I would like, first of all, to solve a doubt in an honest way that, at the same time, preserves me emotionally and at the same time is enough to help me (and maybe others, in the same condition).

Whenever I ask someone how their DMT or ayahuasca experience was, they usually give me a very interesting answer (to say the least). They almost always narrate an excitement, not a fear or panic of getting out of control. In my experiences, I never experienced anything deep, not only because of the relatively poor quality of the DMT I had access to, but mainly due to the fact that I get a little stuck, stuck, with a reasonable fear of having a psychedelic experience too strong for me to bear, that I get out of control or even that I have a horrible bad trip. Few people spoke for me from this perspective. I would like to know if you have this panic before the trip, and if so, what happened. I think we all have our pains, however I'm afraid that a...let's say...disturbed childhood can breed some demons.

Yup, I sure do. And it is the weirdest phenomenon seeing as I cut my teeth on 7g of mushrooms, and continued to eat just as much for many subsequent trips. And my first DMT doses (3 times the first night) were all well over 100mg.

Maybe four or five years ago is when things changed. I wasn't handling what was thrown at me very well anymore, albeit, I was getting a very different nature than I had previously experienced. But many experiences became more challenging.

I also became drastically more sensitive to many psychedelic, which only served to increase trepidation and worry.

The effects of my depression also shifted, lowering my confidence in my forays.

Perhaps it's also that my prefrontal cortex is done developing

The only advice I can really give is to just keep going for it. Even if that means you're only taking low doses for a while. Do what you're comfortable with and don't judge yourself for not going as far as you may want. It's just something to understand and work through, and in time you will overcome it. It's been a baby-step kind of road for me personally, but progress is being made nevertheless.

I will say that part of me is thankful for this struggle, because there's a special type of magic to be found in low dosing.

One love

P.S. You may find this thread useful.

What Void said.

I sure have those fears aswell and ive also been slowly approaching these things. We create irrational and abstract fears to topics we dont know (yet). Only reason to find out our fears are true is to jump into the water, although when we jump in we quickly realize that our fears are illusions and are laid upon by ourselves.

I sure had my bad experiences but those were caused by bad set & setting. With DMT you can surely have challenging trips but freaking out in loss of control hasnt happened for me. So far only mystical thinfs happened when i let go deeply.

The fear is always there, and, as you put it, it feels reasonable, it could always be too much, it could always be a horrible trip, it could always bring out my childhood demons.
Thats all true.

What do you expect to happen then? What happens if the experience becomes too much? What happens if all your childhood demons get loose?


In my experience is a matter of making peace with that, going forwards inspite of the fear, letting the fear come with you.
Other times the fear will win, you will stay at home, you will cancel your commitment, you will put the pipe down, and thats okay.

Herea something I recently wrote that may be helpful (and the ShadedSelf was kind enough to rehighlight when it slipped my mind).



Let go and be with it.

One love

Blind_Goat,

Thank you for this. I think you here at the Nexus will find that we are willing to admit and discuss our fears around DMT use.

As far as I can tell anyone who works in an ongoing manner with DMT has to deal with the fear. I personally think it arises from two areas, one phsyical and one psychological:

1.) The Physical: DMT comeup ignites the fight or flight response in our brains and limbic system like applying a nuclear torch to lighting a tea light candle. This has been well documented by researchers studying folks coming up on DMT. It is a physiological response. Given that it is very primitive, very deep and very phsyical I think it is hard to fully overcome. Thus, we try to cultivate surrender, acceptance and letting go skills.

2.) The Psychological: DMT guarantees nothing but surprise. There is no way to understand what is going to happen to us as we dose. This fundamental aspect of THE UNKNOWN is very scary to human beings in general, with or without any DMT involvement.

Terence McKenna said he was never able to do it without shaking and sweaty palms. I sure feel that.

You are in good company. There is a reason they call it the work. I personally believe it is well worth doing. It has helped me deal with stress and fear in my real life and taught me to be more accepting and happy about the unknown aspect of things.

I greatly appreciate everyone's understanding. I reflected a little from yesterday to today and I think that people who have had traumatic experiences where they were not in control or even, who felt confused and only found some kind of comfort when they understood what they were going through, anchor their fears more deeply in the loss of control about yourself.

I remember Terrence once saying that there is something feminine about the shamanic and the psychedelic experience, because it is about surrendering and receiving the experience. This has always been very difficult for me.

Voidmatrix's advice was very important to me: I think I was overcharging myself for the need for an immediate and profound experience and judging myself a coward for fearing it.

I know they were like rhetorical questions, but it might be interesting to answer them:

What do you expect to happen then?
It's a mixture of completely open expectation and at the same time an inclination to think that there might be a horrible experience.

What happens if the experience becomes too much?
I have ADHD, naturally, I don't mix drugs with Ritalin (even cannabis is not associated with Ritalin when I do it), however when I'm entering the DMT experience I feel bombarded by thoughts, as if I'm downloading a lot of information, there are a lot of stimuli , I look at my arm and it is full of fractals and wonderful shapes: I despair.

What happens if all your childhood demons get loose?
I don't know, I'm afraid that in the panic of the experience I end up ending my own life.

I've found that many internal judgments are permutations of judgments we feel others may make about us. Anyone who wants to judge you for how far you're able to take yourself psychedelically is patently an idiot

Also, based on my interactions with ShadedSelf, I can confidently say that their questions aren't rhetorical

One love

They are mainly for you to explore if you want, Im glad you answered them though.


So, sounds like these people know what happens when they are not in control and they dont want to go down that route ever again.

From the first post I get that you dont want to go too deep into this, but sounds like you have a pandoras box somewhere deep inside you, and I agree its fair to assume that DMT could open that up.
Part of me thinks that you are probably strong enough to deal with whatever you find in there, but I think its also fair to take it easy if you dont feel like you are ready.

Im curious, how do you think a horrible experience would feel like?

Why do you do DMT?

This fear is mostly pronounced prior to smoking phalaris extracts (5-meo-dmt dominant strain) in my experience.

To me it feels like driving a super car at extreme speed. The faster it gets the harder it's to control the steering wheel. The slightest loose of focus could end you up in a grave accident.

The fear and anxiety of the come up is like fuel to it's engine. It literally feels like putting my mind to test to its limits till it's breaking point.

Same extract can be blissful or a complete terror depending on my mood and what thoughts on my mind the moment I smoke it.

I stopped planning when to take it.. rather I just go by how I feel. Like I could feel ready for a hit and the moment I grab the joint I get second thoughts. I take those second thoughts seriously and put the joint down.

Other days I would be feeling amazing and in mood for exploration and grab that joint and feel totally convinced and in peace with it all and just lit it up and take a good hit and it pays off

It's a delicate issue and requires one to be tuned in with themselves.

My hands would also sweat and my heart will start to race before a hit although not everytime. Sometimes I just feel totally ready and that's when I learn and enjoy the most.

Feeling my heart racing during certain hits is enough to send me into panic and end up in complete world of terror. That high pitch frequency sound in my ears digging through my head and I feel like am breaking apart and about to shout or explode into a supernova..

That fearful anticipation will hunt you sometimes and get the best of your courage and you might have to wait it out till it's gone then you can try again.

It's that dramatic incredibly fast shift in conscience that is so uncomfortable like being stripped naked of everything that makes me who I am vvvvfooommmm gone! For what it seems permanently like am never coming back out of this.

Thank you for this topic. It's bringing me a lot of flashbacks.

Im curious, how do you think a horrible experience would feel like?
I think that a horrible experience could be deduced, in part, from my own dream experiences.

My worst nightmares are nightmares of being powerless, incapable, or being persecuted. Monsters or people chase and attack me in a Kafkaesque world where I'm guilty but I don't know why.

There is a variation of this nightmare that alternates between dream and nightmare, very strange, where I jump very high and while I'm up, I feel safe and well (it's a good experience), however, as gravity inevitably exerts influence on me, I'm falling and I know when I'm on the ground I'll be available to those who are chasing me, I'll have to jump again to protect myself from above.

After using DMT a few times, I saw that a risk for me would be having too much information. It's a little hard to explain, but it seems to be getting too strong for me to bear. It is also strange to me that so many forms and experiences occur without my being able to stop them. The no-return aspect of the experience scares me a bit. Other than that, I've heard some reports of bad trips that freaked me out.


Why do you do DMT?
I started using DMT because I was first curious to enter such a fantastic world. I had some pleasant sensations with it at low doses (a particular desire to eat fruit was even noticed after the return of some experiences in which I started to enter an orange and warm ocean).

However, I was curious to use this type of tool due to the fact that I am researching and gathering ideas to write a book on philosophy of mind (I'm a philosophy professor), which concerns a tautology (a logical arrangement where all sentences are true) about the transcendental status of repeatability of deep self. Let me explain: we've thought over the centuries about what the mind is, or even how it works. I would like to re-situate this investigation object with 2 fundamental and classic questions in the history of philosophy: is the mind material or is the mind immaterial?
If we assume that the mind is material, what we mean by that is that it emanates from a specific combination of materiality that separates me from you, for example (since if we had the same material identity we would be the same person). We are, therefore, similar enough to be human beings, but different enough to be distinct. This means that if our mind emanates from the material configuration and, ultimately, our "self", it is enough for the materiality to organize itself again in the same way for this "self" to manifest itself again. Therefore, the materialist tendency of the mind seems to share a possible survival of the self (not our memories or personality or mind, just the "self" the pure conscience that can inhabit a cow, a three , a human or anything else, not in the beyond, but in its ideal material identity (as a DNA of the self).
In a second possibility, if the mind is not material and by that we mean that the elements that make it exist are not material, then the cessation of mental material support (body) does not cause it to end, since it is not material. . Thus, we arrive at a possible tautology, in which all logical possibilities seem to endorse the possibility that the "self" is not a unique event, but at least repeatable. So the question for the mind is no longer whether it is material or not, but whether it is repeatable. I am writing a philosophy book with such ideas and therefore seek knowledge with DMT insofar as it can break the notion of SELF for my research. So I would say that the reasons I use DMT are: curiosity and a sense of adventure plus a need to seek out knowledge.

I'm gathering strength to really breakthrough

The courage you seem to be referring to is a courage not of triumphing over the unknown, but of being open. This is immense courage, but the words of all of you are making me stronger.
I must thank everyone for their company in a matter that is so complex for me.

So, on the one hand we have a completely open expectation, no judment of what the experiece could or could not be, a sort of inocent exploration to find out what the mind really is, and on the other hand we have a fear/expectation of the experience being something quite concrete that has to do with feelings of powerlessness, persecution, guilt...

Have you seen Inception?, this reminds me a bit to the subplot where the protagonist has an inner demon that intervenes with their actual goal.


Was this at some point your experience of life in your awakened state?
Do you have a sense of what you are suposedly guilty of?


Whats extrange about not being able to stop them?