In apology for all the things I won’t be able to adequately describe in this recollection, I’ll start by mentioning a few things that I can confidently describe well (enough). It pertains to my first two experiences with DMT in any form, which both occurred on the same day. The form of the DMT in this case was changa, which is essentially a smokeable version of Ayahuasca with a duration very similar, if slightly expanded, to crystalline DMT. A very rough estimate of duration for the latter seems to be about 5-9 minutes with varying amounts of after-affectedness, and for changa about 9-15 minutes. For the experiences I will describe here, they were comparable to these estimates. The similarity to Ayahuasca lies in the fact that changa is a mixture of dried admixture plants (and perhaps only sometimes, typically with minimal to no psychoactivity) with any of a number of different plants with MAO (monoamine oxidase, which rapidly breaks down DMT in the body, rendering it inert) inhibiting properties, which serves to slow down the body’s ability to break down the DMT and assists in better absorption, which has been saturated into the entire admixture from a solution. It should be noted that the effect in this case is much more slight, only extending it by several minutes, which is because the amount of total MAOIs in the body prior to the ingestion of the DMT would have been far less than that required to maximize those effects, not to mention someone smoking changa not having engaged in various nutritional specialization diets designed to extend those effects when the Ayahuasca is drunk; unsurprisingly, those effects are much much longer.
The amount smoked (note: changa can be smoked, and does not necessarily need to be vaporized or free-based) was roughly 200 milligrams per person per session, although that estimate is based on how many sessions we partook of and how much of this substance that we had in our possession. This amount could have varied significantly because the dosages were merely ‘eyeballed’, or visually estimated with only one small spoon (the spoon, at least, was uniform, as we used only one). These were smoked through a glass bubbler, a very thick and sturdy one with an oft-seen color spread of pale aquamarine blues and greens. The setting was an elaborately and plushly set-up campsite at the Rainbow Serpent festival in western Victoria, Australia in January of 2012. There were colorful tapestries and swathes of canvas all around, colorfully filtering the intense southern sun into our space, which was decked out with big and comfortable cushions and carpets and all manner of conveniences, although most relatively neatly organized and put away. The basic ‘posture’ as it were, was to smoke the 3-4 tokes while sitting poised against a small pyramid of cushions that you could then fall back into after finishing the hit (and after handing off the bubbler, and in these cases, after imbibing a sip of some beverage like cold cider).
What can truly be said about a first experience like this, an encounter with DMT? What can be said that will not sound like the mere ravings of an overactive imagination? But the importance, the responsibility of saying it seems to be quite potent and quite real. So, as feeble as the attempted capturing of this kind of journey in the frail web of words is, I’ll do my very best at it, and continue to do so. The word must be spread.
Prior to this experience, I spent some weeks and months reading DMT experience accounts and considering the implications of everything that this would seem to mean (I had been thinking about and to some extent reading about DMT experiences for a few years prior to this). I read both positive and negative accounts and I held it in my mind with a sort of respectful awe—no tangible fear (confidence learned by many other psychedelic experiences) but definitely some anxiety coupled with a lot of hesitant excitement. I was finally gonna go ‘there’ and see what could be seen, for a moment anyways. I spent a lot of time mentally preparing to ‘give in’ to the experience—I had read, gathered and intuited that trying to fight it would probably not send you in a positive direction.
My friend, also in this respect, my guide and guru, sampled this changa before me as I watched silently and respectfully. He had had multiple experiences over the past year and a half or so with DMT, but this was his first chance to smoke changa. I watched him smoke it, and played my part in the ritual (handing him a can of cold cider to sip once after smoking). I remember seeing the wonder of an infant in his eyes, a true awe, while he was affected. Handing him the can was like handing a shiny tool of magic wonder to a simian, the way he looked at it and me; I could see true and deep gratitude in his face, and genuine and even panged curiosity. When he emerged and opened his eyes again, it was like he was just astrally teleported straight down from the sky on a bolt of lightning, beaming with energy and positive vibrations and excitement. He described all he could of his experience and a session of discussion followed for probably the better part of half an hour, if not an hour. His accounts were entirely positive, all about color and emotion fused together (and a million other things, he was absolutely flabbergasted, as much, it seemed, as the first time he smoked crystal DMT, but of course, in a different way). It’s tempting to try to describe what he described to me, but perhaps not fair to interpret the interpretation and better to focus on my own. Seeing how positively it affected him served to set me up in a very positive headspace.
After a while, I gently reminded him that my long awaited time had finally arrived. My heart was beating very rapidly and I almost felt afraid, but it was more like a tension, and it never manifested negatively. It’s the same sensation I get sometimes before taking psychedelics. It’s like the body and the mind both know what they’re in for, and they’re desperately trying to prepare for it, but there is only so much equipment and harnessing you can strap yourself into before you rocket out of this plane and beyond. I did my best to remain calm and relaxed, I found my comfortable sitting position (facing a particularly colorful striped sheet of canvas) and prepared a drink—my friend described the experience of sipping the drink as an almost intensely intimate and visceral cold massage pulse going all the way through his innards—and again did my best to prepare for what I was in for.
I want to mention that I am intimately familiar with the experience of inhaling nitrous oxide (whippets, nangs) while at various points of an LSD experience, especially with eyes closed and experiencing total and complete time dilation, where you sense the stopping of time and existence, and hang on the edge of the void, the emptiness, before the pulse of time begins slowly again and you can approach having a semblance of consciousness (however altered). I think the sense of ego loss in that state coupled with such profound time dilation (time slowing, perceptually speaking) was a good point of mentoring for me in preparation for this changa experience. That is not to say that the two experiences are synonymous, but there is a relation in regards to feeling as if you went ‘beyond the outer edge’, to employ an unfortunately vague metaphorical tag.
I instructed my friend to take the glass bubbler from me after he determined I was finished smoking and ready to lie back—mainly I was concerned about breaking or spilling it, not knowing how far away I would go, but knowing it would be very far indeed.
The smell of changa and DMT in any form is simply overwhelming and can even be quite nauseating. Having just sat through a cloud of it, I was slightly worried about the overwhelming nature of the smoking of it. I have been a user of cannabis for nearly 14 years, although I have been primarily (to the tune of 90% of my consumption) vaporizing it for the last several months (maybe 8 or 9) and my lungs and throat have been suffering no abuse. I wasn’t too worried about coughing, I’m pretty tamed like that, but I was slightly concerned. It didn’t bother me too much (the concern), and it was quickly forgotten in the wake of what I experienced. I didn't suffer any nausea or otherwise bad reaction to the intake of the smoke. I don't even recall being bothered by the taste or smell.
I smoked 2 very large tokes and possibly a third (I cashed it anyways). Here’s where the fun begins, and where it gets impossible to describe in any kind of a linear way. I’ll try to speak in short, bullet-like paragraphs; that might help piece it together.
Before I finished the second toke, I no longer could comprehend the full nature of the glass bubbler that I was holding (or at least knowledge enough to know how to expertly use it, which I certainly have in an unaffected state), it was like holding some kind of magic-infused wand or amulet. Enough of ‘conscious me’ was still present to recognize that the sensory/memory/skill triad to be able to recognize if something was still smokable or cashed, whether to take another toke or not, how to go about it with full mental cognizance was quickly departing me. I must have smoked a third toke because I remember forcing myself through another (just having a go at it) not being able to determine if it was gone or not, and just what to do next.
My friend took the piece from me after I handed it his direction, he handed me a drink and I looked at it and recognized it for its function even less than that of the bubbler. It was glowing with a kind of super-faceted, impossible and otherworldly kind of sheen, that which a metal could never actually have, and overlayed with the kind of hues that I associate with LSD visuals and overtones, chrome-looking purple, metallic blue and matte silver, and being the center point of the mandala that what was before me (in front of me) had morphed into. I remember this mandalazation (I'll go ahead and take credit for coining this term now) happening first with the bubbler in my hand, everything seeming to radiate visually outwards from our central point, and everything nearer the periphery was extraordinarily visually active, colored tiles and shapes rotating around the same central axis.
I can recall that my friend was whispering something to our other camping companion, and although I had no idea of the semantic content of what he was saying (I could hear him but I had essentially forgotten the meaning of that language) but I intuitively sensed that it was some form of a guidance mantra, something between him instructing our companion what to do or not to do, or something told to me as a form of direct guidance, and I didn’t know which, but the ‘presence’ of my friend’s voice played a very warm emotional role in the experience. It reached me as some form of “it’s okay” and “ride with it”, neither directly but rather in spirit; that seemed to be the gist of the message.
I remember clearly how one small syllable or a few syllables of his whispering formed an echo chamber (seeming to illustrate and demarcate the time dilation into the inwardly expanding space in which time flows very differently indeed), repeating, seeming to circulate around me forming a ring, an altar of the moment, not repeating in a linear way like notes make music, but repeating in way that seemed to be all happening immediately NOW, but lasting forever, perhaps seeming to echo out into the space dimensions as well as the temporal one, sounding like whispered glossolalia, or some magical language of the ancients. It was cut up and spliced and removed from semantic meaning but still carried an archetypal meaning, and it resembled a type of chanting or a comforting whisper, but the layers of sound became so thick that I think it morphed with the static-electricity noise (Terence McKenna’s bread wrapper/plastic bag crumpling sound) that permeated the whole beginning of the experience. I couldn’t describe it as a tone, in an audial sense, but as an envelopment sensation seemingly perceived by some combination of senses that remained as the body vibration feeling that I would feel at the end of the experience. In my mind’s eye, I could almost see the multi-dimensional cone or cylinder of sound textures that I was at the center of, like being in the eye of a tornado, calmed.
First, all the sound or pressure of ‘normality’ gets sucked out, as if you both fall miles below the surface of the earth and are send vertically up high above your body simultaneously. To offer an analogy, it felt somewhat like you had morphed almost instantly into a vast giant, and you held your arms out to the sides as far as you could and your consciousness went from being centralized to being focused at both ends of this arc, where the hands are. Then, the clicking tone/crumpling vibration sound spirals around forming this cone or cylinder, giving you a sense of the endlessness of this moment, like you know on some level that you are experiencing time dilation, but not having enough of the ego remaining that they can be compared at that moment.
I remember how rapidly I lost almost all sense of ego, it probably happened within 20 seconds from my first toke, I felt like I was immersed in the shadows and fields of Jung’s collective unconscious, seeing without language, and after I lay back and closed my eyes, I was very far away indeed.
The ‘tone’ that I didn’t necessary hear as a tone was still present, but as I said, in something like a tactile sense, or as an energetic tension, as if the energy making up the matter and the everything else of that expanded moment (that timespace transaction) did a rapid upward rise in intensity and tension. If you imagine the crescendo, that most useful of musical metaphors, in a similar way to T. McKenna describing the tone, rising higher and higher in pitch and volume, everything tightening but stretching, twisting and flexing simultaneously. It was as if the fabric of timespace was all accelerating towards some manner of singularity that I would eventually behold within myself, as if my body formed the center of this accelerating tonal/torsional vortex.
I have a sense that the ‘woven voice matrix’ spiraling around me continued for a quite a long time, but I couldn’t say if it lasted the entirety of the experience. My sense is that eventually I was so far away from normal ego space that I wouldn’t have known what a voice was, in the traditional sense. In fact, not to jump around (more than necessary), I recall after ‘returning’ from the first—afternoon—experience, when I first spoke or vibrated my vocal cords to attempt to speak (I believe my first utterance was a shaky and to me a deeply resonating, “oooh, wow,” that sent my lips atremble with vibration), I had the distinct impression that it was the original, primeval squeak of all of my ancestors and also my first attempt to use the physical power of speech as a human entity. I didn’t
not know how to do it, but it felt like the whole grand magnitude of the meaning and importance and history of the power of language and speech and vocalization and using pressure waves to transmit meaning (etc.) was crystal clear before me, and with it a sense of gratitude and total amazement at this ‘magic’.
Everything else thereafter felt like it was occurring for the first time, even simple bodily functions such as urination (which I did some 15 minutes later and was nearly as profound). This was something like a carry-over of the all-encompassing thought that occurs somewhere between the ego-less peak of a psychedelic experience and the reemergence into ego in which ‘you’ can appreciate all that you have beheld. That and an echo of what it would have felt like as an infant to actually experience these phenomena for first time. Especially in regards to vocalization, the poignance and magnificence of it rippled outward in total internal, mental amazement. I truly appreciated, for the first time, the miracle of language and vocalization.
Between these book-ender, ego-framed points of this experience (descending/ascending and returning) it’s very difficult to recall what ‘I’ experienced, other than a tapestry of images and a sense of how much it felt like the embrace of Gaia/the Other/nature/the universe/energy unbound in matter/the God(s), etc. I came back feeling like my spirit and all of my essence had just been expunged of all detritus and washed sparkling clean, as if I had been embraced and soothed by Brahman and all the creative forces, and the spirits of all the materials that make up my body and my world.
I recall that the colored piece of canvas that was in front of me (brightly colored with broad horizontal stripes of colors like deep orange and brownish purple, colors somewhat resembling a sky at sunset) also had an impact on the visual imagery that presented itself. The ‘warmth’ of the colors came alive as a type of kindness or spiritual warmth and became a kaleidoscopic mandala-like fractal rotating above and all around me (as if fused with sound itself).
I recall very specifically both being prepared to, and succeeding at, letting go, giving myself to ‘it’ fully, trusting it with my full being, my body and my sanity, and I feel a sense of surety that it was highly protective (this attitude was like an amulet for this experience, created as expertly as I could manage in my mental preparations). There was a moment, or rather a streak or thread of worry, doubt or fear that extended through the beginning phases, where both the time dilation and the ego loss was so extreme and so profound that I felt like I was missing something or that I might lose my ‘self’ enough to miss some important detail due to overwhelmed amazement. Perhaps I was stuck between trying to properly ‘witness’, analyze and observe the event and trying to give in completely and ride it to the outer edges of everything and nothingness. I imagine that even for an experienced psychonaut, this kind of sensation is not altogether uncommon for first time DMT experiences, at the end having a tinge of doubt about whether you had gotten all from that first go-round that you potentially could have. This just has to be shrugged off and accepted that everything gets better with practice, including being able to more deeply perceive altered states of mind and altered-mind-based landscapes and better describe them afterword.
I don’t recall seeing McKenna’s self-transforming machine elves or their ilk (or their manifestation personal to me, what have you), and I think it’s possible that my ‘breakthrough’ was not complete (I practically lost the notion of what ‘pipe’ and ‘smoking’ was between the first and third tokes and probably was not drawing as deeply and efficiently as I could have been.) I did sense the otherness, the sort of collective intelligence or presence of the thing, but it presented it'self' to me as a feeling more like a force somewhere behind me holding me aloft and whispering comforting nothings in my ear rather than beings in my face trying to communicate with me. It was less like my backdrop morphing into the fractalized kaleidoscope of living, weird, alien beings that I had imagined, it felt like I was traveling through a vortex of color and sound and vibration.
It should be noted again that because we were not in a forested place, I rode out the majority of the experience with eyes closed. My friend/guide/babysitter had had all of his experiences sitting in a natural (foresty) setting and recommended it highly, to the point that I almost had an anxiety about being in an ‘artificial’ space. But being camping out in the bush in a lush campsite setting lying on a carpet on the ground with sultan-worthy cushions propping me up comfortably seemed to form a good middle ground.
When I came back to myself and my ego re-presented itself, I was flooded with deep realizations. My body and my limbs were vibrating with tremendous energy and power and I was simply riding the contraction of breathing in and out and feeling the contractional vibration from my core all the way out the ends of my appendages. I remember specifically feeling deep vibration in my arms and hands that continued for what was probably several minutes. It verged on being almost unpleasant, but I was so awash with feelings of deep amazement and spiritual rebirth and profundity about that specific ‘hallucination’ or sensation (and the whole experience) that it felt entirely pleasurable, almost as if I couldn’t imagine it stopping. This seems to be related to the psychedelically-inspired apprehension of the vibratory nature of matter, correctly perceived, the way an LSD user experiences visual stimuli as a dance of photon waves reflecting and refracting—correctly—rather than the illusion of discrete items and beings and things all ‘containing’ their own colors and having their own boundaries). I remember that feeling of vibration in my arms very clearly and distinctly. I was amazed by it. I held my arms to the sides and just looked at them, trying to understand the sensation and what it meant. Eventually, I simply shook my hands lightly, trying to return them to non-numbness wherein I could once again grasp objects and such.
I was utterly confused about what I had experienced, as if some part of me had not fully ‘let go’ and there was still some anticipation that had not been met. At the same time, there was a true humbling feeling of ‘whatever it was, it was profound and amazing and it has birthed me again into the universe and the biosphere, newer and more awake’.
The entirety of the rest of the day was spent discussing this and being amazed by it, but also being slightly afraid of the next, forthcoming experience, which would be later that night, while peaking on LSD, and we would smoke the changa again, this time at night.
* * * * * *
The second time, when we came back to the camp buzzing on frenetic Hoffmanic energy, it was dark and the camp was only very dimly lit by a random assortment of solar powered lamps and a giant array of glow sticks in several piles, both horizontal and vertical (in cups and containers). This time, I went first. Again, I was able to settle my nerves enough and put myself in the headspace of ‘trust it, ride it, give into it fully, trust that it will preserve you, you can lose yourself in it and still come back’ (that old psychedelic mantra, oh so important) simultaneously infused with the brilliantly positive afternoon experience.
The initial stages (while smoking) were very similar, the sensation that my friends around me were other kinds of entities, that the ‘devices’ before me (including the bubbler in my hands) were filled with alien weirdness and translucent, chromatic beauty and wonder (and I had little idea what they were used for), but I managed this time, 3 or perhaps 4 very long and very deep tokes that I held in for what were veritable eternities. This time, I wanted it in me right down to the very core of my soul, to maximize the effects. In fact, I remember my friend reminding me gently to breathe, so I must have held it in for a long time.
The impressions that I can recall were very simultaneously macrocosmic and microcosmic. I don’t know if these impressions/experiences followed one another in a linear fashion or simultaneously overlapped, but I remember them distinctly and separately but somehow in relation or in close progression with each other. One was the sense of being a sort of nebula in space, or a galaxy or of spanning the entirety of the galaxy (or universe), or an electric storm cloud high in the atmosphere. The other was the sense of being an electron, merely a charged particle, or of being an atom or at least within an atom on an atomic scale, of being both ‘real’ and merely a probability, of being within a cycle or a type of energy cloud. I recall being on both extreme sides of the size-scale of matter within the universe and feeling at the very fringes of spacetime existence.
Now, I must comment that I have long held the personal theory/belief/impression that the universe is in essence a type of fractal, a picture of geometric chaos cum perfect order, self-similar from bottom to top, filled with energy-dense or energy-efficient shapes (spiral, hexagon, sphere, string, wave form, etc.) and processes of change. Also, I had been recently learning a lot (through lecture series and self-study) about micro-biology and chemistry and astronomy. I feel fairly certain that a least a part of the reason for this particular metaphorical canvas had to do with the psychedelic synthesis of things recently assimilated and learned, a congealing and gelling of recent wide-ranging things absorbed informationally becoming more tangible and comprehensive personal understanding. But I also sense or feel that there is a universality to this type of macro-microcosmic simultaneity, (and I’m going out on limb here, being of limited experience with DMT) in which you can experience multiple things (seeming mutually exclusive) simultaneously and have it seem just as real as the ‘realness’ of discretely separate ‘things’ everywhere perceivable and definable and all occurring in linearity in timespace ( as seen by the unaffected, sober or ‘normal’ mind). I think it relates to the boundary dissolution that is similar across all psychedelic experiences. To be clear, I’ll add that I’ve had more LSD experiences than I can accurately count (over at least 14 years total, I estimate between 50 and 80 experiences), a handful of mushroom experiences, a dedicated epoch of cannabis experience and no experience with mescaline or peyote or DMT in other forms. This is the basis of understanding from which I am speaking.
This nighttime session took me much further away, it was entirely pleasant (although at times frightening), very different from the first, and the related, specific DMT-style visual hallucinations continued with the vibratory sensations for a 15 full minutes after the 15 or so minutes I was ‘gone’. My friends were a bit shocked (well, pleasantly surprised?) at the time duration. I couldn’t speak for a long time. I recall that after ‘returning’ from both voyages the appearance of my friends’ faces was such that they represented overlapping layers of tribal designs over their faces and a kind of light (the light of consciousness) emanating from them as if an aura. Of course, they had looks of beaming smiles and or deep concentration being focused on me during my experience.
I also recall during both experiences using my (limited) knowledge of pranayama (yogic breathing) techniques being an important and central feature of my experiences. I was breathing in and out very deeply (I usually exhale at least twice as long if not 3 times as long as I inhale when doing meditative breathing). Every breath in and out morphed and interacted with the hallucinations I was having, and this was not surprising because of something similar described to me by my friend/guide/babysitter. Perhaps the rhythm of it, the sound of it, the universality of the breathing experience to any earth creature (or perhaps to any mammal), all factored in to make this a very profound part of my interaction with ‘it’. I specifically recall that when I was exhaling, rather than it being me pressing air outwards as it always feels, that it was happening automatically, like air escaping from a balloon as you loosen the nozzle end, as if the pressure or the potential energy of full lungs was much stronger towards continuing this process, as if I couldn’t stop it from happening and as if there was zero effort involved on my part. The air simply escaped. I didn’t exhale it, it exhaled itself.
The looming experience of DMT, regardless of my excitement, dominated my thoughts somewhat prior to these experiences and utterly after them (over the course of this week at Rainbow Serpent). At first, I only wanted to put forth the right measure of effort and respect to hopefully assure that it would happen. Afterwards, endless implications towards the way I think about life and especially death circled around inside me. Even though it had been a long time since I had taken LSD (perhaps 8 months), I remember feeling profoundly underwhelmed by it, mainly because of the inevitable comparison of it and the change. It’s like comparing a trip to the supermarket with a trip to another continent for a period of several months. Not that I wasn’t affected by the LSD (to say otherwise would be silly), but it seemed like I had discovered gnostically like many mystics that there is another whole layer of reality behind everything we had hitherto apprehended and perceived, containing all the complexity of the mundane and the psychedelics that are (I hate to say this and only mean it classificationally) lesser psychedelics (or perhaps the less visionary psychedelics). I had all kinds of sensations of curiosity, bewilderment, fear and ill ease, basically the weight of the implications of what I had experienced. The curiosity is now awakened.
Mutate your reality tunnels into reality lenses that can be swapped with ease.