The DMT molecule: A tryst with spirits, elves and aliens

In the last ten years, there has been a slowly growing occurrence of underground ayahuasca religious ceremonies in Southern California, and primarily in Los Angeles. These ceremonies are spread by word of mouth, and entrance to it carries a donation. It’s a ‘donation’ because it can’t be called an ‘admission,’ which is considered taxable income. Also, the ayahuasca drink used in the ceremony is illegal. What is ayahuasca, and why is there a ceremony surrounding it? First of all, ayahuasca is a religious drink consumed by indigenous Indians in the Amazon. It’s hush-hush here in this country because the drink is technically illegal. This is because its active psychedelic component is a compound called DMT (the illegal part.)

DMT is short for dimethyltryptamine. It occurs naturally in mammalian brains, albeit in extremely small amounts. It is a psychotropic drug. It can be extracted and refined from certain plants, such as mimosa hostilis. DMT is also a Schedule 1 drug in the United States. This means, very simply, that ingesting this innocuous-sounding substance lands you in very hot water with your local drug and law enforcement authorities.

By the accounts of people who have ingested DMT, the experience begins with the visual appearance of geometric shapes of increasingly complexity. This is then followed by the gradual imposition of a subjective perceptual reality populated by entities of either animal and/or non-human form, and interestingly, of creatures which resemble contemporary descriptions of aliens. There are also encounters with human spirits (who may or may not be relatives.) The preceding is a grossly simplified encapsulation of the sensory experience and it should be noted that the duration and appearance of these entities varies from individual to individual.

Now, these perceptual experiences may or may not sound like the psychotropic adventurer’s cup of tea (which is how ayahuasca’s consumed) but there’s a caveat to this ticket-to-fairyland beverage; the taste of ayahuasca is indescribably vile, and the Indians also refer to ayahuasca as la purga, (the purge) because the consumer will inevitably vomit, or have extremely loose bowels. There are alternative and less gastro-intestinally distressing ways to ingest DMT, such as smoking it, or injecting it. Both are disquieting prospects, because in order to smoke it, you must know how to chemically extract and refine it. To inject it is an even more physically invasive procedure that immediately bumps DMT consumption into a much more serious category of psychotropic exploration. DMT is not for the bong and pizza crowd.

So what’s the point of ingesting DMT if it can either make you hurl or require that you have a background in organic chemistry? It isn’t called the ‘spirit molecule’ for nothing, because the transcendent qualities of DMT cannot be disputed. The ingestion of DMT in the form of ayahuasca is a sacred function by amazonian Indian shamans and tribes. It is also part of religious ritual by the Christian Santo Daime sect of Brazil. DMT is one of the few psychotropic substances where users frequently describe interactive encounters with personalities.

DMT’s consciousness-altering experience has been sampled by William Burroughs, Allen Ginsburg, Terence McKenna and Timothy Leary. They all attest to DMT’s potent launching of the subject into a sometimes frightening plane of reality. But they all agree it is a powerful psychoactive experience. The "trip" itself seems (in a distillation of several accounts) to break down into specific stages:

Firstly, geometric patterns appear in the subject’s vision. They grow in intensity and complexity. They are not static, but mobile, and constantly changing into higher orders of shapes and size. The second stage is the movement of the experimenter through a metaphorical transitional structure; this could be a huge tunnel, encountering a "membrane" of light, beyond which dim figures can be seen, or entering a vast hall or chamber, where the topmost dome or ceiling opens up to whatever the individual is then about to experience. And this next part is where it gets tricky.

Depending on whom you talk to, this next stage ranges from traumatic to awe-inspiring. Various animals may be seen. Most encounter the "machine elves." In some experiences, they’re literally wearing elf-garb, down to pointy hats. In other instances, they may have an insectoid appearance. They’re all under four feet high. Many times they’re aware of your presence, and may try and interact with you. There’s a strong impression they’re workers. But even this stage is a preamble. If you’re lucky (or unlucky) you might next encounter the "alien entity." This personality fits most contemporary descriptions of an "alien" – large head, narrowing chin, black slits for eyes. Their demeanor can range from indifferent, to curious, to outright hostility.

Many of those who have partaken of either ayahuasca or DMT testify that the stages of experience described above may not happen during a single trip. Sometimes it takes multiple DMT sessions to progress toward the next phase. It’s as if there’s an acclimation mechanism at work. Because of the seemingly organized aspects of the DMT-induced experience, some experimenters have hypothesized that DMT turns off filtering mechanisms in the brain that prevent certain visual and auditory stimuli from interacting with our cognitive processes. These stimuli are assumed to be unrelated to our consensual reality, to our coping & survival in it, and therefore our neurobiology has evolved to block it from our consciousnes. In other words, if these filtering mechanisms didn’t exist, we’d be swamped by so many audiovisual phenomena that we wouldn’t be able to focus on our immediate survival needs.

So where’s the auditory and visual stimuli coming from? Is it generated by our subconscious, by some part of our brain that’s been locked away for hundreds of thousands of years? The commonality of the experiences, the literal "sameness" that all DMT experimenters both supports and undercuts that. The initial appearance of geometric patterns could be ascribed to a section of our noggin that all of homo sapiens shares, one that generates the same imagery. But the animals? The elves? The aliens?

It could be that DMT is helping the user to access a collective unconscious of stored archetypes. But if you’re willing to ingest that scenario, then why not a dimension beyond our own? Is that still too far of a stretch? There’s actually a precedent for this belief system. It’s called religion, and billions of us ascribe to one form of it or another. Sometimes, out here in Los Angeles, it’s by word of mouth, a donation, and a teacup of la purga.