I've broken through once and experienced 2-3 other less-intense trips on DMT and I don't find it's gotten any easier to take it. Loading up the pipe and preparing myself involves intense focus, preparation, and an effort to relax. I have to deal with much nervousness when smoking because the experience is traumatically fast and intense. Dissolution of this reality into the DMT one is so rapid that I'm always dreading this short period of transformation. However, once my mind (or consciousness) leaves my body, things are great. I have no anxiety, no fear. Though DMT hyperspace and the breakthrough world are intense and my heart rate is initially high, I feel very comfortable in the space. This calmness is exemplified in the meeting I had with shadow entities on my breakthrough. Despite rushing into their presences, I wasn't startled to meet them. They didn't scare me like things in the dark typically do.


My question is for people who have take DMT many times (or enough times) and can comment on whether or not it becomes easier to load one's mind into 'the cannon' and blast off. Or does that element of dread simply part of the experience?

It can get easier , but then one day you get a really horrid trip and the dread starts up all over again.

Doing Ayhahuasca ( Pharma.) has made the vaporised route for me easier as I know have the brevity of the smoking trip in mind.

Can't really say for sure. Sometimes I am more anxious than others, but it is usually there even if an exciting anxiousness.

I find loading a small dose first eases it in much better. That first hit gives me that no fear thing you spoke of and opens me up for the breakthrough dose I can then load.

Have you tried changa? It is much gentler and I find much less anxiety with it. I even find enhanced leaf gives me less pre-flight anxiety. Might be because Ifan a daily cannabis smoker and find dosing in bongs/bubblers familiar. I haven't experienced oral administration yet to comment on that, but I've got some fumarates I plan to take once I brew some rue.

Interesting. I've never head a horrible trip. I don't see why I would have one. My great first breakthrough was achieved with a less-than happy mindset. I'd been feeling down about and because of certain things and felt compelled to try DMT again. I calmed myself, but the issues I had tried to tuck away for the duration of the experience instead became the focus of the trip and it was extremely positive. Because of this I don't see why a trip would be terrible. Maybe when you become too comfortable with it you make yourself vulnerable to being surprised. When you respect and slightly fear its power, your always a student to the experience. When you feel like your experiences give you different status in hyperspace or privileges or wisdom compared to the beginner, you're put in your place in a jarring way. Just speculation.

What are peoples' bad trips like and why do you think they happen?

And no I haven't tried changa. Not sure what it even is. An herb that soothes things? If you take a small hit of DMT to prep yourself for the feeling of it, can you still take the full dose within a couple minutes and receive full effects?

Yes you can redose right after or within a few minutes or whenever in my experience. I dont notice a considerable tolerance but I dont own a milligram scale and usually just dose until comfortable or breakthrough. Tolerance seems to be very short lasting. Mostly you just need to inhale the dose as quickly as possible for breakthrough.

Check the FAQ and wiki for easy to read info on changa and enhanced leaf. Also lots of other good info worth reading through when you have time.

That is an enhanced leaf blend. I also find it calming to brew a cup or two of that tea before a dosing. For changa you would need caapi or rue for harmalas.

My "bad" experiences have mostly seemed to be a reflection of state of mind when entering the experience. They were unpleasant while experiencing. Integration of the experiences can change "bad" to "good" pretty easily for me. As you said, you are gaining experience in hyperspace at the very least and understanding that you can survive what you just experienced.

"It does not cause physical damage, addiction, and any tolerance disappears very quickly."
What is changa / How to make changa ?
Denied breakthrough / Dark DMT trips / Not good experiences anymore ?

I have found that the trepidation involved with working with spice has grown if anything. I had a very brief honeymoon period with it where I felt very little to no fear with it, but with a few hyperslaps over a fairly long period my use calmed. With working with DMT and having more respect for the immense power it contains, I have found the wariness has spiraled!

Currently bringing myself to put a lighter to a loaded pipe often takes weeks! When I get to the actual point of having the lighter an pipe in hand I have some fear but try work in a similar way to when you get on a plane or something similar. At this point you cede control, it my be uncomfortable at times but it really won't get anywhere, once the vapour is in your lungs there is no way back!

Regarding changa-- personally I find that entry can be a little smoother and in some ways it can feel a bit friendlier it definitely has quite a bite to it at times, so I am just as wary with changa as straight freebase.

If anything I think it is good and healthy to have respect, awe and even some fear of the power of strong psychedelics.

With DMT you get the trip it wants to give you, and oftentimes one is lulled into upping the dose through a complacent attitude, ( bit like yours, no offence) then it hits.

The bad trips are as bad as the good ones are beautiful.

I understand complacence can cause frightful surprise and a bad trip, but I don't see myself as complacent at all. As I said, I respect and even fear DMT's power. I don't up my dose because I'm comfortable with it. I'm only familiar with it. I said I don't know why I would have a bad trip because I never fight the experience and because the time I launched from a negative mental state I had a fantastic lesson in hyperspace. So in my experience, I don't resist letting go and I've not had a bad trip because of a bad state of mind. A bad trip is possible, I won't deny that. But for me, as long as I maintain the same practice of mental preparation and attention to set and setting, a terrifying trip would seem totally arbitrary and illogical. Where's this negativity coming from and why now? I'm good, but the experience isn't. Why would this happen? It just doesn't seem causal. And I've read a lot about shadow beings in hyperspace. Most people say they're malevolent and tell you you shouldn't be there. People also say they were afraid of these beings and didn't want to see them. I met tall, Anubis-like Egyptian shadow beings in a dark room and was neither treated badly nor frightened to be in their presences. I felt much positive energy and love from them. I know it's different for everyone, but I'm just trying to predict how a bad experience would happen for me. Are there specific things that indicate the trip is going to be bad? Is it truly uncontrollable discomfort or can you work with it and relax?

I meet all kinds of situations out there, some of them really have not been in any way comfortable. Some seem to have nothing at all to do with anything I can put a finger on, I am just totally taken by surprise, other times when a difficult experience happens I think I have some idea why it happened. It is the randomness with which complicated and difficult journeys arise that keeps me on my toes. It really is a leap into the unknown.

It does tend to get easier over time, but that said there is almost always an element of fear either way. Sometimes more experience can actually make people more fearful of it- since they know how insanely intense, bizarre, and unpredictable it can be. So everyones different, and at different points on their path

one things seems for sure; as the time between the last breakthrough grows, so does the trepidation. The most ready i ever am to take the plunge is virtually ALWAYS right after coming back from a deep experience. This is why low/medium doses help so much before going in fully

I have to agree with UniverseCannon here. I am more timid when it has been a while since my last breakthru, less right after a breakthru.

I will say as I knock on wood...never had a bad experience. Weird, bizarre, intense, crazy experiences....yes....bad, or horrible...not yet. "KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK!" <--(Wood)

While pre flight anxiety is normal for all of us, and one should certainly be cautious of set and setting, bad trips are not a bad thing per se, so long as you are brave enough to look at yourself honestly.

I have almost 30 trips under my belt and still before every launch i`m kinda nervous. Sometimes i`m more anxious sometimes less but in most cases it doesn`t affect my trip.

Yep, i have had one horrible infernal experience about a month ago and after that i had to slow down a bit to solve some of the problems that dmt has shown to me. Because every next trip was not so pleasant.

Don`t know about you but when i tried to smoke low dose and after that one hour later full breakthrough dose it gets so freaking intense even after first hit that its almost too much.

No one is immune from bad trips. The worst thing that can happen is to become complacent and begin to think its all flowers and candy. It will bite you in the ass hard.

points to consider

Pre flight anxiety is normal for everyone for good reason.

You can get more used to the physical sensations of the trips over time.

The deeper you go the weirder it gets

Always travel with extreme caution and vigilence

Be strong and attentive to set , setting and dose

I haven't paid attention to dose before. I don't have a scale to weigh it anyway. I also don't think weighing a dose is always accurate because different purities means different potencies and therefore different dose requirements. My stash is my first batch and its definitely not the purest it can be. Because of this I just use a generous amount and smoke as much as I can before I need to put the pipe down. Terrence McKenna once suggested this method too because the only way to breakthrough every time is to smoke as much as you can and as quickly too. You can't OD and you'll be knocked out by the time you've had enough, so it works out. If I had really pure stuff I'd measure so as not to waste any.

I'll just keep my fingers crossed and hope I don't have a nightmarish trip. I think I'd be able to soldier through it without fighting, but I can't say for sure. If it's just bad energy that would be strange. If it's unpleasant introspection I'd be happy that I can at least learn from it.

Nervousness about smoking definitely does increase the longer I wait. My past experiences have left me really energized and excited about exploring hyperspace though. I would definitely be able to launch again right after a good trip.

Has anyone blasted off multiple times in a row (after tolerance dissipates)? Does there seem to be a thread between the trips or are they all different?

Mate, not to jump on you here but I feel your outlook is naive. Heres a few points to explain why I feel this way.
Your seeming to claim your not vulnerable to bad ones because your have total respect for the molecule ext, but feeling your in control isn't exactly complete respect.

2nd point, It gets dangerous to think you can predict or know the effects of each dmt trip prior to launch. Just because you had a great one with a pre launch negative mindset surely does not mean this is always the case. People, myself included, have had absolute nightmarish horror stories and have launched in a beautiful, positive mindset. There is no A + B always = C with dmt.

As Felnik points out and I KNOW that man has been there as well, DMT can get so bizarre and strange that it wont even feel like the same substance from time to time and you can go so deep that as your writhing confused and drowning in the hellish deep waters of the experience you have no awareness why, or what is happening or that your even a sentient being on a psychedelic.

These are rare but please friend, don't feel it cant happen to you because you have a good head space and a couple positive experiences under your belt. It can and if you use dmt long enough odds are overwhelmingly that it WILL. For me it didn't happen to me till after hundreds of journeys. Thats why I feel you need a warning in your logic.

Again, not accurate nor a safe assumption in the least.

I LOVE T.M., probably my favorite thinker of our times but he really didnt know wtf he was talking about when speaking of smoking dmt. It was quite obvious from his own description he was burning it and wasting a lot of precious molecule.

Its super dangerous to have written on the forums and for anyone to think what you just said so I need to re bute it.

THE WORST CASE SCENARIO OF VAPING TOO HIGH A DOSE OF DMT IS NOT SIMPLY A BLACKOUT!

Yes often times in can be a blackout but people have died from this in certain settings, IE my friend falling into a river and drowning, and B- you can have a hell ride for sure. Mine was from way too much DMT and I demontrated P.T.S.D. in the months following it.

Please be careful with this logic.

Points well-taken, Olympus Mon - thanks. I hear what you're saying and agree it's unwise to assume I know how to avoid a bad trip. If unpredictability is the nature of the experience, then all I can do is prepare for the worst and hope for the best. I think Terrence McKenna recommended a person start singing if a trip is going downhill. Not sure if he was talking about Psilocybin or DMT (I think it was DMT), but if I'm even capable of singing, in the trip or for real, I'll try to remember to do so if things get rough.

I agree on getting familiar and to an extent comfortable with the physical and mental sensations of smoking, though I think you'd have to smoke 1000 times to feel the same about the experience in hyperspace. I guess that answers the main question of the thread then!

Exactly.
One can not truly always avoid a bad trip 100%, BUT one can learn how to navigate through them. In a way thats even better IMO.
Cheers

From what I've read and heard, the LD50 of DMT is way higher than anything you could feasibly reach. So OD death is not a real possibility. Correct me if I'm wrong. Someone harming himself on a high dose? Personally I don't see how one could even walk, but it's possible I guess. And I'm sorry to hear your friend died in such a way. He died while on a DMT trip? For anyone to harm themselves on DMT would seem to be the result of irresponsible use. Setting should be safe. I definitely wouldn't want to trip in a potentially dangerous place. And I'd assert that a DMT breakthrough and a DMT 'overdose' would render a person equally unable to deal with a dangerous real-world pressure such as water. If I were even on a sub-breakthrough trip I'd have a damn hard time doing or responding to anything in the physical world. DMT is definitely something that requires a sleep-like isolation from the environment in my opinion.

I don't mean put in tons of spice and try and smoke it all. That's reckless and pointless. Smoking too much might be too intense, but it seems to me at least that the sensations that correspond to the hit your on are a pretty good indicator of whether to take one more or put it down. It doesn't really seem possible to accidentally smoke significantly more than is necessary. You've got maybe 15 seconds from your first big hit and it just doesn't allow you to 'overdose.' Again, and maybe I didn't make this clear in the post you cited, I only smoked this way for myself because I don't know my purity or the weight of my stuff and don't recommend it to others who can measure a dose. Please tell me if I'm wrong about anything. I don't intend to maintain opinions that aren't correct if I can help it...