In the five experiences I've had with DMT and Ayahuasca, I always felt this pressure to figure out what I'm supposed to do, with a distinct feeling that I'm meant to figure it out and I'm really close to it, with a subtle uncertainty as to whether there's a possibility of failure, whether I'm even in control of that, or whether I'm simply aware of the fact that I'm going to prevail as a matter of precognition or something.

This is a sort of an essential part of the whole DMT experience for me, and I don't know whether this is natural to the experience and perhaps reflective of something actual, or if it's just psychological. I have some dissociation issues and I used to have dreams of playing out some sort of story or film that - in the dream - I knew I had seen before, but couldn't quite remember how it was supposed to go. If you were to imagine being inside a movie you've seen, and you're suddenly in the perspective of one of the characters, and it simultaneously feels like the movie is playing out to which you're only a witness, while also feeling like you're responsible for acting it out perfectly, such that there is no effective difference to whether the movie is playing out independently or if you're performing it correctly.

This feeling of a split between reality as it's supposed to be and me performing my role with an ambiguous understanding of whether I'm doing it right as a participant in reality - as if doing it wrong would remove me from reality - has been a persistent one for me, and DMT has highlighted that. It's unquestionable that this is related to a psychological thing for me, but I'm curious as to whether it's entirely that, or if any of you experience something similar.

In my relatively limited experience, it seems that different people get and react differently to Ayahuasca trips.

Myself and a friend, almost always have a recreational and often incredibly euphoric, pleasurable trip. In fact, I've only had one or two trips of my 30 or so trips which I would consider "challenging" or "work" so to speak. All messages I seem to get come to me as feelings, I don't ask or have any particular intentions etc. I just go along with the ride. Occasionally I learn something, very rarely I get a deep spiritual insight, but almost every time it's one hell of an experience. This friend and I, both really have quite a laid-back approach to experiencing ayahuasca and DMT in the sense, we aren't asking anything of the experience.

On the other hand, another friend of mine and my girlfriend often go in with intentions to learn something, or ask questions of the experience. They take the experience quite seriously and it's quite a big or significant thing for them to do. I notice my one friend who has this mindset often has, from my perspective, quite rough and taxing trips. My girlfriend also comes out of trips often feeling as if she "has work to do" before she can trip again. This friend has the belief that Ayahuasca, DMT, will show him who/what he needs to be, to become the better version of himself. To be happier. He often expresses that he has been "shown what he needs to do" following a trip.

I'm not entirely sure I fully grasp what you are asking in your post, though I gather you are looking to understand other points of view in relation to the psychology of the DMT experience. It is my belief and observation that if you hold DMT to be a certain something in your mind, say, a healing medicine, a teacher of truths, a connection to something greater, then this will likely hold true for your experiences and your trips may well be more of that nature.

I hope this provides something useful to you.

I often feel like this normally in daily life. Trying to understand meaning in the limited time we get on this earth. I definitely feel like I am searching for something when I am on LSD. However, on DMT it was too much all at once and I didn't feel like I was searching for anything at all just trying to take in the experience.

So are you asking if you’re working your way up to a breakthrough experience, or asking if others have experiences like this when breaking through?

In my experience the level of thought your expressing here isn’t possible on breakthrough doses.

Sorry, I left out a line clarifying this - I'm kind of appropriating the term to just mean the initial step into immersing in the trip rather than being at odds with it or keeping a hold on your sense of thinking autonomy. I'm not asking about what it takes to break through, I'm just curious about whether other people experience something similar to the sensation I'm describing.


It's complicated for me, I'm a deeply and problematically heady person and my capacity to think doesn't have much to do with the dose I get. The least immersed and most thought-driven experience I had with Ayahuasca was actually with the largest dose (a cup and a half), and a much tripper, immersed, and vision-filled experience with half a cup before that. My first experience with DMT was an above average dose of some sort, and while I was able to keep a grip on thought it was extremely uncomfortable to do so, and once I gave up on it I had an incredible experience of cosmic singularity that made me believe in God for a week (I'm not closed off from the idea, just cautious to make such judgments on account of smoking something).

May I ask what your intention was when you did DMT? I guess I came into it wanting answers and that doubtless played some role

Inclined to agree this type of thinking is not from a breakthrough experience. I remember a light mushroom trip where I experienced a similar "What am I supposed to be doing?" mental pressure. It really stumped me. I think the commonality is that there has been a partial suspension of some ego processes, but you're in a halfway house where the essence of the substance/mind of the experience has not descended on to you to you fully and consumed your attention. You're left adrift in a sort of mental purgatory.

Or, you may have carried through a degree of apprehension into full blown experiences. An unwillingness to concede to the moment of the experience out of habit, fear, or suspicion.

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans"

My 2 cents: You're looking in the wrong direction. There is nothing that needs solving, externally (externally includes the visuals of the experience because visuals are external to you, the witness). What is holding you up is something internal, in your psychology, a mental knot. This is the beauty of the psychedelic experience in terms of healing because it can take you right to those mental knots. It's like it boosts the light, the contrast in the mental space, and the knots then cast greater shadows which are more easily seen.

Instead of trying to 'figure out' anything, just relax backwards into yourself. Do the opposite of straining and allow the experience to offer you something.



Yeah, reading this is again striking in me the chord that perhaps you need to learn to relax. It's a sort of performance anxiety that you're having. Don't focus on the symptom of the performance anxiety itself, focus on the fact that it's highlighting something. Again, you need to go internally to see what's at the root of it. For me I find it's easier to do that introspective and interrogative work when sober, and use the psychedelic experience to have in the moment mental release from the knot.