The cosmic trap could also be described as the existence trap. I'm not really sure what to call it. But its a re-occurring theme of certain DMT trips I've had. Kind of like a re-occurring nightmare really. I don't normally write up my DMT experiences in this way because I find it very difficult to describe but I'll give this a try.

I was at a friends house who I was staying with. Two friends were present and my wife. I was coming off of LSD and MDMA and we had all been at a concert together and were coming down from various substances and combinations thereof. We were all in a good mood and since these are close friends I was comfortable blasting off in front of them. I had done some DMT earlier in the evening while at concert and it was great (low dose).

The DMT was in a vaporizer pen and I decided to take a hit of N2O and DMT at the same time. I filled up a balloon with N2O. I then inhaled some of the N2O blew it out and took a long slow hit off the DMT pen. I blew some of the DMT back into the balloon and inhaled more of the N2O + DMT space gas cocktail.

Then I went blank for a moment. It was like I blacked out really quick. But I didn't really black out it was like a button was pushed and momentarily I went from where I was before to where I was now. Everything looked mostly the same. It was the sort of DMT visual where everything looks hyper-real but no fractal patterns or related visual effects. Just hyper-real colors, the room looked basically the same, I could see my friends. One was meditating and doing a strange dance, one of hitting a balloon of N2O, giggling and mumbling random things that made no sense to me, and my wife was just chilling nearby.

But IT was in the room. I don't really know what to call IT since I couldn't see IT. But I felt it was there its just hidden. I'm going to call IT a demon because ( ). I've never seen the demon but I can feel its presence. This demon decided to possess my two friends and whoever I would focus on the demon would inhabit.

Now me and this demon don't get along. I don't like when its around and it doesn't seem to like me much either. Whenever it comes around I feel like I've been caught. I don't exactly know what I've been caught doing but it feels like I'm a child whose been caught doing something naughty. But it goes deeper then that. Its like I've been caught existing. Like it can read every thought I've ever had and it doesn't like those thoughts.

When the demon possesses people its like I can't tell them whats going on. Because they might be in on the whole conspiracy. Are they real? Have they been the demon all along? Is this all a game they've been playing with me? Am I the only person that exists in this world? Has it all been an illusion and now the game is up and I've been caught and now they are going to put me up on trial for some kind of eternal judgement trial?

These are the kind of thoughts that run through my head when the demon shows up. So naturally I get a little panicked and try to figure out whats going on. I end up thinking something along the lines of damned if you do damned if you don't. Its like I'm just a person moving through the world trying to do the right thing. But there are these demons behind the curtain judging everything you do. Really all I am guilty of doing is existing. I'm not really any worse or better then any other human moving through this world. But I am guilty of wanting to exist.

But my wanting to exist is the source of a lot of suffering. Any life that wants to keep existing can cause of a lot of suffering to other life. To live is to eat and kill. To live is to desire, to lust, to want more. To live is to want to keep on living.

But what happens if you want to live forever? Its terrifying to live forever. You go through lives trying to hide from the fact that you've done this already. You try to hide your desires from yourself. You try to hide from the other beings that also want to exist but that you just keep torturing and killing and taking from since you want to just keep existing. It gets pretty morbid when you engage with this kind of thinking.

Anyway so the demon caught me wanting to exist and it made me feel guilty. I was terrified the demon would want to expose me for all the evil I had done and all the cosmic level evil I would commit in my futile quest to keep existing.

I was able to look at my friends while having these thoughts but because whoever I looked at was possessed I couldn't look at them for long for fear they would see what the demon saw. They might have been the demon too so I didn't want to face them in their physical bodies like that. It might have gotten ugly. I might have tried to fight them or attack them to protect myself. Basically I needed the demon to go away and was willing to fight it off if I had too.

At this point I start to come down a little and start saying to myself. No this isn't real. This is just a re-occurring hallucination you've had before. I was able to start talking myself down and just grind through until the demon goes away. After about 5-10 minutes I tell my friends "well that was weird" and make a lame attempt at trying to describe what I saw. They acknowledged even if they didn't really understand. Its not like I understand what happened either and its not like I can really understand when someone else describes a weird DMT experience to me either so no big deal.

I decided to suck more of the N2O from the balloon. It tastes like DMT. It tastes like the demon. I'm annoyed at the fact that the demon is getting in the way of me enjoying my balloon so I take another long slow hit of DMT. By this point my tolerance is higher so I can't really get into that space again. But I basically called out the demon. I said get back here you bastard so we can brawl it out. I'm tired of you judging me and fucking with me for existing. I'm tired of you reminding me of the cosmic trap all living existing beings are stuck in. I yelled but the demon was gone. It went back behind the curtain.

I've had this theme occur in other trips. Its occurred before when I've combined DMT with ketamine. It also might have occurred at times when I've taken just DMT. I think the difference is with pure DMT experience its very flashy and when it goes dark its horrifically dark but flashy. Colors. Torture and scenes of violence. FLASHY! But when you mix in a dissociative and go down this dark path it slows it all time. It manifests in a different way.

Either way no regrets I appreciate that DMT can be really light and beautiful and also dark and terrifying. It keeps you grounded. There is an opposite entity that I also experience when I take DMT. It has a very feminine energy. It usually is much more forgiving and I end up thinking things along the lines of "your doing great" "your a good person" "we need more beings like you around so people can get along better". This entity is more of an angel. But I never see it. I just feel it.

Anyway I hope anyone who read this enjoyed reading it and can't help but ask if anyone has experienced something similar?

I've never experienced this, but I get it. Also I've heard someone else describe the same dynamic between their good trips with the female entity and dark trips where u get put down and made to feel bad about yourself by a male energy. These trip reports are on youtube but in spanish though.

hi there

hrm, I read your report, that does not seem to nice an exp

You could try, before your next blast of trip, a period (over weeks) of intense exercise, fasting and eating nothing but veg and juices, pray, chat, meditate, create a feeling of contentedness, oneness, make sure you have slept well and then if it happens again you have the spiritual power and robust body and mind on your side. Mind body soul, the trilogy, if all three are aligned then I believe the power is more in your court

I was thinking that you could try something, may sound simple, but you could try loving the demon, love him with everything you have, tell him you forgive him, tell him God forgives him. If he gets more angry love him more, love him deeply, tell him this period of evil / darkness is just because he is cut of from the source of all love to serve a purpose and he will be reunified at some point and it will be glorious....

I have a sneaky suspicion that if you did it for long enough, the demon would not like it and leave, or it may get more intense, but love trumps all, keep your focus and keep on doing it, even if it you have to do it for the rest of the trip! maybe learn a mantra and keep on repeating it.

Maybe the reason this happens, is because demons who are close to the end of their time as a demon, come to spiritual enlightened folks who go through the void, to get help or feel a soul? who knows... it cannot do any harm

Just a thought!

Much love inf

Yes, I can definitely empathise with this experience. I agree with you about combining disassociatives and substances like DMT - I had an experience with Ketamine and psilocybin that was hardcore horrific; I was literally shown hell! IMHO disassociatives with strong psychedelics can be inherently problematic, they seem to “open you up” and disempower you in the psychedelic experience.

I have recently tried DMT and had a very difficult experience, that I think is relatable to your experience. I feel that over the weeks I’ve begun assimilating and understanding it. From this perspective I would like to make some suggestions about how to interpret your experience:

It is entirely plausible that the presence you perceived as external to yourself was actually a manifestation of aspects of your own consciousness. Psychedelic literally means “soul revealing”, and it is not uncommon for repressed memories, thoughts and feelings to be “revealed” on these substances. That you have projected these thoughts/feelings as an external force could suggest that these are things within yourself that your “waking mind” tries to deny about yourself. Based on the things you said it sounds like this could be about repressed guilt - eg. Deep down you are aware that your existence is dependent on other living things having to die, you have not come to terms with this and repressed your feelings of guilt about it.

Please note that I’m not a trained psychologist, these are just my thoughts on what you said and I hope they’re helpful.

If you’d like to read about my experience you can find it here; https://www.dmt-nexus.me...aspx?g=posts&t=91618

Thanks for replies. Haven't checked back in a while so delayed response.

@infinitynlove: Yea I wouldn't classify this as a nice experience. But I wouldn't say it was a bad experience either. Although there were moments of terror, it was not traumatic. Regarding getting into a healthy mindset yes I've tried this sort of thing before and never really succeed. I'm the kind of person who can barely go two days being disciplined about health either mental or physical no less two weeks. Although I'm not physically unhealthy either.

I do like the idea of going after demon with loving intention. To be clear I don't think this demon exists outside my mind. I think of these sorts of encounters the same as I would having a conversation with someone in a dream. Or like having an internal conversation with other parts of my mind that are manifesting themselves as if they were separate from me although I don't think they are.

@SpaceGandalf: I read your trip report so will respond there. I've had similar cosmic trap demon facing experience with ketamine and dmt. Also note that the next day I smoked more dmt and did more nitrous and had totally opposite experience where I couldn't stop laughing at how fun and ridiculous everything was.

I think that most of what happens under influence of psychedelics is manifestation of different aspects of your mind. I never really think of entities or any presence as being external. I may perceive them as external during experience because I might be really high and can't tell. But whenever I reflect back on it I don't view it that way.

Regardless yea I tend to get obsessed in an unhealthy way about the dark aspects of human nature, life, and existence. It is not lost on me that these experiences are another way of presenting the fears I can have around these issues to myself.

Hi Burnt, I’ll respond to your post on my report when I can find the time, I need to update the report too as more things have come back to me. After smoking my first joint since doing DMT I got a heavy flash of memories from the DMT and past psychedelic experiences. Certainly with Ketamine I’ve encountered this before, possibly also relating to other experiences too, but like you’ve said ketamine experiences aren’t maintained well in memory. The only time I did K and psilocybin was my only truly BAD trip, and there is a huge hole in the experience too. I genuinely feel that strong tryptamines and strong disassociatives are a very bad combination.

I think that the sense that such “entities” are external is certainly understandable. When you seem to not be in control of them and they seem to exist outside of yourself, it can be hard to think of them any other way. Over the month after my experience I very much struggle with this and the obvious implications. When I tried to get myself to rationalise it as simply a manifestation of my own mind it felt like I was just trying to kid myself about it - like I was just trying to tell myself a comforting story that I didn’t think was real.

I’ve been in a good mental state for a long while, so it certainly took me by surprise. Since having these memories flash back to me I understand now that this is very much a repeating theme/experience. What this means is impossible to know. I have some ideas but it’s complicated (I am writing something to discuss this in detail) - suffice to say that Jung’s “collective unconscious” has a big influence on my thinking - while our own minds might manifest things while on psychedelics, this will also be the product of external influences on us, those stories and ideas we have been exposed to. To put it another way; everything from our life is part of our set and setting.

Interesting. I find it interesting that when experiences are "good" people want them to be external because it can reveal aspects of the universe that are comforting, whether they are real or not. But when experiences are "bad" you want to explain them away as manifestations of the mind. At least this is how it was for me when I first started doing dmt. Although now I think its all manifestations of the mind and the good or bad is just how you felt when you had the experience or how you interpret it later.

I entertain the possibility that it is actually both an external entity (not necessarily a 'demon' and also the internal contents of ones psyche; the entity is pushing your grey matter, pushing your buttons so to speak, causing a profusion of feelings and associations that results in an upsurge of energy on which it takes its share - I think this mechanic exists in the sober state as well as psychedelics, that entities provoke thought and action to then profit from expenditure of neural energy.

Like an ant milking an aphid, or other analogous biological example.

@burnt: Your subjective experience sounds very familiar to me. I have experienced similar feelings but in different modalities, through psychedelics and potent dreams as a child. The reason why I think it's entities fucking with us, and not our own repressed guilt or other self-responsible motivation, is because of the intensity and energetic nature of the response. Through meditation or even just introspection we can also invoke these feelings and thoughts, and work through them, but it never occurs through the lens of humiliation or frustration but understanding, revealing, and with it often comes a release of energy in our direction rather than feeling we're 'fighting ourselves' (the entity).

Hi burnt,
I isolated the 3 excerpts below because they represent 'the trap' best as I try to understand you.



A strange thing is that when we have such a line of thoughts in sober life they are like a standard philosophical exercise, mere interesting without too much of scaring gravity, all on a hypothetical safe distance.
But when we face these 'encountering observations' in certain trip depths they no longer are innocent and become boot in the face real threatening and very frightening realities, turning the trip in a dark scary way. They are no longer just thoughts but get to the point of becoming personified and therefore extremely confronting in a real way. I suppose this is a point where we have trouble keeping emotional surges at bay, It becomes hard to endure.

Yes I've felt trapped too, heavily, and found feelings of extreme guild over just (wanting to) exist. As if I was cough-on-the-act of the largest perversity possible namely partaking/creating a whole cosmos to make 'suffering' possible. A hard nut to swallow and no fun there. Not to mention I got ripped in torment relentlessly while these dooms came over me. There was not a sliver of room to execute Infinitynlove's suggestions to mediate what was going on, I could only sail it out as it came, so it looked.

How do I think about all that long afterwards?
I lean toward SpaceGandalf and yourself so there is some consensus.
I have left the route that the intel-content of these encounters are as real as they presented themselves at the moment. I suppose an emotional flood (of scare) found the ideal circumstances to explode due the drugs and just needed a mental story as a cloak to come forth. This is how we work imho: we picture a fitting story to feelings. It could have been other mental realizations accompanying/cloaking to the same felt-experience.
Therefore I lost respect for the absolute truth of the accompanying tales such as an unlimited guild feeling over the perversity of existing. I think these were sort of mental iterations of grasping what was felt[***]. Just as were your assumptions that your friends are parts of the exist-conspiracy. I suppose these 'realizations' are no less than very effective fuel feeding the felt-experience eruption into a vicious circle, more that than a literal case of truth.

That said, next time I face same problem it's very likely I conclude nononooo it is real!!!
And in the aftermath can put it in perspective again

[***] I also believe we make visual iterations of the felt experience.

Yes. Thoughts and emotions can seem to bubble up from nowhere and sometimes we place to much meaning on them whether sober on under the influence.

I think dmt hits the "i feel a presence" button in your brain and that is why people tend to see entities in their visual field. Like when you "feel" as if someone is in the room with you and you start talking to them and then realize they are gone. Except more extreme because you have a substance in you.



Interesting. I think depending on your mindset you can get very stuck on these types of thoughts and be humiliated by them just for having them. But yes I agree if you want to work through them there is a healthier way.