Welcome to the nexus!
Sounds like you had a wonderful experience with the cactus. I remember my first time, and it was one of the most memorable trips of my life (8" of potent bridgesii tea). I think your on the right path as far as working up to dmt.
One bit of advice i would offer, is find some mushies and get a few trips with them before trying dmt, in good time of course, cactus always leaves me with so much to work with after the trip sometimes i will wait weeks/months before tripping again, but ymmv.
The thing i found about mescaline and lsa was that they are fairly manageable as far as dealing with a difficult trip. DMT, vaporized or a medium/large dose of aya is the antithesis of that.
Mushrooms fall somewhere in-between imho. You may want to consider working with them first before dmt, as it will give you a taste of how different both of them are from mescaline or lsa. This is just one guys opinion, but i believe i tasted dmt too early in my psychedelic career, in retrospect a few mushroom trips would have prepared me better for the raw power of dmt. But that's just me.
Good luck, and i hope when you do get the chance to try dmt its an experience within you can find a great deal of beauty, awe, and as terrence would say, "something useful to bring back". That's the pay-dirt of any psychedelic trip imho. At least its what i strive for.
I hope you find more than you could ever imagine here at the nexus, working with dmt, and life in general.
"let those who have talked to the elves, find each other and band together" -TMK
In a society in which nearly everybody is dominated by somebody else's mind or by a disembodied mind, it becomes increasingly difficult to learn the truth about the activities of governments and corporations, about the quality or value of products, or about the health of one's own place and economy.
In such a society, also, our private economies will depend less upon the private ownership of real, usable property, and more upon property that is institutional and abstract, beyond individual control, such as money, insurance policies, certificates of deposit, stocks, etc. And as our private economies become more abstract, the mutual, free helps and pleasures of family and community life will be supplanted by a kind of displaced citizenship and by commerce with impersonal and self-interested suppliers...
The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.” - Wendell Berry