So I've been here at the Nexus too darned long to not have any entries in the DMT experiences forum. Although you can find vivid descriptions of some of my experiences at random places throughout the site, it's time I wrote meself a "real" experience report. I'll start with this one. It's a 17 year old experience but I believe my recollection of it is pretty vivid.
This was back before the Internet, so good information was scarce. At this point I had considerable LSD experience, had smoked freebase DMT a handful of times, and had been growing a lovely batch of Phalaris grass in a kiddie pool on the roof of our loft building. We had a neighbor in the next loft who was an enthusiastic explorer himself, and it was using a printout of dubious vintage for information that led us to approaching it this way.
Set/setting: evening, just after sundown. Had fasted all day, taken a vigorous bike ride along the lake, abstained from MJ. All close friends (including GF) knew to give me the requisite space that evening. Temperature and lighting were perfect. My mood was slightly tense, hugely anticipatory.
More background here: the grass in question was a strain known to contain 5-MEO. We had smoked joints of the grass while on LSD and experienced brief but profound effects- but with very little visual content, which I felt was evidence that it was in fact 5-MEO.
Earlier that afternoon I had sat in the neighbor's loft with him using a grass juicer to extract the alkaloids from the Phalaris. We based the dose on the grass weight vs my body weight (I was to be the guinea pig) and started juicing. We found that the juicer was not doing a good job getting anything from the grass, so we trickled small amounts of water through the juicer to lubricate the process. By the end, we had over a half gallon of watery green fluid, which I stored in a cool location. The neighbor also prepared 200mg of rue seed in a coffee grinder, mixed it with water- it filled a Snapple bottle all the way to the top.
So when it came time to administer, I had a chore on my hands. The rue drink was chalky and a little nasty, but no real problem there. Downed it, waited 15 minutes, peed, then beheld The Jug. With some resignation I started chugging it, which was a workout of sorts. Flavor not bad- pretty dilute- but so much of it! Gulp, gulp, gulp, breathe; sigh, repeat. When the jug was down to the last inch or so, I was starting to feel some effects but was also concerned that if I failed to get the whole dose down, the entire exercise would be for naught.
So I chugged the last of it and immediately felt the need to purge. I tried in vain to hold it as long as possible, but my stomach had other plans. Had a giant steel bucket handy and began purging in earnest. For you veteran Aya folks, no doubt you are all familiar with how easy it is to fight this process, and how difficult that can make things. For a moment the convulsions were so bad I was seriously worried about choking and suffocating. But the Aya was kicking in hard, and a primal part of me knew to surrender to these convulsions; within moments the purging process morphed into a beautiful and ecstatic dance, with the tensing and releasing of my body being a rhythm I could fall into and ride with. When all was purged, I chugged more water and purged again, to get as clean as possible.
Things started humming very strongly and I crawled into my mattress. Very soon the effects became overwhelmingly strong. No visuals whatsoever, but my physical and emotional sensorium was absolutely overloaded. It felt like those parts of my nervous system were firing randomly at maximum output, and it was absolutely too much to take. An ancient part of myself suggested that I try chanting as a way of getting centered, so I started chanting and immediately started feeling calmer.
It was a simple chant: Ommm. Ommm. Ommm. But as I chanted I found that what I was doing was in fact using my breathing to regulate the amount of oxygen my brain was getting, and that by lowering that amount by just the right percentage I could find a very calm center, despite the overwhelming sensorium. This caused me to have my only visual of the entire trip, which was a simple oxygen gauge in the lower middle of my otherwise completely dark visual field. As I chanted, and experimented with longer and shorter chants, the light in the gauge would show me how much more or less oxygen I was getting. In retrospect I don't think this gauge was precise in any way, but at the time was a helpful metaphor for regulating my breathing amongst all the chaos.
I arrived at a place where I had a great deal of control and could ascend and descend at will through variations in my chanting. This brought me to that nervous place you can arrive at sometimes while having these kinds of deep experiences: should I cross the threshold? Will I die? Hey, you know that's a metaphorical death, right? Yeah, of course I know that! But will I come back?
So it was in the midst of this internal debate, as I stood at the threshold of a door into some very high place, when somebody's car alarm went off nearby. I lost my focus, and was simultaneoysly relieved and disappointed as I drifted back down to Earth. Total elapsed time spent chanting could have been as little as 15 minutes or as much as 45- to this day I have no idea.
Next, just out of curiosity, I got up and turned on the light. Any OEVs? But the room didn't even shimmer, no breathing walls, no patterns, nothing. Within a few minutes the last traces of body load were gone.
For an oral DMT trip, I felt it was a little short- was hoping for at least two hours but got possibly less than one. This experience also made me think that 5-MEO is really not for me- I'm a very visually oriented person and found the stark austerity of the trip to be a letdown. It certainly was intense stuff, but I find that the visuals in a DMT trip are far more than just a colorful sideshow, and can encode/reveal an enormous quantity of information. Without visuals I have very little to grab onto.
What would have happened if that car alarm hadn't gone off? That's a real good question, and to this day I'm a little haunted by that lost moment.
But the experience was great if for the purging alone, and I was left with a profound afterglow that lasted for days.