It used to be my understanding that when you don't take enough harmalas and take DMT, the latter will be partially or completely destroyed and you can never get it back.

However, my experience seems to contradict that. When I don't take enough harmalas and take DMT, the DMT doesn't get fully activatedc at first, but if I take more harmalas later on, even 2 hours later, without adding extra DMT, the old DMT can suddenly awaken, as if coming out of dormancy, and result in a full-blown experience. Which would suggest it wasn't destroyed, but rather stuck or 'frozen'.

Has anyone else experienced this?

This is anecdotal data based on a few recent experiences. Usually when I don't feel it, I eat something first, and only take the extra harmalas later, so the food may have confounded the observations through enterohepatic recirculation or something like that.

Is this with pure DMT, or with ayahuasca brews?

I have the same experience with just eating something. If a brew does not work for two hours, just eating something, may suddenly set it off. It usually kicks in realy fast then.

Both with crude plant teas and relatively pure DMT.

Sure about food, but I don't think I took enough harmalas the first time around. The food didn't prompt it for an hour, so I took more harmalas and after another 40 minutes or so it started. So if it was the food, it would have taken 1h 40min to work.

Yeah, the MAOI’s seem to be a bit more complex than general lore explains it.

For example: you can smoke syrian rue, and it will temporarily make shrooms or ayahuasca much stronger, and qualitatively altered. You can repeat this at different points throughout the process. The quick comedown is the interesting bit. If it was just “stopping the breakdown”, why would there be a quick comedown? Why could it go up and down when smoking harmala? Why wouldn’t smoking it just result in a higher dose of psilocybin or DMT that would have the same time extension as a normal dose? Why would it follow the activation time of the MAOI? And why would it change things qualitatively?

Seems like MAO processes are a lot more than something happening in your stomach, since you can smoke it, and MAOI’s affect the way your brain interacts with a psychedelic, and that it’s a bit more complex than simply preventing metabolic time.

I have no scientific understanding of it.

What is interesting here, to me, is the whole “take the MAOI first and the DMT second” thing may not really be important. People say it a lot, but as Dragonrider mentions, in my experience the bigger factor is whether you eat something or not after taking the oral DMT. In my experience a croissant is the most reliable oral DMT trigger Maybe people shouldn’t worry about slugging down some gross syrian rue and waiting 15 minutes and then slugging down some gross DMT plants and instead get all that grossness out of the way in one gulp, and just eat a nice croissant afterward

I've read over the years that the alks can get hung up in the gastro tract without bile release, which is why it is often suggested to eat something fatty about 1.5-2 hours in to kick the gut into play and process the food-- if you've fasted prior to your dosing your system isn't necessarily fully activated by just the liquids in your aya- I have experienced this to be true by eating a little almond butter or other fatty things at around this time and having a strong surge take place within a half-hour.

Yeah, it's a bit like being launched when it kicks in then.
I personally find that it can come pretty close to the sensation of smoking DMT even. That wooosh, being firmly pushed down on your comfy sofa with a force of 6G feeling.