Part IV: The Cosmic and Mental Frontiers

Chapter 14: Experiences Under Psychedelics (LSD, DMT, Ayahuasca)

Psychedelics sit in a strange and controversial spot in the study of consciousness. They're by far the fastest and most dramatic way to reach non-ordinary states of awareness, but they also come with real risks, legal headaches, and a fair question hanging over them: do chemically induced experiences reveal something true about reality, or just produce vivid hallucinations?

After going through the evidence, I think psychedelics are genuine tools for consciousness expansion (not toys, not escapes, but tools) that, used with intention and respect, can produce insights identical to what people reach through years of meditation, out-of-body experiences, or past-life regression. But they're tools that demand caution.

The Stoned Ape Theory: Where Human Consciousness Began

Terence McKenna, in Food of the Gods (1992), made a provocative and well-researched argument: psychedelic mushrooms may have played a decisive role in the emergence of human consciousness itself.1

His thesis is that our hominid ancestors, moving through the African grasslands, would have run into psilocybin mushrooms growing in the dung of grazing animals. At low doses, psilocybin sharpens visual acuity, a clear survival advantage for a hunter. At moderate doses, it stimulates sexual arousal and social bonding. At high doses, it produces intense visionary experiences that may have catalyzed the development of language, art, and religious awareness.

"A particular family of active chemical compounds, the indole hallucinogens, played a decisive role in the emergence of our essential humanness, of the human characteristic of self-reflection."1

McKenna wasn't being metaphorical. He argued that the specific neurochemical effects of psilocybin, particularly its impact on the brain's language centers and its ability to dissolve the boundaries of the ego, could have been the catalytic spark that turned a clever primate into a self-aware, language-using, spiritually aware human being.

Whether or not you buy the evolutionary hypothesis, his broader point stands: psychedelic substances have been part of human spiritual practice since the very beginning.

Shamanism: The Oldest Spiritual Practice

McKenna traces the lineage of psychedelic use back to shamanism, which he identifies as "the Upper Paleolithic tradition of healing, divination, and theatrical performance based on natural magic developed 10,000 to 50,000 years ago."1

Shamanic cultures around the world (from Siberia to the Amazon, from Africa to Australia) have used psychoactive plants and fungi as central elements of their spiritual practice. The shaman enters an altered state (through plant medicines, drumming, fasting, or other techniques), journeys to non-ordinary reality, communicates with spirits, receives healing knowledge, and comes back to share what was learned with the community.

The heart of shamanism, McKenna notes, is ecstasy, not in the modern sense of mere pleasure, but in the original Greek sense of ekstasis: standing outside oneself. Stepping beyond the boundaries of ordinary consciousness.

Whether the shaman is an Arctic Inuit using Amanita muscaria mushrooms, an Amazonian ayahuasquero using the ayahuasca brew, or a Mazatec curandera using psilocybin mushrooms, the core practice is the same: ingesting a substance that dissolves the ego's boundaries, entering a visionary state, interacting with non-physical intelligences, and returning with knowledge or healing.

McKenna documents a vivid example: a young man named Raongi undergoing a shamanic initiation with an elder called Mangi. After ingesting the plant medicine, Raongi sees visions of electric blue eels and approaches what the elder describes as "Venturi, the real world, the blue zone", a realm that feels more real, more fundamental than ordinary reality.1 It's exactly what OBE practitioners describe: a reality that feels more real than the physical world.

What Psychedelics Reveal

The experiences people report under psychedelics, particularly psilocybin (mushrooms), DMT (the active compound in ayahuasca), and LSD, line up remarkably well with the non-ordinary experiences described throughout this book:

The materialist counterargument is straightforward: drugs alter brain chemistry, and altered brain chemistry produces altered perceptions. You're hallucinating, not perceiving deeper truth. It's a fair objection, and if the experiences were random and chaotic, it would settle the matter. But they're not. The same entities, the same geometric patterns, the same dissolution of self, the same overwhelming sense of "more real than real", reported independently by thousands of people, across different substances, different cultures, different centuries. Hallucinations are usually personal and disordered. These experiences are shared and structured. That distinction matters.

Getting Banned From the DMT Realm

DMT deserves its own treatment, because it doesn't behave like the others.

Start with the fact that your own body makes it. In 2019 a team at the University of Michigan found that rat brains carry both of the enzymes needed to synthesize DMT, and not only in the pineal gland, which is where everyone assumed it would be, but in the neocortex and the hippocampus. They measured it at concentrations comparable to serotonin. They also found that levels roughly doubled in the brains of rats after cardiac arrest.3 Set that next to Chapter 5 for a second. The one molecule that reliably produces "I was somewhere else and it was more real than here" appears to surge in a dying brain.

Then there's what it actually does. Smoked or vaporized at a high enough dose, DMT doesn't decorate the room the way mushrooms or LSD do. It replaces it. People describe passing through an enormous spinning kaleidoscopic structure, which the community calls the chrysanthemum, into somewhere they call hyperspace.4 And meeting things there. Not vague presences: specific entities, apparently autonomous, that often seem to have been expecting you.

The biggest survey of this is out of Johns Hopkins. 2,561 people who had taken a breakthrough dose and encountered what they took to be an independent being. 69% came back with a message. 19% said they were shown something about the future. 41% reported fear during the encounter, though the emotions that dominated overall were love and kindness. Most of them endorsed the statement that the entity "existed in some real but different dimension of reality, and continued to exist" after the drug wore off.5 That last part is the interesting one. These aren't people describing a hallucination they had. They're describing a place they went, which carried on without them once they left.

Which brings me to the part of all this I find genuinely strange.

Some people get banned.

There's a well-established pattern in DMT circles of users who hit a wall and never get back through it. The shape is fairly consistent. After a stretch of frequent recreational use, a session goes wrong. Instead of the usual welcome, whatever is there turns cold. People report being interrogated, laughed at, dismissed, or simply told to go, often with a message along the lines of you have no purpose here, you've seen enough, or stop coming back. And then the drug stops working. Same substance, same technique, bigger doses, and they get nothing: a dim holding area, flat colorless visuals, or a blackout with no memory at all. The community calls it being locked out of hyperspace.

One thread on DMT-Nexus, which is the main forum for this stuff, is titled simply "Banned from hyperspace, every single time." The poster describes seven months of attempts at 10 to 30 mg, varying his mood, his setting, and how much he meditated first, and getting the same result every time: fractal shapes, a sense of presence, and a clear instruction to leave. Sometimes gently. Once, he says, as "begone human." The moderators' response, offered without much surprise, was that this happens to people, and that he should stop for a long while, sit with what he'd already been given, and go back when something told him to.6

Here's why I can't file this under pharmacology and move on.

Almost every psychedelic builds tolerance fast. Take LSD two days running and the second day is a shadow of the first. DMT is the documented exception. In 1996 Rick Strassman gave 13 experienced volunteers four full intravenous doses of 0.3 mg/kg, spaced half an hour apart. Their hormone and heart-rate responses blunted with each dose, exactly as tolerance predicts. Their subjective experience didn't. By clinical interview and by rating scale, the fourth trip was as intense as the first.7 DMT is the psychedelic that doesn't wear out with repetition, which is precisely what makes "it stopped working for me, permanently" so hard to pin on receptors.

So what's going on? I don't know, and I want to be straight about the quality of the evidence here, because this is the thinnest material in the chapter. The lockout reports are anonymous forum posts, not data. Nobody has studied it. There's no way to verify anyone's dose, their chemistry, or their state of mind. And several ordinary explanations are very much alive:

Any of those could explain it. What none of them explains is the content. In a lot of these accounts the message comes first and the lockout follows, and the message is about conduct rather than dosage. Not "you took too much" but something closer to "you are treating this carelessly." Which happens to be the exact distinction every traditional culture drew, and which I come back to a few sections down.

Read one way, the psychedelic underground is rediscovering the hard way a rule the shamans wrote down thousands of years ago: you come with a question, inside a structure, for a reason. Read another way, something on the other side has standards about who it lets in. I genuinely don't know which reading is right. I do notice that both of them point in the same direction, and that the direction is treat this as sacred, not as a ride.

Does Everyone Meet the Same Beings?

If hyperspace is a place rather than a light show, two people ought to be able to go there together. That's the obvious test, and the obvious test has a long history of not working.

In August 2008 the DMT-Nexus community ran it properly. Members around the world agreed to dose at the same moment, 8pm GMT on the 9th. Each picked a personal glyph and a catchphrase, a "hyperphrase," so that anyone who ran into them on the other side would have something checkable to bring back. They even agreed on a rendezvous point: Stonehenge. It's a decent protocol, and it was designed by the people with the most to gain from a positive result.

It produced nothing. Only a handful managed to dose on time, and the ones who did came back describing different things: snakes, alien beings, godlike figures, human-looking women. No glyphs came back. No hyperphrases. Nobody found anybody.9

The disappointment is older than that. In 1905 a Colombian naturalist named Rafael Zerda-Bayón proposed calling ayahuasca's then-unidentified active ingredient "telepathine," on the strength of exactly this idea, that the visions were shared. The name stuck for twenty years. In 1923 Guillermo Fischer-Cárdenas isolated the compound and kept the name to honor him, then reported that it had only mild effects and wasn't hallucinogenic at all. In 1927 a chemist at Hoffmann-La Roche showed that telepathine was identical to harmine, which had been sitting in the literature since 1848, thoroughly unremarkable, extracted from Syrian rue.10 The telepathy was in the name, not in the molecule.

So what is actually established?

Convergence, but of a narrower kind than the claim needs. In a 2021 field study, Pascal Michael, David Luke and Oliver Robinson interviewed 36 people immediately after they inhaled 40 to 75 mg of DMT at home. 34 of the 36, 94%, reported meeting entities they experienced as genuinely other than themselves. 72% described creatures that were neither human nor animal. 53% found them helping or nurturing, 56% charming and inviting. The authors point to "the frequent overlap of, often specific and nuanced, content between participants" as evidence of what they call the internal consistency of the DMT experience.11 Put that next to the 2,561 people in the Hopkins survey and you have a great many strangers reporting the same cast of characters.

Rick Strassman noticed it happening in front of him. Running the New Mexico trials in the early 1990s, dosing volunteers one at a time, he found himself hearing the same figures recur across people who had never met, and writes of one session that it was "another encounter with clowns or jesters, something I had been hearing about for quite some time from other volunteers." That's not a survey respondent remembering something years later. That's the investigator noticing a pattern forming across his own case series while it formed. Strassman also went further in print than I'd expected: he treats it as "just as likely" that these worlds are "outside of us and freestanding" as that they exist only in the mind, and describes his volunteers meeting "seemingly solid and freestanding realities coexisting with this one."12

That's worth something, but it isn't the same claim, and the gap between the two is where this argument usually gets fumbled. Unconnected people converging on the same kinds of being is one thing. Two people in the same room, at the same time, coming back with matching details is a much stronger thing.

Accounts of the second kind do exist, and they deserve better than a wave of the hand.

In the Penguin anthology Tripping, one contributor describes a night on LSD with a friend called Peter, the two of them sitting in a lounge room watching faces surface and dissolve over each other's features. What makes the account unusual is the timing. "Even the rate of change of the bizarre imagery seemed to synchronize between us," he writes. "As we both commented on the strange procession, each of us saw shifts at precisely the same time." At one point his peripheral vision flooded with a pattern; at that same instant Peter pulled back in his chair, groping for a word he couldn't reach. "It's electric orange paisley," the narrator said, and Peter agreed that was exactly it. By the end of the night they had cut their commentary down to shorthand, "color change," "face change," because the synchrony had stopped being remarkable.13

Then there's the most famous case of all. In 1971 Terence and Dennis McKenna went into the Amazon at La Chorrera and spent days in what both experienced as a shared, telepathically linked state. Dennis published the honest version forty years later, and it's far more useful than the legend. A skeptic in their party, Vanessa, put mathematical questions to the "oracle" the brothers believed they were in contact with. It was, in Dennis's word, flummoxed, and the answers it did give couldn't be verified. Dennis is equally candid that he was by then closer to psychosis than to insight, silently convinced he was in telepathic contact with restaurant waiters and that the dishes were arriving by telekinesis.14 Asked about it decades later, he reached for the diagnosis himself: "We both went crazy simultaneously, so it's that classic folie à deux kind of thing."15

So the honest answer to "has this ever been documented" is: yes, repeatedly, for a century, and not once cleanly.

Every account I can find has the same hole in it. The two people were talking to each other the whole time. The narrator in Tripping named the color and Peter agreed, which is not remotely the same as Peter naming it first. Confirmation flowing through conversation is exactly what you'd expect if the perception were genuinely shared, and exactly what you'd expect from suggestion between two intoxicated friends who are already finishing each other's sentences. The reports as they stand cannot separate those two, and the strength of feeling that accompanies them isn't evidence about which one is true. What's missing from this literature isn't cases. It's a single case where the two people couldn't hear each other.

Dennis McKenna, who spent the fifty years after La Chorrera becoming a serious ethnopharmacologist rather than a prophet, put the problem plainly in 2012. Either all of it is generated inside the skull, "or the alternative is true, that there actually are entities in 'hyperspace' that can communicate with us via something akin to telepathy when the human brain is affected by large amounts of tryptamine. That's a hypothesis worthy of testing, if such an experiment could ever be devised."14

Somebody devised one five years later.

At a symposium convened at Tyringham Hall, the psychologist David Luke and his colleagues laid out the design in detail, and it's the right one. Don't ask a person to transmit an image, because nobody can hold an intention steady inside DMT space. Instead, dose several people at once, put each of them in a separate room, and interview each one the moment they come down. Then take the transcripts, mix them in with dummy transcripts from unrelated DMT sessions, and hand the pile to independent judges who don't know which is which. If the judges can reliably pull out the set that belongs together, the accounts share something. If they can't, they don't. Either way you get a number instead of a feeling. The organizers described the goal plainly: six psychonauts in separated laboratory conditions, tested for "telepathy, tele-vision, mutual communion, visual landscape corroboration, and eventual correlated mutual communion with alternate sentient presences."15

That was published in 2018. As far as I can determine, nobody has run it. The design has been sitting there for the better part of a decade, and the money in this field went to brain imaging instead.

Which is the honest state of things: the experiment that would settle the question is neither expensive nor complicated, and it hasn't been done.

The most recent attempt to move it forward comes from a different direction. In May 2026 Andrew Gallimore, the cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman and Niffe Hermansson posted a paper arguing that DMT entities deserve to be treated as a testable hypothesis rather than a closed case of hallucination.16 Their framework is Hoffman's conscious realism: perception is an interface rather than a window, and what DMT may do is briefly widen the interface to take in agents we aren't ordinarily built to perceive. That's the metaphysics, and you can take it or leave it. What they add on the practical side is a second experiment alongside Luke's.

Luke's design tests whether two isolated people bring back the same place. Hoffman's tests whether the being in front of you knows something you don't. Put a computer in a sealed room, have it flip a screen randomly between blue and yellow, and ask the entity which color it's currently showing. Get that right, reliably, across trials, and no amount of talk about suggestion or archetypes covers it. They also propose a variant of the isolation protocol: two separated volunteers, each trying to hand a random word to the other through the being in front of them. A psychedelic dead drop.

None of it has been run either. This is a preprint and a proposal, not a result.

So the state of play is two good experimental designs, nine years apart, from serious people, and no data from either. That's frustrating, but I'd rather end this section on a question that can be answered than on a story that can't be checked. Both of these turn the argument from something you either feel or don't into something that either works or doesn't, and I'll take one of those over a hundred more testimonials.

Holding the Door Open: Extended-State DMT

There's a second obstacle to mapping hyperspace, and it's an unglamorous one. You're only in there for about ten minutes.

Go back to the tolerance result, the one that makes the lockout reports so awkward to explain: DMT is the psychedelic that doesn't fade with repeated dosing. In 2016 Gallimore and Rick Strassman pointed out that this peculiarity has an engineering consequence. If the experience doesn't diminish under continued exposure, you can keep somebody in it. Their paper borrows target-controlled infusion from anesthesiology, the technique used to hold a surgical patient at a chosen depth, and models how to hold brain DMT at roughly 100 ng/ml for as long as you want.17 What that would buy, in their words, is "careful observation of its psychological contents." Stretch ten minutes into hours and you stop taking snapshots and start doing fieldwork.

Worth being precise about what this is not. It isn't microdosing, which means doses deliberately too small to feel. It's the opposite: a full breakthrough dose, held at the plateau instead of allowed to spike and crash. The shorthand is extended-state DMT, or DMTx.

And it has been done. The Imperial College study I mentioned earlier is the first published run. Eleven volunteers, an intravenous bolus of 6 to 18 mg followed by a constant infusion for 29 minutes. Effects arrived inside two minutes, held level for the length of the infusion, and cleared within 20 minutes of it stopping. Entity encounters increased in the later part of the sessions and at the higher doses.8 Physiologically it went well. One volunteer had anxiety with chest discomfort that resolved in ten minutes, with a normal ECG.

So where's the map?

There isn't one. The study found no consistent environments across sessions or across participants. Volunteers did not come back reporting the same places, or the same beings, or anything you could triangulate into a geography. The authors make no cartographic claims whatsoever, and they're careful about the limits: eleven people, doses that varied between them, a fixed dose order that could produce order effects, and ratings collected after the fact.

I want to sit with that instead of hurrying past it, because it's the cleanest test this chapter's central idea has faced. If hyperspace were a location, holding eleven attentive people there for half an hour each ought to start producing landmarks. It didn't. One small study can be underpowered and this one says so about itself, but it's the result we have, and it points away from where I'd have put my money.

The next round is already underway. Gallimore runs a non-profit called Noonautics, the research arm of a centre named Eleusis that opened on the Caribbean island of Bequia in March 2026, and it has teamed up with Hoffman's group. The plan is to use DMTx to hold trained scientists in the state for hours at a time, making structured observations and running the kind of experiments described above, with Hoffman's mathematical models supplying a framework for interpreting whatever comes back.18

That's the version of all this I find genuinely exciting, and not because I expect it to vindicate anything. It's that for the first time somebody is going to spend real time in there, clear-headed, taking notes, using a protocol that is allowed to fail. Either the landmarks turn up across independent observers or they don't. Either the entity reads the screen or it doesn't. After a century in which the most extraordinary reports in this entire book have lasted ten minutes and been impossible to check, someone is finally building an instrument that stays open.

The Scientific Framework

Rupert Sheldrake, in Ways to Go Beyond, offers a scientific framework for understanding how psychedelics work as spiritual practices.19

Rather than "creating" experiences (as the materialist view would suggest), Sheldrake proposes that psychedelics work by temporarily disrupting the brain's filtering mechanism, the same filter that, under normal conditions, reduces the vast ocean of consciousness to the narrow stream we experience as waking awareness.

This is the same mechanism Eben Alexander used to explain his NDE (the neocortex shut down, removing the filter) and the same idea behind the antenna theory of panpsychism (the brain constrains consciousness rather than generating it).20 Psychedelics don't add something to consciousness. They remove a restriction, letting consciousness expand to its natural, unfiltered state.

Recent neuroscience backs this up. Brain imaging studies of subjects on psilocybin show decreased activity in the default mode network (DMN), the brain region tied to the sense of separate self.21 Less brain activity, more consciousness. That's the opposite of what you'd expect if the brain generated consciousness, but exactly what you'd expect if it filtered consciousness.

Ancient Plant Medicine Traditions

Drunvalo Melchizedek, in The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life, points to the use of plant medicines in ancient spiritual traditions, particularly in Egypt and among pre-Columbian civilizations.22 These weren't recreational drugs. They were sacraments, sacred substances used in controlled ceremonial contexts, under the guidance of trained practitioners, for the specific purpose of expanding consciousness and accessing higher knowledge.

The distinction between sacred use and recreational use is crucial. Every traditional culture that used psychedelic plants treated them with extreme respect: specific preparation rituals, dietary restrictions, ceremonial settings, trained guides, and clear intentions. They knew it was a tool for accessing extra knowledge, or for healing (traumas or illnesses). The modern habit of using psychedelics recreationally (at parties, without preparation, without clear intention) strips away the safety structures that traditional cultures built up over thousands of years.

A Word of Caution

I'm not telling everyone to go out and take psychedelics. They're powerful, they can be dangerous, they're illegal in many places, and they're not for everyone. People with a history of psychotic disorders, severe anxiety, or certain medications should absolutely stay away. That said, I believe they're far less dangerous than alcohol. You can take mushrooms or LSD without getting a headache, vomiting, or anything like that. And they're not addictive. You'll be tired the next day since the journeys are usually intense, but you'll be fully functional and your liver won't suffer from it.

And for those who come to them with respect, preparation, clear intention, and ideally experienced guidance, psychedelics can offer, in a matter of hours, the same fundamental insights that years of meditation, OBE practice, or past-life regression work toward: the direct, experiential knowledge that consciousness is primary, that you are not your body, that you are connected to everything, and that love is the fundamental nature of reality.

The mushroom, the vine, the molecule, they're not the source of the experience. They're the key that briefly unlocks a door. What's behind the door was always there.

Sources

  1. Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge (Bantam, 1992). Presents the "stoned ape" hypothesis on psilocybin's role in human evolution and traces psychedelic use back to Upper Paleolithic shamanism. First published 1992; later paperback editions 1993. https://openlibrary.org/works/OL8353432W/Food_of_the_gods
  2. Three Initiates, The Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece (Yogi Publication Society, 1908). Source of the Hermetic Principles of Mentalism and Vibration referenced here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kybalion
  3. Jon G. Dean, Tiecheng Liu, Sean Huff, Ben Sheler, Steven A. Barker, Rick J. Strassman, Michael M. Wang and Jimo Borjigin, "Biosynthesis and Extracellular Concentrations of N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) in Mammalian Brain," Scientific Reports 9, 9333 (2019). Found the two DMT-synthesizing enzymes in rat neocortex and hippocampus as well as the pineal gland, brain concentrations comparable to serotonin, and a rise in extracellular DMT following cardiac arrest in pineal-intact rats. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45812-w
  4. The Hyperspace Lexicon, DMT-Nexus Wiki. Community-maintained glossary defining "the chrysanthemum" (the spinning fractal structure that either opens onto or blocks breakthrough), "the waiting room" and "hyperspace." https://wiki.dmt-nexus.me/Hyperspace_lexicon
  5. Alan K. Davis, John M. Clifton, Eric G. Weaver, Ethan S. Hurwitz, Matthew W. Johnson and Roland R. Griffiths, "Survey of entity encounter experiences occasioned by inhaled N,N-dimethyltryptamine: Phenomenology, interpretation, and enduring effects," Journal of Psychopharmacology 34, no. 9 (2020): 1008-1020. 2,561 respondents; 69% received a message, 19% a prediction, 41% reported fear, and most endorsed that the entity existed in a real but separate dimension and continued to exist afterward. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0269881120916143
  6. "Banned from hyperspace - every single time," DMT-Nexus forum thread. First-person account of repeated refusal at 10-30 mg over seven months, and the responses of long-time community members treating the pattern as familiar. Cited as a record of what users report, not as evidence of what causes it. https://forum.dmt-nexus.me/threads/banned-from-hyperspace-every-single-time.366379/
  7. Rick J. Strassman, Clifford R. Qualls and Laura M. Berg, "Differential tolerance to biological and subjective effects of four closely spaced doses of N,N-dimethyltryptamine in humans," Biological Psychiatry 39, no. 9 (1996): 784-795. Thirteen volunteers, four intravenous doses of 0.3 mg/kg at 30-minute intervals: endocrine and heart-rate responses showed tolerance, subjective effects did not. Strassman's book-length account of the wider study is source 12 below. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8731519/
  8. Lisa X. Luan, Emma Eckernäs, Michael Ashton, Fernando E. Rosas, Malin V. Uthaug, Christopher Timmermann et al., "Psychological and physiological effects of extended DMT," Journal of Psychopharmacology 38, no. 1 (2024): 56-67. Under continuous infusion, subjective intensity plateaus and then drifts down while plasma DMT keeps rising, suggesting acute psychological tolerance. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/02698811231196877
  9. "Synchronized Hyperspace Event," DMT-Nexus Wiki. The community's own attempt to test whether simultaneous users could meet and identify each other in hyperspace using pre-agreed glyphs, "hyperphrases" and Stonehenge as a rendezvous point; first event 9 August 2008, 8pm GMT. Turnout was small and the recorded reports describe different entities, with no mutual recognition. https://wiki.dmt-nexus.me/Synchronized_Hyperspace_Event
  10. "Telepathine," Wikipedia. Chronology of the name: proposed by Rafael Zerda-Bayón in 1905 on the assumption that ayahuasca visions were shared; kept by Guillermo Fischer-Cárdenas when he isolated the compound in 1923; shown by F. Elger at Hoffmann-La Roche in 1927 to be identical to harmine, first isolated in 1848. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telepathine
  11. Pascal Michael, David Luke and Oliver Robinson, "An Encounter With the Other: A Thematic and Content Analysis of DMT Experiences From a Naturalistic Field Study," Frontiers in Psychology 12, 720717 (2021). 36 participants inhaling 40-75 mg at home, interviewed immediately afterward using micro-phenomenological methods; 34 of 36 (94%) reported entities experienced as non-self agents, with 48 subthemes of entity appearance and behavior showing substantial convergence across the sample. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.720717/full
  12. Rick Strassman, DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences (Park Street Press, 2001). The University of New Mexico trials, in which volunteers were dosed individually; Strassman records recurring figures across unconnected volunteers as he encountered them, and argues it is "just as likely" that these realms are "outside" of us and freestanding as that they exist only in the mind.
  13. Charles Hayes, ed., Tripping: An Anthology of True-Life Psychedelic Adventures (Penguin Books, 2000). The synchronized face-morphing account, including the "electric orange paisley" moment, appears in a contributor's first-person report of an LSD night with a friend. Note that the experience was LSD rather than DMT, and that the two participants were in continuous conversation throughout.
  14. Dennis McKenna, Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: My Life with Terence McKenna (North Star Press of St. Cloud, 2012). Dennis McKenna's retrospective account of the 1971 experiment at La Chorrera, including Vanessa's failed attempt to verify the "oracle" with mathematical questions, his own frank assessment of his mental state at the time, and the formulation of the entities question as "a hypothesis worthy of testing, if such an experiment could ever be devised." The brothers' contemporaneous account is The Invisible Landscape (1975); Terence's is True Hallucinations (1993).
  15. David Luke and Rory Spowers, eds., DMT Dialogues: Encounters with the Spirit Molecule (Park Street Press, 2018), and David Luke, ed., DMT Entity Encounters: Dialogues on the Spirit Molecule (Park Street Press, 2021). Proceedings of the Tyringham Hall symposia. Luke sets out the isolation-plus-blinded-judges design, and Anton Bilton's introduction states the intended protocol of six psychonauts in separated laboratory conditions. Dennis McKenna's "folie a deux" remark on La Chorrera appears in the same volumes.
  16. Andrew R. Gallimore, Donald D. Hoffman and Niffe Hermansson, "Traces of the Other - Are DMT Entities Real? DMT Phenomenology in the Framework of Conscious Realism," PsyArXiv preprint, posted 27 May 2026. A preprint rather than a peer-reviewed paper, and a proposal rather than a result. Treats the hallucination-only reading as a testable hypothesis and sets out experimental paradigms, including the sealed-room color test and the transfer of a random word between two isolated volunteers via the same entity. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/8qvgy
  17. Andrew R. Gallimore and Rick J. Strassman, "A Model for the Application of Target-Controlled Intravenous Infusion for a Prolonged Immersive DMT Psychedelic Experience," Frontiers in Pharmacology 7, 211 (2016). Argues that DMT's absence of psychological tolerance to repeated full doses, unique among the classic serotonergic psychedelics, makes it suitable for target-controlled infusion, and models holding brain concentrations near 100 ng/ml to sustain the state indefinitely. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2016.00211
  18. Noonautics and the Trace Institute, collaboration with Donald Hoffman's group at UC Irvine, announced June 2026: use of the extended-state DMTx protocol to hold trained observers in the DMT state for hours while running the experiments proposed in the preprint above. Noonautics is the research arm of Eleusis, a centre opened on the island of Bequia in March 2026. An announced programme, not a published result. https://www.socsci.uci.edu/newsevents/news/2026/2026-06-03-hoffman-science-blog.php
  19. Rupert Sheldrake, Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work: Seven Spiritual Practices for a Scientific Age (Monkfish, 2019). Discusses psychedelics such as ayahuasca among practices for tuning into more-than-human realms of consciousness. https://www.sheldrake.org/books-by-rupert-sheldrake/ways-to-go-beyond-and-why-they-work
  20. Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife (Simon & Schuster, 2012). Alexander's account of vivid consciousness during a meningitis-induced coma, interpreted as the brain's filter dropping away. https://ebenalexander.com/books/proof-of-heaven/
  21. R. L. Carhart-Harris et al., "Neural correlates of the psychedelic state as determined by fMRI studies with psilocybin," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109(6), 2138-2143 (2012). Imperial College London fMRI study finding reduced activity and connectivity in the default mode network under intravenous psilocybin. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1119598109
  22. Drunvalo Melchizedek, The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life, Volume 1 (Light Technology Publishing, 1998). Edited transcript of the Flower of Life workshops (1985-1994) covering sacred geometry and ancient Egyptian spiritual traditions. https://archive.org/details/B-001-001-119