Most individuals who have achieved breakthrough on DMT will attest to the very queer familiarity of hyperspace and its contents.

This is both perplexing and interesting. In one perspective, the DMT hyperspace is utterly alien, radically surpassing anything we as human beings are capable of conceiving. At the same time, however, we find ourselves gripped by the sense that this "hyper-space" is unmistakably, disconcertingly familiar.

The purpose of this thread is two-fold:

1.) For those who have sensed this strange familiarity during a breakthrough to hyperspace, describe/discuss the experience (to the best of your ability, of course ).

2.) Offer some conjectures or potential explanations for why the DMT-induced hyperspace experience is so familiar.

I would very much like to hear what Nexians of all different stripes have to say in regards to the above. (Note: you don't have to answer both, i'm really just looking for some relevant info )

1) That's what I consider to be the crowning jewel of the entire experience is the STRONG feeling of deja vu. A feeling of "Wow, duh, I remember now", or "This is YOU". "Remember now!?!". I tend to stick by my username 'Tattvamasi'...YOU are THAT!

2) Explanations,...heh...I could never pretend to even come close to trying to explain what that feeling may be or even the experience for that matter. So, once again I must say "tat tvam asi"

The feeling and familiarity you both speak of makes me either laugh, cry, or both. During most of my trips, when this moment hits, it brings forth some type of emotion. Also at this moment all fear has been washed away, and I'm fully free. I even poke fun at myself sometimes after this moment hits... "Hey... and you was all scared for no reason... you remember this place!" I love that moment...

I often only remember my previous trips when I'm once again entering dmt realms, so sometimes wonder if the feeling I've been here before is just from a past trip I had forgotten. Its been to long and to many to know why I get the overwhelming sense of deja vu.

I have yet to breakthrough, so I can't speak directly to this. However my first time smoking spice I remember thinking... "this is definitely DMT". It's like the smell was very familiar to me, even though I had never been around it before in my whole life. The taste seemed familiar to me as well, very strange indeed.

Sober, waking life is familiar to me* - Dreams can be familiar, too. Being trypped out (not hyperspace) is somehow also familiar. It seems to me that these are just two different strong harmonics of the same vibration of life. Or just the chemicals hitting some weird familiarity button in my brainpiece

*not to take this for granted

I too often experience this.. Not only when smoking dmt, but also when I eat mushrooms or 4-aco-dmt I usually have strong deja vu.

Funny you mentioned dreams Umantis because when this phenomenon takes place I usually have the strong sense I lived those moments in previous dreams and that's why they're so familiar (I often have EXTREMELY vivid dreams and I would say roughly 60% of the ones where I actually become aware start off with me tripping somewhere on a psychedelic).

Since dmt is said to be the chemical in your brain that makes you dream, maybe it's a possibility that when we sleep every one of us is blasted to hyperspace every night via the natural dmt in all of us except when we go that deep it's next to impossible to remember....

Untill we go back with our spice!..... Boom deva vu!

I'm no expert on different levels of sleep but I know there is REM and some others, maybe different levels of sleep cause your brain to release more dmt than others.
Just throwing some stuff out there.

I was just pondering this feeling from mushrooms. It's funny you bringthis up. Dmt will do the same thing, but there's something about the mushrooms...

while i can't say that i have 'broken through' with dmt, i can recall still the feeling of de ja vu the very first time i vaped dmt, and other subsequent times. it was one year after my previous mushroom trip, i remembered everything from it, it seemed, i remember thinking to myself - this is the exact place i was before, seems so familiar. found it interesting that this occurred with two separate substances.

YESS.

mushrooms first gave me this. A feeling of returning to my source or coming home. And "oh, yeah.. this".
Whether or not it's actually the case or just some brain button-pushing is hard to tell.

As I see it, this reminder of origin makes life seem to be some sort of mission I'm on. It really results in more lust for life and reason to live, learn and explore as much as possible. Like digging further at the end of life's ongoing fractal, adding complexity I feel a bit like an ant that gives its contributions and then happily dies knowing everything is going extremely well.

On my first breakthrough I had the distinct sensation of returning home to the all that is or godhead. And I had a cosmic laugh that I had been deluded into thinking I was that little monkey man on that backwards world called Earth. I felt like I was there forever. Imagine my surprise when I cam down. As I came down over the course of ten minutes it felt as if my whole life had lead up to that moment and I wasn't really ever my true self until AFTER it occurred.

On my second breakthrough I felt like a herald of beings was imparting to me, without words, the fact that, "YOU WERE ALWAYS HERE YOU NEVER LEFT."...."THIS IS WHAT YOU ALWAYS WERE AND ALWAYS WILL BE. THIS IS ALL YOU"

The dichotomy of alienness and deja vu of familiarity is definitely one of the strangest parts of the DMT experience.

Almost like a part of us feels lost in hyperspace yet a different part of us feels as if it is returning home.

I recall the first time I took LSD that it was like coming home, as if I had been there before and was returning.

With DMT I was amazed that my visuals were almost identical to a painting by A.G. The one with the yellow and blue and green patterned lines and skulls. It has been used as an avatar here by a few people if I am not mistaken.


I didn't see the faces or skulls but every time i have taken a high dose of DMT that is the type of pattern i experienced and devolved into. Being inside that pattern is the closest I have come to hyperspace, I have yet to see elves or deities or jewels, all I have experienced is intricate patterns of this type.

I have had other experiences with various combinations and such, fungi, mecaline, LSD etc, but for me my high dose DMT experiences have been rather consistent. I can't say it felt familiar other than having seen the art before the experience, I wonder if I had not seen the art, would I have had the same experience?

Three hypotheses on why this might occur:

1) The feeling of Deja Vu is just a feeling. When you experience euphoria, you might think that you just perceived something enjoyable when this is not necessarily the case. Likewise, DMT stimulates the part of the brain that feels the feeling of familiarity and/or supreme realness.

2) Hyperspace is not composed of alien objects, but is actually a realm composed of pure platonic forms, alien only in their unadulteration. Thus the simultaneous senses of familiarity and unfamiliarity.

3) We are a brain floating in the vat that is hyperspace and, in a brief daydream, we believe that we live in this. When we finally awake into reality, we find it silly that we let our mind drift away from real life momentarily.

It is quite silly, and that's what makes it so profound. When something of such random audacity also convinces you that it's just as real as your waking life, then something of that strength deserves the utmost reverence and respect. Scratch that... when something that strong also completely REPLACES the reality you reside in and makes you truly forget the very life you are experiencing then.. there are really no words to explain it.

That's why I love it so much!

Those are all great ideas, hixidom. Thanks for sharing .

Since the default position is to approach the latter two points with skepticism, I'd like to instead outline some general skepticism regarding the first one.



First, euphoria/joy are intrinsically subjective feelings. If you experience joy - well then, you are joyous/there is joy. Therefore, its hard to see how the case could be otherwise. A similar thing can be said for the feeling of supreme realness. An experience of supreme realness is an experience of supreme realness, whether the experience is "real" or not in actuality (whatever THAT means ).

Concerning deja-vu: As far as I know, there is no single, circumscribed area of the brain involved in "feelings of familiarity", as in instances of deja-vu. An operationalization of "feeling of familiarity" would be recognition, a concept central to research into memory - and there are multiple, diffuse brain regions and neural circuits that are involved in such processes. Scientists believe that I couldn’t possibly - truly - remember/recognize something without there being something in me, a trace, produced in me by my former association with that specific something. Thus, a "valid" feeling of familiarity might be induced by stimulating certain areas of the brain involved in the mediation of memory/recollection. Conversely, as you mention, "less valid" feelings of familiarity (deja-vu) can arise as well. The similarity between deja-vu inducing stimuli and already existing - yet different - memory traces could lead to an apparent feeling of familiarity (through processes of association). In both cases, however, there must be some pre-existing data (memory traces, or previous experiences) for the brain to either truly recognize or to synthesize into a confabulatory, misleading feeling of familiarity. The problem is: Swim cannot conceive of ever encountering something in the past (of his ordinary waking-state-consciousness liftime) that is remotely similar to what he has experienced via dmt. So what associations could be made that might lead to (a "less valid" )sense of familiarity?

Furthermore: Importantly, based on swim's own experience with dmt (as well as the experiences of others), swim would contend that the phenomena of "the familiarity of hyperspace" is not the same as the phenomena of typical deja-vu, although there are overlaps. This is apparent if one compares and contrasts cases/descriptions of the two phenomena.

Well, what I meant by (1), and maybe I didn't word it well, is that feelings like joy and sadness don't have to arise as a result of an external cause. Certain drugs make us happy, and our instinct is to look for external factors in our environment that could've caused such happiness, but such drug-induced happiness comes from within. It's the parts of our brain that induce happiness on overdrive. Likewise, if we assume that familiarity is a feeling like happiness, then it I would say it seems reasonable to say that it could be triggered without any external stimuli. And if that isn't enough, here's a hypothesis for another way that deja-vu (and phantom familiarity) could occur.

1) There are a lot of separate circuits between the ones that first receive sensory input and the ones that memorize sensory input. Somewhere between those circuits is the consciousness which experiences those sensory inputs right now. The sensation of familiarity occurs when the sensory inputs as perceived by the consciousness coincide with sensory information already stored in memory. If for some reason, at a particular time, sensory input is suddenly routed to two separate parts of the brain such that it is stored and perceived simultaneously, it would give the subject the sensation that they are seeing something that they've already seen. It could even form some sort of feedback loop such that the sense of familiarity becomes stronger and stronger over time.

The brain is full of feedback loops, so I would say that strong familiarity could occur as a result of sensory feedback taking place somewhere in the brain. Otherwise, I agree that hyperspace familiarity is very different than deja vu.

Oh, ok gotcha. Yes, I agree then



That is definitely the most plausible explanation for deja-vu. (I tried to say the same, but I fear I wasn't so articulate...) And it's an explanation that's applicable to most instances of typical deja-vu. But, as I said, I don't think it's adequate to account for that peculiar hyperspace familiarity: there are significant differences between the two phenomena, so they both cannot be identical; and even if the hyperspace familiarity could be conceptualized as an instance of deja-vu, for reasons already mentioned, I think the aforementioned explanation would still fall short.

I don't know if you've ever experienced this "hyperspace familiarity", but it seems like it's a singularly peculiar phenomena. Incredibly interesting and provocative

I agree, and that's why I usually opt for hypotheses 2) or 3).

I just started traveling to hyperspace recently and the very first time I remember everything feeling so very familiar. Not in a deja vu way but that familiarity has always made me my trips very comfortable and as such very easy to just relax and enjoy. Even the body buzz is just that familiar psychedelic body buzz (though magnified x1000). I can totally see how people with limited experience in psychedelics would be absolutely blown away but for me, I've kinda felt very much at home.