I thought I would share my psychedelic journey with DMT, both vaped and as Aya, along with two of my non DMT trips which I feel greatly contributed to the mindset for my DMT trips. I had been keeping a journal of my experiences, starting with my first dose of LSD a year ago, and documenting most of my trips along with my thoughts and musings afterwards.

Even sticking with just my DMT trips, this ended up being a lot longer then I expected. Sorry about dumping so much at once, but it all feels like it ties together into one big story.

I figure a good starting point would be the first time I did any psychedelic at all, LSD on Christmas Eve, one year ago. At the time, the only drugs I did were weed and caffeine, I vaped weed pretty regularly, and was barely drinking any alcohol. My sessions with Sativa often felt fairly psychedelic on their own, and with me knowing very little about what classic psychedelics were like, I came in assuming it would have similarities with sativa. And boy was I wrong.

The reason psychedelics first caught my eye started with something rather silly. I had heard stories about DMT being used to access another dimension where you could see and talk to the machine elves. Being a former physics student who always had interest in what might lie beyond, it got me curious, and I looked into things more. Of all the psychedelics, LSD felt like the most accessible, it small size meant it was the most discrete, all accounts I had read claimed that it was very safe so long as you tested for impurities and NBOME. The idea of seeing otherworldly entities on any drug still felt rather out there, but again, I was curious, and it sounded like LSD at the least could do people some good.


I had read that bad trips can send you important messages, I had an idea of the things that might come up. What I feared would upset me did not, what I was originally ok with I wasn’t anymore.


PRE-CONDITIONS
(mind)Set: Stressed about covid, but otherwise calm
(physical condition) Set:
Setting (location): At my desk, alone
time of day: A little afternoon
recent drug use: weed and advil a few days earlier. Coffee
last meal: Breakfast bar

PARTICIPANT
Gender: m
body weight: 150 lbs
known sensitivities:
history of use: first time


REPORT
First Psychedelic trip - Lady LSD turned me away from the temple

It was only 100 ug, but the drug certainly had its way with my mind, and gave the feeling of a sick, delirious, nauseous me stumbling into the other side. The feelings came as enough of a shock that it was hard for me to keep my mind focused on the experience, but images came to mind. An early thought was how this drug could be used to form a cult. I had senses of primal energies, wild rituals in the jungle, with a very feral spirit to it. I had visions of a temple, a shrine girl kneeling, and others facing her, and the image of a goddess overlaid to her, visible only at the corner of someones vision. Symbols hovered above her, which felt like they had somehow been infused with meaning and power.

Over the trip, I had a few trips to the bathroom. At the time the bathroom sink was clogged. It had started off with a slow drain, but over the weeks it had gotten worse, and I kept putting off calling maintenance to deal with it. It was an annoyance beforehand, but now it was making me very unhappy. The whole state of my bathroom, the bathtub tiles, and the state of my place in general was making me unhappy. Then the end came, and I felt like I was being scolded. Youtube had stopped with a video thumbnail containing an anime pic of Reimu Hakurei, shown here. It felt like she was mad at me.

Words came to mind “You come to the party, you shouldn’t be in the party, there is no party, you shouldn’t be partying”. This finished my trip with a sense of Yin and Yang from LSD. One side wild and primal, the other side clean cut, reserved, proper, and low key. And lastly, with a sense of temple, but I wasn’t quite sure in what way. I sat there in shock for a while, and then I did what I felt compelled to do, a load of laundry.

This compulsion felt so different. I wasn’t happy with the way things were. I wanted things to change. But this desire also made me even more curious. I could tell that psychedelics had the power to change people, and I wanted to know how else it could guide me. But I also knew so little, so I started to look across the internet, for how these substances could best be used.

Over the weeks I did stick with the lesson of cleanliness. Being clean is of course a never ending battle, but my habits had improved. But it didn’t stop there. I felt like I needed to cut back on weed, so I did. I felt like I wanted to do different things with my evening, so I started reading again, picking up the Hobbit and eventually making my way through the series and Silmarillion. LSD REALLY changed how I looked at the setting.

Quite a few trips followed, which I’ve decided not to go into detail here. I was using LSD fairly regularly. At this time, it was the heart of the Covid winter, the amount of things I could do as an alternative to LSD was limited, not only was everything closed and events and gatherings not happening, but it was frigidly cold outside. Like many people at this time, I was mostly alone in my house. I had DMT on my mind, but I put it off, and didn’t give extraction a try for many months later. Time past, LSD mysteriously stopped working right, I stepped away from psychedelics for a few months, moved onto shrooms, and kept learning whatever I could about these substances, of how they could help, of the research and neuroscience being done, and even read the book How to Change Your Mind.


REPORT - Aya trip #1 – botched
In summer I had my first Ayahuasca trip. I started off at a modest 3g of root bark, but I made a big mistake. I had a burger for lunch before drinking, and I could tell the DMT was just sitting in my stomach, not doing much. In hindsight, I should’ve known Aya would be susceptible to the edible effect.



REPORT - Aya trip #2 - The cosmic nightclub
I made a second attempt at Ayahuasca. This time at 6g of root bark on an empty stomache. While waiting for it to take effect, I decided to meditate, and was surprised at just how easy it became. I normally struggled to keep my mind quiet and focused, but now it all felt so natural. I soon put my headphones one, put on some music, and focused my mind. Quickly it felt like I was looking into the other side. It was in a fractal landscape, where a structure had been build, where the insides felt like an extradimensional nightclub. It was hard to look around, but I tried to navigate. I saw the lower body of a women, and tried to follow her through the nightclub.

Over the course I saw a few other entities. They seemed pseudo-DMT like, and had the texture of real people, though with some differences. One of the women was covered with...something, I wasn’t sure what. Eyes over her body? Cosmic swirls? For someone with otherwise human looking skin, it felt kind of gross. The entities I saw paid me no heed. Occasionally, it felt like that if I took a wrong turn, it might lead me to somewhere truly awful in hyperspace, but the nightclub itself was relaxing.

Eventually I ended up in a courtyard, with two entities out there. It seemed like they wanted to talk to me, to teach. But the music took up most of my concentration and I couldn’t communicate. I decided to turn off the music, but then the visions stopped. The music was distracting, but I needed it to see anything. But with it, all I could do was see. I gave up and decided to take an evening walk instead.


REPORT - Shroom trip - I marched out of the temple.

I’ve been skipping over many of my experiences with shrooms, but this trip served as a lead in to vaping DMT. Beforehand, I had finally resolved myself to attempt DMT extraction, after a great deal of research. Recently I had finished my first pulls, but figuring out vaping technique was proving much more difficult then expected, and so far had zero visuals from it. I made the decision not to be overly aggressive in trying to break through, to instead let life take priority over DMT and psyches.

On one day, I decided to forgo a DMT attempt and went for shrooms. These were golden teachers, and my experiences with this batch was low visuals, and this trip began as such. Beginning with wirey blurs, vague forms, an overall stoic feel. Then I found myself in what I called the cosmic temple, with wonderous cosmic backgrounds, a brief silhouette of Buddha. It was here that I began to have doubts about my use of shrooms. The feel was great if you wanted to meditate about the universe and achieve peace of mind, but I wanted to achieve things, to improve myself, and to help myself find success in life, and the youtube mix playlist seemed to reinforce this feeling. Then a scene began to play, uncharacteristic of my golden teacher trips, but in line with my previous Blue Meanie trips. I marched out of the cosmic temple

The music changed, my surroundings became green and more realistic then the fractal cosmic temple. I felt like a hot headed monk student marching out to make his way in life outside of the monastery. I was out to live my own life and free to enjoy it. But out in the real world, I had to deal with the troubles of the real world. A scene of invasion played out, with the me character helping to fight off pillagers of his new home. Scenes continued to play out, with me trying to escape the negative aspects of society, trying to live out my life, and trying my best to do it right, and many years played out. But I was always looking back, at the monastery life I had left behind, always looking into the sky in wonder. It felt like the vision was nailing my nature perfectly, with my real world desires in life, and with my curiosity to know what is beyond. The part of me that studied the sciences in university and always felt like there was more beyond the material.

But it felt like a fork in the road was before me, to look to the heavens with psychedelics, or live a happy but tough life on earth dealing with real world concerns. And I chose the real world. I put my DMT into the freezer, and decided to stop doing shrooms. This also felt like a nudge that things I was hoping for in life were about to come, and I just had to pursue them. I thought I was done.

But things did not work out.

Not to go into too personal details, but not only did the things I was hoping for not materialize, it felt like those hopes were flat out smashed into pieces. It would’ve been one thing if it just happened this way on its own, but it felt like shrooms got my hopes up before real life dashed them. So now I was wondering, are the visions from psyches really all just in my head? With no input from the other side? Was it just showing what I wanted to see? Was it all just a view into my subconscious with mundane materialistic explanations? Are DMT visuals just the work of a brain misfiring from drugs?

(more to come)

This is by no means a completely collection of my DMT trips. One thing that came to mind while writing this up was how easy the details of a DMT trip can get forgotten. Recollections of additional scenes came to me while typing it, but I had since forgotten where they fit in. I unfortunately usually did not fill out my journal immediately after, instead hours after or even flat out forgotten. I believe it was often the more colorful scenes that I forgot soon after, only recalling during a new trip, or bits and pieces now.

The forgotten were often meaningful nonsense anyways . Only my subconscious knows what they meant.

PRE-CONDITIONS
(mind)Set: Unhappy during the first trips. My mood and outlook steadily improved over successive trips
(physical condition) Set: healthy
Setting (location): The floor of my bedroom, away from distractions and clutter.
time of day: mostly after work, 5:30 pm to 6:30 pm. On weekends usually around noon.
recent drug use: weeks prior to most trips it was varying amounts of weed, advil, Flonase nasal spray some evenings. Coffee almost always beforehand
last meal: If after work, a few hours after a basic lunch. If on weekends, some breakfast bars


BIOASSAY
Substance(s): DMT
Dose(s): 15-35mg
Method of administration: vaped, often with poor technique


REPORT - Attempt #1
Right on tune, I finally had my first glimpse of the DMT realm. For 30mg, it was not a good hit by any means, but good enough. I saw waving shapes, I heard strange noises, I saw a glimpse of what looked like the waiting room, but it quickly wore off, lasting barely a minute. But as I started to return to normal I felt like crying, I was happy, and unexpectedly, it felt like my emotions were oozing out of me, like I was a wet sponge being squeezed.

At this time, I was using the APX volt with the default mouthpiece, and based on postings I had seen online, I decided to order the bubbler attachment


REPORT - Attempt #2 - Rejected
While waiting for the bubbler attachment to arrive, I had decided to give DMT another go after work. The workday was fairly tough and mentally tiring, and it ended with my mind anxiously stewing about things in my life. When it came time, the visuals were less then last time, and the word “rejected” came to mind. In hindsight, this almost certainly would not have worked out even if my mood was great, as my technique was still rather bad.


REPORT - Attempt #3
Later that week, my bubbler arrived earlier then tracking suggested. I was unsure if I should give it another go after the last rejected trip, but went for it anyways, and my mindset at the time was much more relaxed. I had read post suggesting I try inhaling slower to avoid cooling off the DMT and slowing vaporization. It worked too well and quickly burnt my throat, loosing a good portion of the vapor. But I still felt the effects and saw visuals. It felt calmer, and the presence felt approving. The religious and spiritual feeling was back, I felt like I could understand why people felt you should extract your own DMT, and treat the process with respect. Then I got the feeling that I aught to come to the DMT Nexus and say Hi. The process of vaping this white powder extracted by mixing drain cleaner with paint thinner felt less sketchy. Vaping it now felt like a “rite” which deserved respect. The visuals were still very short, but it ended with a vague snakelike feeling.


REPORT - Attempt #4 and #5
My vaping technique continued to improve, and I again started off with the feeling that I was a sponge being squeezed, with my emotions pouring out, again feeling like a rite. The thought even came to my mind that DMT wants me to earn the experience. I decided to give it a take 2 that evening,, so one hour later I tried again. In the process of setting it up, water in the bubbler began to pour out, and while trying to stop it, I accidentally knocked over the vape, and spilled a bit of my spice, which almost felt like a nudge to not do repeat trips in one night. Though this time since I had already filled up the bowl and wasn’t recovering what I had left, I went through with it anyway. The visuals were weaker and different, and it felt like my brain was still a bit tired from the last one. It gave me subtle thoughts, images of a temple, of rites, of strong men kneeling and bowing in respect to the temple, showing their devotion, with a mix of eastern, and bronze age, or maybe meso American feel to it. When my eyes opened, I caught a glimpse of a women kneeling beside me, in a red or orange kimono, with no clear view of her face.



REPORT - Attempt #6
I continued to make progress, and the next attempt completely enveloped my awareness, with no sense of my body. I was surrounded with a skylike sea of color. I had a sense that there was someone on the otherside of it, and thought “You have the advantage” at whomever that was.

Unfortunately that progress was soon put to a stop when on the next day, I accidentally knocked the bubbler on the floor, breaking it, learning the lesson of don’t put small glass objects in places where they can be easily knocked on the floor.


REPORT - Attempt #7 and #8
After reordering the bubbler and going on a short vacation. The trip had involved seeing extended family, and when I tried hits again, that's exactly what appeared in front of me in the waiting room, family. So I took a bit of a break.


REPORT - Attempt #9
On my return trip to DMT, I quickly noticed that I could still feel my body and open my eyes. It filled me with negative emotions and feelings of failure and worthlessness. As this happened, I got images of some sort of nebulous expanse off to the side, as a corner of the eye type sensation. Eventually, I realized that WAS the DMT realm. It felt like a view of it through a car window. I also had a vague sense of communication from the realm, but was unsure of what.


REPORT - Attempt #10
On my next trip, I had a similar, though significantly less emotional version of it, as though I was stuck in the waiting room, looking out through an extradimensional domelike window, sorta like a spaceship, into the DMT realm, with a sense of real world things to take care of. Though I was still unsure if I was being denied entry, or if my brain was being weird.


REPORT - Attempt #11
I took another break, another vacation, focus on the real world, and an invigorating shroom trip which I will not get into here, and eventually returned to attempting DMT trips. I chose to instead to do a small 15 mg dose, with intentions of healing and strength, which produced a calm peaceful trip.


REPORT - Attempt #12 - Sending a wish into hyperspace
I had now began to discuss my intentions aloud before attempting the trip, which I found helped in greatly reducing my heart rate and preflight anxiety going in. I could tell I made mistake in the vaping process, I was aiming for one big hit, but instead when my lungs felt full I could still see clouds in the bubble chamber. The trip was on the weaker end, with low visuals and clear sense of body. My mind was focused inward and was going with the flow, but at some point, I began lucid and more aware of myself, and decided to change direction. I focused on a desire of mine, vocalized it, and cast it out. That moment seemed to break down the waiting room and I could see a blue nebula beyond, though not very well. The vision of it was rather blurry.


REPORT - Attempt #13
On the next trip, my vape technique felt improved, and I was greeted with an orange/red light which I found absolutely beautiful. It was in the direction of my window as if it was the sun, except it was high noon and completely cloudy, with no sun anywhere near that window. I wanted to fully see that light so badly. I felt I needed to “lift” my head to see the light, and had a sense that a feminine entity was behind it, and I wondered if it was the entity I sensed on my first LSD trip.



REPORT - Attempt #14 - Choice
My next attempt was a little over 30mg, with my intention set to see the same light as last time. My technique appeared to be spot on, and I felt the effect before I even finished my hit. The initial visuals were blue/purple, but I soon found myself in a bright room with bright whites and bright colors. The whole thing was chaotic to a level beyond any of my previous trips, and quite hard to remember, yet it hit like a sledgehammer. It jumped in and out of some dark rooms, and I remember strange shapes moving around and jumping in front of my face. I saw a floating, rapidly moving ribbon or film reel, the images I saw on it were dull and hard to see, but it felt like something I could have in my life, a major change in my life, and the word choice came to mind. And it was of something I truly wanted to choose. And then it ended. Exactly what I was choosing against I was unsure, which my mind assumed might be continued psychedelic use. It felt like an echo if my “I marched out of the temple” trip. However, it was clear to me that I wanted what I was “shown” and would give this all up to have it.

After this I took another break. But simply wanting to choose something isn’t enough, the choice must first present itself in the real world for any of it to matter. And the choice was not presenting itself, in fact it was looking dimmer and dimmer.

The same frustrations I had when starting on DMT were returning. I of course have no reason to expect psychedelic use to give me what I wanted in life, but the trips were flat out waving it in front of me. Is it all just wishful thinking, showing me what I want to see? Is it all just my subconscious desires? Is it all just my brain misfiring from a drug, producing materialistically explainable visions? If it was all materialistic, were the therapeutic benefits still worth it on its own? But most of all, for the first time in my life, I was actually concerned if there was really any out there.

I put down DMT for two weeks, and while those two weeks seemed to rain synchronicities, they were just that. Nothing meaningful was changing, despite my efforts.


REPORT - Attempt #15
My next trip was 35mg, hoping to figure these things out. I saw a dichotomy of a dining room table representing the mundane world, and on the other side of my vision, the cosmic DMT realm. Half and half. Choice, again, for the third time.

(more to come)

Things were boiling over for me. Not only was the choice the drugs were waving in front of me not materializing, but real world life itself had been piling obstacles in front of me. Very surmountable obstacles, but a frustrating number, even as I had been trying to focus harder on real world things. I decided to do Ayahuasca this time, as a make or break trip. If it didn’t help me sort these things out, I was done, even if sorting it out meant helping me move on with my life. This time, I wrote down my intention in a word file detailing everything that was on my mind. It was 7 pages long single spaced.

PRE-CONDITIONS
(mind)Set: Very distressed and uncertain. Ready to surrender myself to the drink
(physical condition) Set: healthy
Setting (location): Same as my DMT trips. The floor of my bedroom, with my laptop for music
time of day: A little afternoon
recent drug use: weed over the past week
last meal: breakfast bars


BIOASSAY
Substance(s): Ayahuasca
Dose(s): 6g of rootbark.
Method of administration: Banana smoothie


REPORT - Aya trip #3 - This is where I am
I repeated the dosage of my comic nightclub trip, at 6g of root barks, prepared as a banana smoothie, on an empty stomach. The aya buildup started with meditation, which again felt much easier then normal. It started with visions of an Asian warrior, learning meditation from the temple to control himself in life.

At the time I had been playing Diablo 2 resurrected, which includes a journal entry from the mage Horazon, commenting how after imprisoning Bhaal, the alliances of the mage clans fell apart due to petty differences. The thought of how these conflicts could arise came to mind, and that focused on the warrior. He was writing about his issues, another factions leader, who was a loud, boisterous oaf causing trouble with his mouth.

At this point, I turned on the music and focused my mind. The first thing I saw was flowing water. It was in Yellowstone, water flowing out of one of the geothermals, down the rocks and into a river. “This is where I am” came to mind, the chaotic reflections of light on the waters surface formed the image of a women’s face, as though synchornicities were where she could be found. She was calm and friendly. There was no anger with me. It wasn’t that psychedelics were bad, it was how I was using them. The focus was now on myself, how my problems were my own doing. How I was turning people away in life. My problems visualized as a knot that was easily undone. I started to wonder “Why are you helping me?” and wondering who I was in the grand scheme of things that warranted a spirit to try and help me out in life. The Aya was feeling like medicine, and the nausea was a sign it was working.

The visuals began to change into something DMTlike. It felt like I was now being shown things, and a multiverse of lights formed around me with beautiful fractal patterns. The curves began to resemble an elephants nose, and I realized there was now an elephant man dancing in front of me, which soon dawned on me was Ganesh. It felt like the fractal curves were misinterpreted by people as an elephants nose. The music from youtube autoplay began to be getting too manic for me, along with the dancing. My nausea came in full force, and I ran to the bathroom and puked, then just sat there in disbelief.

Afterwards, I was feeling a lot better about things, though now filled with more questions. Why Ganesh? I’ll admit I really wasn’t expecting to find Hindu deities out there, so it motivated a bit of research in my part. But what caught my attention was how Ganesh was commonly portrayed as dancing, just like in Aya. Plus, when I saw him, there was something circular behind him, that seemed similar to the horseshoe shaped thing in this pic


REPORT - Aya trip #4 - Its a distraction

I was approaching the one year mark of when I first tried psychedelics, and I felt I needed to decide what my relationship with these chemicals would be for the coming year. While the previous Aya trip had calmed me, I was instead filled with a whole new set of questions about the nature of hyperspace, and the universe itself. In addition, I was wondering how future use of these substances could be used to help me out in the real world.

After the frantic and vomit inducing end of the previous Aya trip, I lowered the dosage to 4g of root bark. The initial meditation was more difficult this time, though it also produced more visuals, of the pixilated cloud variety. At a certain point it hardly qualified as meditation, as my mental commentary was getting active in response to the visuals. So I put on the music, from a preselected playlist to avoid future autoplay excitement.

The with music visuals started off as a wireframe cloud of yellow/orange, which I eventually realized was a giant feminine face. The visuals moved on, continuing to take on an everchanging pixilated form, which reminded me of some golden teacher shroom visuals. The image of Ganesh returned to my mind, and I saw his face, staring at me in the distance, his nose constantly swinging. The visuals kept shifting, but the face of Ganesh remained, always staring. There were brief periods where one of his eyes would stand out in my attention.

The visuals kept shifting, and not much happened for a while, leaving me feeling disappointed. Eventually the visuals seemed to take on a style that resembled Hindu art. Ganesh himself was also textured differently, a lot closer to the artwork I’ve seen of him. By the end, Ganesh was hovering close to me, in a cross legged position. I began to feel like the music was making it hard to understand anything, similar to how I felt on my cosmic nightclub Aya trip. The thought came to my mind that the visuals were a distraction, they weren’t why I’m here. I began to imagine those pixilated visuals as similar to clouds in our world, sure they can be pretty and might look like things, but ultimately carry little meaning, and shift from one shape to the next. I felt myself mirroring Ganesh in how I was sitting, our minds were one. Focus came on controlling my mind,, controlling my focus. Thoughts of cosmic oneness. Ganesh seemed to communicate more, but much of it was hard to remember

The playlist ended, and I stopped focusing on the trip and pondered. It felt like the answer for me and future psychedelics use would be on lower doses, with more inward focus. High dose trips can be beautiful but unwieldy. Occasionally I’ll get something very impactful, but if I keep doing it, I’ll get many duller ones with not much going on. And for LSD, it was often the afterglow where the insight would pour in. At a certain point, you do not need a message hitting like a truck.