Why Do DMT Users See Insects from a Parallel Universe?

http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/pc/dmtinsect.html

by quakeguy • 9 years ago

204 170 9 years ago

sprott.physics.wisc.edu

api• 9 years ago

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150820-the-case-for-complex...

Sorry had to do it.

leavinit• 9 years ago

Lol, no apologies needed. Unless you're Canadian, in which case it's customary. Wonder what those scientists would have to say about dark matter in the midst of a DMT bender. Can they get NSF funds for that?

quakeguy• 9 years ago

No apologies needed, we get it right. :)

brianberns• 9 years ago

So, assuming you mean to imply that DMT "insects" are real creatures composed of dark matter, such a being would still be affected by Earth's gravity if it was nearby, even if it couldn't interact with our "normal" matter at all. This seems to imply that it would be pulled through the surface of the earth, towards the center.

So if any of you see intelligent insects walking around on your next DMT trip, ask them how they keep from being sucked into the planet.

aoeuasdf1• 9 years ago

Easy, they live on a planet of dark matter :)

nether• 9 years ago

I saw these weird drapes folded around me that were brown, green, and white stripes. They were gently heaving, and I knew that they were living creatures that were watching over me. I didn't take enough to have a full breakthrough, but in that moment I was certain that I was dying, with all of my consciousness welled up into my head, as if that's all I was. When I came to and regained awareness of my limbs, I was relieved to feel tears on my face because I guess that meant I was still alive. For a couple of weeks I wondered if I really had died. The feeling was that strong. Now, I think that's absurd, but still a tiny part wonders...

The lesson learned was that I needed to start questioning my convictions more. Just "feeling sure" isn't enough to certain of something. I try to maintain a little bit of skepticism and doubt toward every thing these days.

unixhero• 9 years ago

I really think that's walking a very fine line. You may benefit from finding a counselor for periodic visits in the near future.

aerique• 9 years ago

You talk like someone who has never used hallucinogens.

SturgeonsLaw• 9 years ago

Just "feeling sure" isn't enough to certain of something.

This, I believe, is one of the most powerful and profound lessons hallucinogens can teach us.

If you can experience, first hand, that even the sensory input from your eyes and ears can not always be trusted, then it tends to make you very, very skeptical of things that are held as immutably true beliefs.

TheOtherHobbes• 9 years ago

It would be hilarious if math, science, and logic turned out to be consensus hallucinations that were not only incomplete but could not make more than limited patches of sense.

dpweb• 9 years ago

Everyone knows that we inherit physcially from our ancestors going back millions of years, but why not psychic inheritance. for instance, children are afraid of the dark. dont forget for thousands of years prehistoric animals killed humans in the dark. i believe we inherit from our ancestors and this explains some of our current psychology.

wouldnt be surprised if dmt is halping the mind tap into some human psychological archetype, the insects repesenting something in the numan experience. of course, also, maybe we are a huge experiment by extraterrestrial aliens and they examine us, block our minds from this and dmt is an antidote! the point is, were trapped in our conciousness its all we know.

sli• 9 years ago

In the same vein, after a couple experiences with hallucinogens, I've started having some amusingly pedestrian reactions to some of the effects. I still enjoy them all the same.

For example, when I look at a tree and notice that the clumps of leaves all have the same shape, I'll just immediately blurt out something like, "Well that doesn't seem correct," almost as a reflex. They keyword of course being "seem."

There's no reason those clumps of leaves can't all be the same shape, but my brain seems to want to reconcile what I'm seeing with what I know is pretty unlikely, but not impossible. I've had similar reactions to leaves on the ground arranging into gridlike patterns at first glance. I see no reason why the leaves can't naturally fall into a grid pattern, and I likely won't notice minor variances in how they're spaced out if they actually were in that pattern.

All in all, some of the most positive and personally insightful experiences I've had.

spacehacker3• 9 years ago

With the same skepticism you could also ask yourself to which extent the hallucinations were actually due to subconscious recall of all kinds of memes surrounding hallucinogens like "out-of-body experience", "consciousness", "parallel worlds", "breakthrough", "feeling like dying", as well as imagery from all kinds of drug films and literature etc.

GordonS3• 9 years ago

It's a good point, but I had a similar experience in my teens, before I'd been exposed to any such influences.

dzhiurgis• 9 years ago

Don't forget UFO's - Their Sightings Coincide with Popular Sci-Fi Films, TV https://www.google.co.nz/amp/www.universetoday.com/37713/rep...

That said there is something DMT that its excreted in your brain at death.

Figs• 9 years ago

Just "feeling sure" isn't enough to certain of something.

Back when I was a teenager, I got interested in the idea of lucid dreaming. One of the suggested ways I'd read of gaining awareness that you are in a dream is to habitually ask yourself if you're dreaming -- sooner or later, you'll do it in a dream.

I tried that for a while, and sure enough, I did actually ask myself if I was dreaming while in a dream, and concluded that I wasn't in dream, because I just felt sure that I wasn't dreaming! Was rather amused when I woke up and realized that I actually had been dreaming all along...

What I should have done -- as I later learned -- was to try to do something impossible while anticipating that it will happen. For example, jump with the intention of levitating, expecting to just hover in the air. Dreams work on anticipation -- what you expect to happen is what happens next. (That's why nightmares always seem to do whatever you're afraid is going to happen next; you expect your fear to come true, so it does.)

Empirically testing reality on occasion is a good thing to do; sometimes you'll find out that what you think is real is just a dream.

hardly_a_mirage• 9 years ago

For example, jump with the intention of levitating, expecting to just hover in the air. Dreams work on anticipation

Yep, either you're dreaming or you're now dead.

exodust2• 9 years ago

The book Art of Dreaming has some good tips... Such as remembering to look at your hands. That action for some reason if performed in a dream will help you realize you're dreaming. The other thing is there's two factors of realization (according to the book), the first is realizing you're dreaming. The second is realizing you are asleep in your bed right now. Surprisingly, it helps to realize and acknowledge these independently for the lucid state to properly kick in.

Once all that happens, the next challenge is of course holding it together without waking up. That just takes practice, but some people are naturals at it I hear.

stordoff• 9 years ago

For example, jump with the intention of levitating, expecting to just hover in the air.

The following quotes neatly sum up how flying in a lucid dream feels to me:

There is an art to flying, or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. [...] Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, that presents the difficulties. [...]
Do not listen to what anybody says to you at this point because they are unlikely to say anything helpful.
They are most likely to say something along the lines of "Good God, man, you can't possibly be flying!" It is vitally important not to believe them or they will suddenly be right.

bsenftner• 9 years ago

I used to be quite good at this. In a similar vein as asking "am I dreaming?" I got into the habit of slapping my hand palm up on a table and saying "apple!" while willing an apple to appear. One day, it did. I realized I was dreaming and simply started bicycling my legs into the air, and I proceeded to fly around my city (Boston at the time.) The first time, it was exhilarating, but my excitement kept me from easily falling asleep, and I'd wake from dreams really easily. Then, few months later during a period of high stress, I did it again and managed to stay asleep while swimming above my neighborhood. I found when under high stress, I'll get these aware dreams where I can just imagine whatever and it manifests. However, its sorta boring after a bit, you can't surprise yourself, and my life is not so stressed anymore, so I have not had such a dream in a few years.

ralfd• 9 years ago

Conversely it is impossible in dreams to read the same thing twice. Take a book, newspaper and read a sentence. Look away. Try read again, the text/meaning will have changed.

Neliquat• 9 years ago

Best tests. Easily done in the waking world (which is which?) Without looking like an idiot. 1. Lightswitches, they dont work right in dreams, shading is hard. 2. Clocks, or digital readouts. Time has no refrence and displays are oddly hard. 3. Hands. You do not know the back of your hand. Might be why so many people stare at their hands on psychedelics.

mortenjorck2• 9 years ago

I had a peculiar experience of heuristically testing a dream not long ago: I had determined I was dreaming, because my field of vision felt too incomplete, that the balance of what I was seeing was titled too far toward interpolation versus observation. That is to say, if waking experience were interpolated from 100% throughput of the visual cortex, I was working on something like 8% (though still interpolating a complete scene from it).

Looking at a wall, I thought "ha, I can't see what color it is", only to realize it was actually a vivid shade of golden-yellow, feeling the color on my retinas. Impressed, I walked over toward a door with a crash bar on it, challenging once again "ok, I can never really feel anything in dreams, so I'll just have a vague sense of touching the crash bar", only to actually feel the heft of the door, and the cast steel on my fingertips.

But as I felt the crash bar, my visual sense of the scene collapsed again, as if all the processing power had just been redirected to haptic from visual. The room and the hallway were just vague ideas drawn once again from a trickle of sensory information. This was amusing enough to wake me up.

Now of course, I don't know if this was actually an insight into how the mind dreams – it's entirely possible that the mechanics themselves were something I dreamed.

Kenji• 9 years ago

The lesson learned was that I needed to start questioning my convictions more. Just "feeling sure" isn't enough to certain of something.

Well, that's the life lesson I learned in the maths lectures and exercise sessions I attended. Seems like drugs are not required to understand this ;)

marcos123• 9 years ago

I obviously don't know you, but based off that comment, I think you're missing the forest for the trees and I'd venture to guess that it's because you've never experienced something like DMT. There are definitely levels to certain lessons in life, like learning that "feeling sure" isn't enough to be certain of something. Sure, math class taught you that if something doesn't add up, it's not true. But I see that as an intro to that life lesson of "feeling sure" not being enough. A few levels up from that understanding, a lot of times, involves something like DMT giving you a metaphorical 50,000 ft view from where you can begin to understand that even those math problems might not be the end all, be all of truth.

We live in a world of gray areas, not black and white.

Eleopteryx• 9 years ago

I too remember feeling like I was dying. My consciousness had dissolved and transformed to such an extent that "will I ever be a human living on Earth again? What's stopping me from just being here forever? What's stopping this five minutes as five million years?" Basically every assumption about reality is broken, "real life" takes on a new sense of impermanence. Being alive here at all starts to feel like a fluke, like a hundred-year stop in a trillion-year journey.

I might be full of shit though.

splitdisk• 9 years ago

The more common term is "entities" or "elves"-and I can't really say I've ever seen them.

DaiPlusPlus• 9 years ago

I read that "The Machine Elves" are more associated with LSD than DMT. Perhaps they activate different parts of the brain associated with object recognition - LSD for humans and faces, and DMT for insects/reptiles as other comments have speculated - it makes me wonder what myriad other substances out there that we haven't discovered yet and what otherworldly effects they could have.

notmarkus• 9 years ago

"Machine Elves" was coined by Terence McKenna to describe the beings in the DMT world. He didn't do much LSD and wasn't a big fan of it.

Maybe others have had different experiences but at the very least the origins of the term are tied to DMT.

oh_sigh• 9 years ago

Do people of all cultures see insects, or is it just westerners on DMT?

For example, I've heard that schizophrenia manifests itself in different ways across cultures. Voices are almost always negative/destructive in western cultures, but often times take on playful manners in non-western cultures.

robertk• 9 years ago

What if someone was raised without ever having seen an insect?

Synaesthesia• 9 years ago

From what I've heard they are rather abstract, unidentifiable (or indescribable) entities. Terrence Mackenna called them "machine elves".

burgerdev2• 9 years ago

It is most prevalent among westerners writing fiction novels about alien praying mantis entities[1].

Jokes aside, as far as I know DMT is not the only compound that makes you see insects. For me, it kinda makes sense to interpret little 'irregularities' in your visual / tactile perceptions as, say, ants.

[1] http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/neoreality.html

burgerdev2• 9 years ago

On the other hand, perhaps insects are ideal for (subconsciously) describing alien encounters. The mind has a good understanding about how insects look like (not like us), but it can barely imagine how it feels to be an insect.

omio• 9 years ago

SG-1 fixed this once...

GuiA2• 9 years ago

There is some evidence that seems to indicate that the humans have an evolved "built in" reaction to snake/snake like patterns:

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/cd/12_1/Ohman.c...

As reptiles, snakes may have signified deadly threats in the environment of early mammals. We review findings suggesting that snakes remain special stimuli for humans. Intense snake fear is prevalent in both humans and other primates. Humans and monkeys learn snake fear more easily than fear of most other stimuli through direct or vicarious conditioning. Neither the elicitation nor the conditioning of snake fear in humans requires that snakes be consciously perceived; rather, both processes can occur with masked stimuli. Humans tend to perceive illusory correlations between snakes and aversive stimuli, and their attention is automatically captured by snakes in complex visual displays. Together, these and other findings delineate an evolved fear module in the brain. This module is selectively and automatically activated by once-threatening stimuli, is relatively encapsulated from cognition, and derives from specialized neural circuitry.

This makes sense, as humans have evolved along venomous snakes for presumably a very long time.

Is it possible that when drug users of a wide variety of backgrounds report similar hallucinations (here insects), it taps into similar mechanisms, activating neural pathways that deal with the recognition of insects?

lukeholder• 9 years ago

Interesting that Satan is described as a "serpent" in the Old Testament/Garden of Eden story.

endianswap• 9 years ago

I know this is off topic, but Satan didn't exist when the OT was written, by the way.

http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/bib...

MickyTheMouse• 9 years ago

I think we are onto something here.

riffraff• 9 years ago

I might be wrong, but AFAIK the old testament Eden story features the serpent, but has no mention of Satan.

The identification of Satan with the serpent is a Christian and Islamic thing.

j_s• 9 years ago

The verse most specific to a "built in" reaction to snake/snake like patterns (per OP) is Genesis 3:15:

"I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspringe and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel." (ESV)

cnp• 9 years ago

This response is a _very_ long way from the very real and extremely alien experience.

snarfy• 9 years ago

Supposedly it's the same reason cats hiss and put their ears back - to mimic a snake.

anamoulous• 9 years ago

One day when I was a teenager I was in the backyard and stepped off the sidewalk and onto the grass like I had done a hundred times before. After taking a couple of steps I froze with an uncomfortable feeling and turned around to see that I had stepped over a very large cottonmouth viper. There wasn't any standing water near the house so I guess it had gotten lost or was sick and wandering. I've always remembered how seemingly automatic my reaction was, like I was controlled by some other thing.

FWIW I've always hated snakes.

saywatnow3• 9 years ago

This makes sense, as humans have co-evolved along venomous snakes for presumably a very long time.

I always find appeals to evolution for phenomena like this a bit weak. In the Darwinian sense, this response would have to be a random mutation that is environmentally selected for. Not a biologist, but that seems a very high-order function to be subject to random mutations.

RandomInteger4• 9 years ago

I don't think you understand evolution. Evolution is not just random mutations.

GuiA2• 9 years ago

The "co-evolved" was a mistake on my part, thanks for pointing it out. Removed for clarity.

abecedarius5• 9 years ago

That's a general argument against any complex adaptation. Here's some experimental evidence I found on a quick search: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... (I only skimmed this paper.)

always_good• 9 years ago

Interesting.

On larger doses of acid where I'm suffering immense mental agitation, the common visions are spirals, coils, and snakes.

In particular, a snake with no head, but rather attached to itself to form a hula hoop. Trying to turn over, but it can't. So it's there writhing infinitely.

The futility of it is a good representation of the abject overstimulation I'm feeling in my head. And, of course, a nice feeling of terror to go along with it.

Whenever snakey things are on the mind, I know that it was a bigger dose than I intended, and I'll soon be holding on to a panicking brain.

madaxe_again2• 9 years ago

I wonder if the ororobous imagery has an origin in this variety of experience...

NobleLie2• 9 years ago

Look into Ouroborous, Jungian Archetypes, and Kekules notes on his dreams.

Crazy world we live in...

KirinDave• 9 years ago

As a 12 year old I lived on a ranch that had not been fully purged of rattlesnakes (in central California, if your property has water near it and not too many roads, you probably have a few rattlesnakes).

My most terrifying experience was going into the horse barn to grab a lead rope coiled up on top of a bale of hay and not seeing the juvenile rattlesnake coiled inside the lead rope.

I grabbed it and the lead and by pure luck I had it right behind the head. It was rattling and writhing and trying to get a bite on me. No one was home, and I had no idea what to do. I have no recollection of anything other than holding the snake in a panic, but my parents found me holding an exhausted snake trembling violently, it was at least an hour after I had picked it up.

It stands out as a totally singular experience in my life, nothing ANY degree of chemical stimulation has ever replicated. My fear was so intense I basically blacked out in place with my arm locked rigid for an hour.

pault3• 9 years ago

I've had similar experiences while rock climbing. It's totally irrational and you have no control over it. It's really fascinating but only in retrospect. :)

madaxe_again2• 9 years ago

Sagan's "The dragons of Eden" is almost entirely on the topic of primal snake fear, and the resultant hypothetical origins of dragon myths - it's a neat read.

enimodas• 9 years ago

I always thought the same was true for spiders. Snakes don't do anything for me, maybe because they look too much like earthworms, but the distinct shape of some spiders gives me an instinctual reaction.

GordonS3• 9 years ago

I'm the same, snakes don't bother me at all, but spiders... well, I'm slightly ashamed to say I am terrified of spiders. I know it's completely irrational, but I can't even go near little ones.

chestervonwinch• 9 years ago

Same. Don't get me wrong, I would freeze if I came across a dangerous snake in my path, but spiders, for me, produce a visceral disgust and freight. However, the feelings have lessened a bit since moving to Florida where these guys [1] took up ownership of my back porch for a while.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_silk_orb-weaver

sokoloff• 9 years ago

Cats display what appears to be an instinctual (and often hilarious) fear of some snake-shaped objects, like cucumbers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNycdfFEgBc

Anthony-G• 9 years ago

As a cat owner, I recently heard about this phenomenon and looked it up. Many of the Quora answers [1] seem to concur that cats would be startled by the sudden appearance of any novel/unusual object in their vicinity.

1: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-cats-afraid-of-cucumbers-1

justatdotin2• 9 years ago

straya represent: walking home one night at about the 8th hr (so definitely coming down). It had rained so much the path was covered in water, and the frogs were out making a racket. There was a pinch on my heel, and I thought I felt a yabby grabbing hold of me. I shook my leg to shake it off, and looked back to find someone long and snakey hanging off my heel - obviously a harmless treesnake hunting the frogs. My mindstate immediately leapt up a level, and the path was writhing with snakes the whole way home.

nhaliday• 9 years ago

I have no idea what a DMT trip is actually like but I liked the depiction in Enter the Void: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCIe9gh84NE.

nol13• 9 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFCvkkDSfIU&t=8m5s

^My favorite way I've seen it described, and also a really cool video even without the subtext. (but ya this is one rabbit hole that I've yet to travel down. guess i took the blue pill, but more pills just seemed unnecessary at the time)

Alex39172• 9 years ago

This video is a better depiction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpCqOPFG6V4&list=FLugyqeLh8e...

That's not to say it's more 'accurate' than the other, but rather I think it more fully captures the impossibility of the experience.

atom-morgan2• 9 years ago

Thank you for introducing me to a great channel.

colordrops7• 9 years ago

This scene from Renegade recreating an ayahuasca trip is amazing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxtkoE-HV-k

Shalhoub• 9 years ago

The problem is - some people never come back from their ayahuasca trip.

https://youtu.be/uzpey20hQwE

byuu3• 9 years ago

Just a fair warning, I've never once seen a depiction of the effects of any kind of psychedelic drug that matched the effects I've personally experienced. And I've tried quite a few of them.

A lot of the experience is the head space and body load, which you're just never going to get from way over the top visual approximations. If you haven't experienced those, you aren't going to be able to imagine them very accurately.

The actual hallucinations are often much more subtle, but it's the headspace that makes them seem more significant. For instance, the most psilocybin does (for me) is cause text on a screen to wiggle around by a few pixels, and things to kind of zoom in and out by maybe 1% of their actual size, and colors on pictures to kind of bleed around by a few pixels if you stare at it long enough.

Now granted, I have not tried dimethyltryptamine. I don't have the courage for that one yet :P

atom-morgan2• 9 years ago

For instance, the most psilocybin does (for me) is cause text on a screen to wiggle around by a few pixels

Take more. I've been sitting in my living room literally holding my eyelids open seeing a completely different world. I agree 100% about the visual depictions though. Never gets close.

justatdotin2• 9 years ago

the visuals in Enter the Void _understate_ those offered by dmt

CuriouslyC4• 9 years ago

The thing about hallucinogens is that they really change how you think. The visual changes are such a small part of the experience, compared with the complete transformation of your consciousness. DMT itself is particularly potent in this regard, it basically completely strips away your sense of self.

I highly recommend a heavy dose of ayahuasca at least once in your life. It is pretty much guaranteed to radically change your perspective on a lot of things.

rubicon33• 9 years ago

Here's a fun question...

If it has a such a profound change in consciousness, would it be easy for a non-DMT user to identify someone who has used DMT, albeit with some training?

krylon3• 9 years ago

That movie was very exhausting to watch, but it was well worth it!

anigbrowl7• 9 years ago

Visually it's not dissimilar. But this is kinda like the difference between looking at a postcard and actually going somewhere.

3131s• 9 years ago

Datura users are also commonly reported by observers to act out hallucinations involving insects. While the user often recalls an entirely different mental experience, it's common for their physical selves to be seen picking at imaginary bugs on the floor in a primal manner (among other reflexive actions, such as convincingly smoking imaginary cigarettes).

It is interesting and darkly humorous (keep in mind that datura is very dangerous) to read the Erowid trip reports for datura. Quite a few of them are along the lines of "I took datura, I had vivid hallucinations for three days with no relation to reality, and then I woke up naked in a hospital / jail".

https://erowid.org/experiences/subs/exp_Datura.shtml

byuu3• 9 years ago

It's not just Datura, either. Belladonna/Nightshade and anti-histamines like Benadryl/diphenhydramine/dimenhydrinate do the exact same things: you see lots of bugs, hear and talk to people who aren't there, smokers tend to smoke imaginary cigarettes, your body feels very heavy, and it screws with your vision.

The most horrifying aspect of the whole experience is that, no matter how much you warn yourself going in, you'll always believe you're completely sober and rational during the experience. It's not until after it wears off completely that you were basically completely schizophrenic during the experience.

Just for anyone thinking this sounds interesting ... even for an entomologist, there is not one single microscopic ounce of euphoria from this experience. Don't try it. There's a reason those who do never try it a second time.

Itsdijital• 9 years ago

A long time ago I had an experience not with datura, but a close relative - benedryl (both are dissociatives).

Came home after rolling on ecstasy all night and wanted to go to bed. It's not that easy though after taking a bunch of stimulants. So I took a little bit of a lot of benedryl (iirc ~200mg or 8 pills). Ripped my bong for a bit and felt nice and chilled out. About 30 minutes later though, things started to get weird. Was taking a piss and all these really vivid tears started appearing, like someone ripping the movie screen of my vision with intense psychedelic swirls and stuff behind it. These weren't like lsd or mushroom hallucinations, they were far more real and vivid. It wasn't anything overwhelming though, just small little pockets here and there.

I went back to my room, and holy shit, there were thousands of flies pouring out of my blinds. Like this amorphous mass of flies dripping from between the slats. All the other hallucinations were gone. It was just the flies, and I cannot stress enough how real it was. I went up to it and could get in real close and see all their little wings and glittery eyes. I got in bed and now there were hundreds of spiders crawling on my computer chair. I just laid in bed watching in awe of how real it looked. Then huge spiders started crawling on my ceiling, like the ones from jumanji. It was unsettling, but I was oddly sober (mentally) and knew how common reports of insects and dissociatives were. Except for the psychedelic rips, there were no other hallucinations besides the bugs. I don't even have a fear of spiders or bugs, and always assumed that was the underlying cause.

nv-vn• 9 years ago

Isn't it technically the deliriant effect that causes these hallucinations (and not the dissociative effect)?

saganus• 9 years ago

I read somewhere (erowid perhaps?) that a dissociatives are very dangerous precisely because it's very hard to tell which things are real.and which aren't so people get hurt trying to escape from these very real images.

Scary as fuck...

krylon3• 9 years ago

When I was 17, I had a cold and the doctor prescribed some homeopathic remedy containing Atropine. Now, the whole point of homeopathy, of course, is to dilute any ingredients to the point where you are lucky to find even a single molecule of it in a given pill. (In my defense, I did not know anything about medicine back then.)

But I think I must have gotten a package from a batch where they forgot a couple of dilution steps or something. Also I may have misread the instructions. Anyway, it took me about six days to go through the pills, and during that whole time, I could not help but grin almost the entire time. Also, two or three times, I very clearly heard someone talking to me who was not there. I did recognize the voices, they belonged to people I knew. Then again, I looked around, did not see the person and figured that it must have been in my head, which apparently people hallucinating from Atropine are rather incapable of.

OTOH, I had none of the side effects Atropine has according to Wikipedia, so who knows what was going on with me back then. But I understood something was off, and the only thing that had changed from the weeks before were those homeopathic pills. (Just to be clear, all in all the experience was pleasant.)

simonh2• 9 years ago

There's bee a bit of fuss over here in the UK recently about homeopathic medicines, which are supposed to be ridiculously over-diluted, containing dangerous amounts of various substances.

The basic idea that tiny amounts of substances that harm you in various ways might benefit you in a related way is magical thinking. But when you can't rely on the 'tiny amounts' part, you're in pretty nasty territory.

calibas• 9 years ago

This needs to be said over and over again. There's two different species of plants commonly known as Datura: Jimsonweed, Datura stramonium, and Sacred Thronapple, Datura wrightii. It's Datura wrightii that the Native Americans used as a hallucinogen, while Datura stramonium seems to have only been used as medicine or poison.

People don't bother making this important distinction anymore and end up foolishly taking the more common D. stramonium. This is probably why Datura has become so infamous, not that D. wrightii is "safe", but it certainly appears to be safer than D. stramonium.

From the Native American Ethnobotany Database:

Datura wrightii: http://naeb.brit.org/uses/species/1244/

Datura stramonium: http://naeb.brit.org/uses/species/1243/

ge962• 9 years ago

wow this website is like a trip in time back to the 90's like that internet explorer website that depicts Bill Gates as a devil hahaha

ge962• 9 years ago

not related, it annoys me that hackernews.com is not part of this site (I don't think so) it reminds me of that guy that wouldn't let go of dropbox.com and put ads on it... again did not research... but I'd think that url redirects here. Oh well. Pretty sweet that ycombinator seeds startups... was not aware, just came here for tech/code stuff.

toruk_makto• 9 years ago

this explains mr. mime in my visuals

boatroad• 9 years ago

I haven't met anyone who described insects. Most of the entities experienced seem to be abstract, with the possibility of focusing it into an object but not a negative one. DMT seems to be generally a positive euphoric experience filled with geometric shapes of love. Although a mild dose can be unpleasant.

What I've experience sometimes looked like UFOs, that when you focused on them would burst into the sky far away. Like a ship taking off in a rapid dimensional-type shift. Similar to the graphics in the movie Dr. Strange.

The presence is more like feeling the wind, and getting a sense that the wind itself is saying hello and making fun of you.

dboreham• 9 years ago

Hmm...I've never tried psychoactive drugs but way back when I worked on hardware I was debugging a board in a lab that had poor ventilation, cleaning flux off it with Freon when I saw a little green Dragon rise out of the green solder resist film and breathe the tiniest lick of fire at me.

swayvil2• 9 years ago

Maybe they visit a parallel universe where they meet insects.

colordrops7• 9 years ago

Funny how most in this thread are unwilling to interpret the experience at face value, probably because of certain taboos among scientific and technically minded types.

JabavuAdams3• 9 years ago

Maybe people here have more knowledge of neuroscience, and physics, than the general population?

Knowledge brings biases, of course. But those biases aren't necessarily wrong.

You have a blind-spot (at least one) on each retina that you never see. Does this mean that there is a secret hole in reality, just out of sight, that science won't accept? Or does it mean that there's an area on your retina with no visual sensors, and that the brain fills in the gaps?

swayvil2• 9 years ago

I doubt it's a conscious thing. Some kind of explaining reflex.

6stringmerc• 9 years ago

Considering what Humans understand about time and space - at least for now - travel between X & Y probably is going to take a different form than filling up rockets or using nuclear power to slog through the ether to...wherever...

anigbrowl7• 9 years ago

I believe this world is basically a playpen in a universe having 5 spatial dimensions.

I've had a very interesting side-effect immediately after coming back from a DMT trip of being able to see around things. Like you look at a box on the table in front of you and you can see the side facing away from you. Faded gradually after 5 minutes. This seems like extremely fruitful territory for trying with ESP test cards, MRI imaging and more.

ajkjk• 9 years ago

Why would you believe that?

colordrops7• 9 years ago

Why not?

anigbrowl7• 9 years ago

Because that's my experience. I investigate theoretical models but I don't have the math skills to develop the idea more rigorously at present.

abecedarius5• 9 years ago

"A few experimental attempts have been made to elicit parapsychological phenomena through the controlled administration of LSD-type substances... None of them produced statistically significant results" http://stanleykrippner.weebly.com/lsd-and-parapsychological-...

anigbrowl7• 9 years ago

Not surprising. I've only had this experience with DMT and am skeptical that it's perceptual rather than imaginary, but a) I couldn't think of a better way to describe it and b) it was really hard to ignore.

It's not something I've ever seen referred to in other people's reports, though I don't really keep up with research in this area. I have no hesitation in saying that DMT fundamentally altered my worldview though.

tudorw• 9 years ago

"CYP2D6 is therefore a relatively highly specific, high-affinity, high-capacity 5-methoxyindolethylamine O-demethylase. Polymorphic cytochrome CYP2D6 may therefore exert an influence on mood and behavior by the O-demethylation of these 5-methoxyindolethylamines found in the brain and pineal gland."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12777961

junkyarddog• 9 years ago

Six to seven foot tall praying mantis like entities are a common element in many alien abduction accounts. They're typically in the background, silently watching the proceedings while letting the little greys carry out the examinations.

In "DMT: The Spirit Molecule" author Rick Strassman theorises that DMT enables the brain to tune in to other parallel realities beyond "channel-normal". If the interdimensional hypothesis for alien abductions is correct, perhaps DMT allows one to occasionally tune into the source of this mysterious phenomenon.

benevol2• 9 years ago

I've seen the roots of a tree (at at distance of about 300 feet) through the ground, while on LSD (about 500ug). I'm sure those really were the roots, because the visible part of the tree (the trunk and the roots that came up above ground again at a few spots) matched completely with roots in the ground I was seeing. The image was stable and lasted for about 45 seconds. Something (not like an external voice, more like an internal voice/thought/intuition told me "yes, of course, you just need to tune into the frequency of the thing you want to see"). As soon as I tried thinking/questioning, the view vanished, and I guess it was because of the ego starting to interfere.

Conclusion: We still have no clue what reality really holds and how to use our brain in order to access our real potential. Interesting times to come, stay tuned.

JabavuAdams3• 9 years ago

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can fill-out missing parts of images that fit plausibly into the existing scene. These are computer programs that are much less complicated than our brains.

So, you have one interpretation, but there's no reason to think it's more likely than the fact that your brain is really good at filling in missing details.

benevol2• 9 years ago

That was my first thought, too. But there are other elements which are relevant:

I could literally walk my eyes along the roots, up and down, they were static and didn't move an inch.

And during an earlier experience (and to a good extent during the 2-3 following days), using about 150ug only, I felt something like a strong connection with the tree I was standing in front of. It was like we were communicating (for as long as I wanted), but not like an exchange of sentences, rather like a constant bi-directional stream of information, or better: a "mutual understanding without speaking/thinking".

This "shared state of being/feeling" was extended to the roots of the tree: I could feel their presence in the ground (but not see them yet, which changed later, as stated above). And I had that feeling whenever I passed a tree during the 2-3 following days.

There is definitely a lot going on (or possible) between humans and other forms of life, which we are currently missing. And I'm sure our spiritual dimension is definitely part of the mix. So if you're into meditation, keep it up.

pseud0r• 9 years ago

I've had similar experiences, but I don't think they're anything other than internally generated by the brain, especially since I've also been able to morph what I've seen into other objects at will.

I've also been able to see objects in more detail on LSD, like I was wearing extra glasses or something, but again I suspect the extra details were just created by my visual system, though it would be interesting if there were more scientific studies of this stuff.

collyw2• 9 years ago

I do a few outdoor sports and I have noticed that when I get into a particularly bad scenario time seems to slow down. Actually I am not sure that it does, but the adrenaline seems to turn off the filtering so I remember it in slow motion and in a lot more detail.

nsxwolf• 9 years ago

What if it's real? What if the DMT is disabling some kind of filter that normally keeps this reality hidden?

scrollaway• 9 years ago

Occam's razor says no.

axefrog• 9 years ago

Occam's razor is a guideline, not an immutable law.

hanibash• 9 years ago

My latest working theory for why DMT elicits similar experiences across different users was actually inspired by Google's "Deep Dream" art: https://research.googleblog.com/2015/06/inceptionism-going-d...

"We know that after training, each layer progressively extracts higher and higher-level features of the image... The final few layers assemble those into complete interpretations—these neurons activate in response to very complex things such as entire buildings or trees."

I'm not an expert, but from the little I know of neuroscience, the human brain also has higher level interpreters inside of it. It is why, for example, that pareidolia (seeing faces in objects) is a thing (https://www.reddit.com/r/Pareidolia/).

"So here’s one surprise: neural networks that were trained to discriminate between different kinds of images have quite a bit of the information needed to generate images too"

"One way to visualize what goes on is to turn the network upside down and ask it to enhance an input image in such a way as to elicit a particular interpretation"

So I believe that what DMT is doing is triggering our high level interpreters to make sense of thoughts and emotions that we have. We do the same thing when we dream, where we interpret an event of the day in a very vivid, novel fashion, sometimes even creating story arcs around it.

RobertoG• 9 years ago

"We do the same thing when we dream [..]"

I think you don't go far enough: We do the same thing when we are awake, too.

I tend to agree with your interpretation. This plays good also with the other post in the first page about the possibility of visual grammars ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13615273 ). If you play with your grammar you get strange languages.

pault3• 9 years ago

I had the same thought when I first saw deep dream (which look exactly like drug hallucinations) and read the explanation behind it. That's when I first had my "oh shit" moment, realizing that DNN researchers really are onto something. I started taking discussions about AI a lot more seriously after that.

egypturnash• 9 years ago

Ever since Deep Dream came out, I have occasionally found myself exhausted enough to start hallucinating eyes/insects/tentacles/etc in anything I look at hastily. And when this happens, it's an immense comfort to be able to say "oh hey I'm just tired and my brain is running its own Deep Dream".

wyck• 9 years ago

Is there a theory that the DMT "beings" are actually your bodies cells and proteins visualised and communicating as different entities?

The whole "You should not be down here, but hello" at a very very self macro level? Maybe even at the atomic level?

waqas-• 9 years ago

"You should not be down here, but hello"

this line sent shudders down my spine. does this happen to everyone?

coldtea• 9 years ago

Because they read about others seeing them, so they already have an expectation of what to see in their minds.

BrailleHunting• 9 years ago

This is either a joke or a bunch of conspiracy theorists of the trippy-dippy sort.

Why Do DMT Users See Insects from a Parallel Universe?

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