Tom Wood
A new study has been looking into the various experiences of DMT users, and they’ve found that a lot of people are reporting the same things, such as encountering ‘gods’.
Of course, taking seriously psychoactive drugs isn’t something we’d advise, but it’s nonetheless interesting to have a look at the reports of those who have taken them.
In this instance, the boffins cast their analytic eyes over people who have taken N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, which for everyone’s sake we’ll just call DMT from here on out.
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The author of the study Stephen Kagan wanted to take a look at the experiences DMT users have reported as calls for it to be legalized grow louder.
Admittedly, there is still a lot to work out about what effect it has on the brain, or any potential health benefits, so it’s unlikely we’ll see it made legal any time soon.
Regardless, Kagan and co have been looking into what people report after smoking DMT, and there’s some interesting stuff in there.
The study claims: "People who smoke DMT, and can recall their experiences in detail, frequently describe seeing vivid and detailed geometric structures, experienced synesthesia, visions of alternate worlds,
"Encounters with strange autonomous entities and divine beings, interactions with complex technological objects, profound emotional and mystical experiences, and being transported to unusual and complex hyperdimensional places."
Trippy stuff, indeed.
For their work, Kagan studied 100 experiences that are readily available from real-world users, coming from places such as YouTube and drug education website Erowid.
The experiences were broken down into categories such as places, entities, objects, attributes and feelings, before they were further categorized down.
In places, there were categories like ‘space’ and ‘caves’ for example.
Kagan continued: "In the majority of reports, people who encountered complex visual and synaesthetic phenomena and had the experience of entering alternate realities did not describe their experiences as being manifestations of their own minds and frequently described what they encountered as being autonomous of themselves and independent of their influence.
"Some people also described the content of their experiences as being more real than real. “This often meant that what they experienced was more vibrant, complex, varied or detailed than what they normally experienced in their daily lives.
“In most cases the ability to perceive their normal surrounding reality did not remain intact and if it did, then the content and structure of their DMT experiences were superimposed upon and within the external world."
In terms of entities, people reported ‘gods:mystic’ and ‘elves:goblins’ as well as - as Mr Rogan reports in the above video - 'jester:clown'.
At the top was ‘humanoid’ with 36 percent of experiences reporting this, with ‘living machines’ featuring in 16 percent of experiences.
While ‘humanoid’ sounds fairly mundane, it often wasn’t.
Kagan explained: "Sometimes they appear as aliens, family members, have strange shaped bodies or heads, limbs with extra joints or that separate in unusual ways.
"Their clothing varied from spacesuits to tribal to that of ancient Egyptians or Greeks and their skin varied in color, sometimes blue, red or golden.
“Their language was usually telepathic or easily understood."
The plan now is to try to gather more data on experiences and break that down into categories as they’ve done here.
Why, you ask?
Well, Kagan said: "With the categories and content found here, we can now build a mature survey for gathering more comprehensive data and we may be able to develop better models of the psychedelic experience in general that can help therapists and clients as well as guides and explorers.
"This may especially be useful as there could be similarities between DMT and high dose Psilocybin experiences.
“In numerous reports subjects claimed that their DMT experiences were some of the most profound and transformative experiences of their lives.
“Further investigation of this is certainly warranted and if this is true, because DMT is faster acting it may be more manageable as a clinical treatment than psilocybin."
There you have it – there may be some fascinating and tangible real-world benefits learned from these sorts of otherworldly experiences.