Five years ago, or so, I received a thrilling phone call that my friend had come across some DMT. After many years of feeling like, what most people call heroic doses of drugs like LSD or Mushrooms, was just not delivering (in hindsight, my approach with these substances was naieve and unfocused as a youngin), I felt I had found the holy grail I had heard about via my obsessive fascination with shamanism, psychedelics and psycho-pharmacology, primarily via McKenna and Straussman.

There was a few grams of an orange, waxy substance which reeked of mothballs. I asked how much I should smoke, how I should smoke it, etc and was told to throw like a point-1 on some bud and smoke it up. Not the best advice in hindsight.

I headed straight to my friends, who had tried some for the first time a few days before, and he essentially warned me to be careful.

I sat down in a pow-wow with him and my girlfriend, and loaded a 0.1g (weighed on a 0.1 scale) chunk right on of some primo nugget, and went to town. I tried to take the largest rips I could, without burning the freebase, and hold them as long as I could. I could remember McKenna's voice in my head: "You gotta take the third toke."

With the third toke, everything in he bowl was gone and, holding it in, I looked around to see his and my gf's jaws dropped and eyes bugged as if I had just done something nutty. Every cell in my body was beginning to vibrate faster and faster, bumping into each other, pushing each other around and creating an enormous pressure of outward energy in every point of my body. I literally felt like I was strapped to the launch-pad as a shuttle begins to launch. I began to become alarmed.

At this point, some unknown person walks in and says "What, are you guys smoking crack?" No matter how absurd the difference between freebase cocaine and freebase DMT, I had to wonder.. Did I just smoke crack? Why were my friends looking at me in shock? No, this was DMT, I was certainly under the influence of a potent psychedelic, and it will wear off soon. Just maintain your thread and know you will be safe.

Wait.. Why am I not breathing? When was the last time I took a breath? This feels like purgatory, suspended in a void between worlds. I know there are people outside my head still, I can hear them thinking. They're wondering if I'm okay, they're concerned about the fact that I'm drenched in sweat and completely non responsive for longer than the expected duration. Okay well I cant be dead if I'm sweating. I'm definitely going to die if I don't breathe soon.

This dialogue, along with the attempt to assure my own safety and the impermanence of the experience continued for awhile as a struggle to overcome fear. Finally, I found my body, and with that my eyes opened. There was a lamp across the room, and it was glowing with an eerie, otherworldy blue tinge with light-energy-tentacles reaching around the limits of my perception and coming back together at the gates of my perception, as if the light and myself were two poles of a field, and "reality" was the fluctuation of the harmonics created by our dance.

Suddenly I felt air rushing in my lungs, and with it the fear was flushed out. I was back, I was safe and I was still so high it was absurd. It was then that I had realized that time had become so stretched out that the gap between exhale and inhale was so long at a certain point, that I was essentially "trapped between breaths." This resonated with my readings on samadhi, where the yogi leaves the body and for the duration the lungs are empty and no breaths are taken.

I spent the next two months sharing this stuff with fellow psychedelic fanatics of the sort and experimenting with it in combinations with LSD, mushrooms, yoga, sex, music, etc. Unfortunately, the lack of information and the poor attention to set and setting led me to a first trip that brought me face to face with the sum of my fear. This led me to associate lift off with fear, and I rarely ever took that 'third toke' for the remainder of that stash, which I ended up giving away.

Somehow I left my body, though I was far too aware of the fact that I was supposed to have one to actually leave it. I don't think I "broke through," even considering the vastly vague implications of the term. I wondered for a long time if I had been shafted with some 5-meo or if I wasn't doing it right, or what. Now I think it was some full-spectrum from a plant heavy on the 5-meo (perhaps even jimjammed after a large portion of the spice was pulled), combined with my poor knowledge and technique. I did not take it seriously enough, or approach it with enough respect.

I quickly learned that respect, patience and education is very important. Without prior experiences to high (relative to what? i don't know) doses of other psychedelics, I probably would have had a total ontological meltdown in a state of sheer terror.

It is now over five years later, and I think that is enough for tonight. I'm now taking a round two, with some fluffy white conjured up under the full moon and I look forward to sharing my new experiences with you guys.

Thank you all,

Namaste

*edited for respect

I wouldn't even mention this,

Very quickly people learn that respect is needed where due, especially with the reality breaking power of DMT.

Thanks for sharing.