my beliefs and spiritual perspectives, everything was reinforced.”
Elena, about whose mystical experience we read in chapter 16, sent me a letter one year after she finished the dose-response study:
“Most of my experiences fade with time. Not so with DMT. The images and ordeals from my sessions have grown more clear and refined. I recall being able to face the eternal fire of creation and not be burned, to bear the weight of the entire universe and not be crushed. This brings some perspective to my mundane life and I am able to relax and embrace it more easily. Outside me, not much is different. Inside, I rest in the comfort of knowing my soul is eternal and my consciousness endless.”
Let’s summarize this small number of follow-up conversations and interviews. Volunteers reported a stronger sense of self, less fear of death, and greater appreciation of life. Some found they were better able to relax, and they pushed themselves a little less. Several volunteers drank less alcohol or noted they were more sensitive to psychedelic drugs. Others believed with greater certainty that there are different levels of reality. We also have heard about powerfully felt validation and confirmation of previously held beliefs. In these cases, views and perspectives became broader and deeper, but not essentially different.
Thankfully, there also were no long-term negative effects in Philip, Lucas, and Ken. While we did not formally interview Kevin after his high blood pressure episode, we saw each other socially a few times afterward, and he seemed to have suffered no ill effects.
The few examples of visible change in volunteers’ “outside” lives all were underway in some form or another before they met the spirit molecule. Several divorces occurred in our subjects, but none were directly brought on by the effects of DMT sessions. Perhaps Marsha’s high-dose DMT encounter with white porcelain carousel figures, described in chapter 11, convinced her that she belonged “with [her] culture” on the East Coast. She divorced her husband and left New Mexico. However, she had been married and divorced twice before and clearly knew how difficult was her current marriage.
No one left an established career for a more heartfelt vocation. Peter, one of our recruits, had images while on DMT of a community in Arizona to which he had been considering relocating. He made the move after completing the dose-response study. He was wealthily retired, however, so the move was easy and natural for him.
Sean, too, made good decisions about his career, cutting down on his backbreaking hours as an attorney so he could “tend his garden” and plant more trees on his remote rural acreage. In addition, he weathered his then-girlfriend’s departure with grace and began a new, more satisfying relationship during his DMT participation. In Sean’s case, many of these events also were in motion by the time he began working with us.
Andrea, whose screams of “No! No! No!” rang through the Research Center, seemed like one of the most likely people to make major shifts in her life. Her high-dose DMT sessions showed her the preciousness and limits of the body and helped her remember some youthful idealism regarding her career. However, by the time I left New Mexico two years later she had gone no further than obtaining some catalogs from local natural therapeutics schools.
Even in Elena’s case, I was not convinced that she really had benefited from her experiences in a practical way. We remained friends and I continued to be involved in her and Karl’s life, and there did not seem to be evidence of basic changes in her everyday pattern of interactions and reactions to her world. Hers was one of the earliest cases causing me some reluctance in accepting at face value the transformative power of even the most profound and incredibly spiritual experiences.
It was especially disappointing that no one began psychotherapy or a spiritual discipline to work further on the insights they felt on DMT. The few people for whom therapy was an issue returned to therapy, or restarted antidepressants, because of relapses into depression at some point after their high-dose DMT sessions. That is, they sought help for possible adverse effects rather than capitalizing on psychological or spiritual breakthroughs from their sessions.
Why wasn’t there more obvious benefit to our volunteers?<
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Within sessions, we were not focusing on helping people with problems. These were not treatment studies. Volunteers were relatively well-adjusted. Neither did we intend to treat our research subjects. We planned to, and mostly did, sit by and support them rather than steer or guide them in any particular direction. When we did apply psychotherapeutic principles or techniques, it was out of clinical necessity or prudence. We scrupulously avoided working on a psychological level with the vast majority of our volunteers. In fact, one of my most pressing questions was whether a neutral environment would lead to positive responses in those having powerful DMT experiences.
Another answer became clearer only as the study progressed. This was the deep and undeniable realization that DMT was not inherently therapeutic. Instead, we again had to face the crucial importance of set and setting. What the volunteers brought to their sessions, and the fuller context of their lives, was as important, if not more so, than the drug itself in determining how they dealt with their experiences. Without a suitable framework—spiritual, psychotherapeutic, or otherwise—in which to process their journeys with DMT, their sessions became just another series of intense psychedelic encounters.
As the years passed, I began feeling a peculiar anxiety about listening to volunteers’ accounts of their first high-dose DMT sessions. It was as if I didn’t want to hear them. These psychotherapeutic, near-death, and mystical sessions repeatedly reminded me of their ineffectiveness in effecting any real change. I wanted to say, “That’s very interesting, but now what? To what purpose?” By extension, these sessions’ lack of lasting impact began eroding the basic foundations of my motivation for performing this type of research. Additionally, the reports of contact with invisible worlds and their inhabitants, while utterly amazing, left me grasping at conceptual straws as to their reality and meaning. My attitude to high-dose sessions started turning from hope for breakthroughs to relief at volunteers emerging unharmed and intact.
DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences Page 29