13 ms·

A DMT trip 'feels like dying' – and scientists now agree

213 points by jeffwass 8y ago

mirimir 8y ago
The key distinction here is between dying and all of the unpleasant stuff that normally comes with it. I've experienced loss of body awareness with LSD, psilocybin and DMT. But what didn't come with it was pain, cardiopulmonary stress, cramping, and so on. So it was easy to relax, and let go of body and consciousness. With just naked virtual awareness left. So anyway, I can imagine that a pleasant death from opioid or barbiturate overdose might be comparable. Or maybe breathing helium, where there's no overt respiratory feedback. Or maybe hypothermia, although in my experience that involved too much twitching around.
jetrink 8y ago
The subhead is a much better title: "A new scientific study suggests strong similarities between near death experiences and [DMT]"
r00fus 8y ago
I wonder if "beta thanatine" from Altered Carbon was based on DMT...
kr3wn 8y ago
I died in a dream. Does that count?
tom_ 8y ago
If it's near death experiences you want, no need to push the boat out - just skip dinner, go to the pub, drink 7 pints of beer, have a kebab (you'll probably be hungry by then), go home, drink the 2 bottles of beer you found in the fridge, that and eat the pork pie, then sleep for 6 hours, then wake up.
- imesh 8y ago
  FWIW DMT is far more pleasant and far less of a hangover than the experience you're describing.
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- peatmoss 8y ago
  The article says the administered dose is well short of toxic and merely simulates a near death experience. People can and frequently do experience actual actual death while engaging in alchoholic revelry. I’m not opposed to drinking, but the risks of a controlled study described in the article don’t seem remotely comparable to an evening out on the town. If I had a dollar for every person who died from falling over or passing out and drowning in their own vomit due to alcohol, I’m pretty sure I could afford all the South America shamen-led ayahuasca trips I wanted.(1) (1) EDIT: which is admittedly somewhere between zero and one.
  - tom_ 8y ago
    Hash tag british humour. But wait. Is it even humour at all?! :O - well now, isn't that always the question.
    - peatmoss 8y ago
      Every comedian needs a straight man as a foil, no? ;-)
- swingline-747 8y ago
  So most Thursdays and a few Sundays then.
- drmpeg 8y ago
  I'm not sure what British pork pie is like, but one of my ex girlfriends used to make pork pies. They were delicious, but as dense as neutronium and difficult to digest even under ideal conditions.
  - tom_ 8y ago
    Yes, quite so, and British pork pies are exactly the same. Very nice - tasty pig meat, tasty jelly, and a tasty lard casing :D - but extremely dense. Normally you'd have a small slice, appreciate it for what it is, then put it back in the fridge and ignore it until at least the next day. Normal rules do not apply when shitfaced, however, and it turns out you'll just quite happily pop half a kilo of this stuff into your piehole without even thinking. Fast forward 8-12 hours, and... well, you can guess the rest. It is the devil's own food, and it probably ought to be banned. How are folk supposed to manage, if after drinking a mere 7-10 pints of beer it proves so irresistible?
Alex3917 8y ago
If anyone is in NYC this week, this conference on DMT has a ridiculously stacked speaker list: https://events.theassemblage.com/dmtdialogues https://events.theassemblage.com/dmtdialogues
- neom 8y ago
  A HN friend and I are going to this. Email in bio if anyone attending is interested in meeting up.
  - ada1981 8y ago
    I’m looking into it for at least part of the day.
  - codetrotter 8y ago
    I don’t live in the US so I don’t have the opportunity to meet up with you guys, but I just wanted to say that your mention of “a HN friend” piqued my interest. Is that to say you guys met through HN? Does that happen often, that people meet through HN?
    - kaielvin 8y ago
      Most likely a friend who is also a HN user. But who knows — he is calling for people to meet up after all.
- tomjakubowski 8y ago
  If they had Cliff Pickover I would consider making the trip from LA.
neom 8y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17795900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17795900
api_or_ipa 8y ago
I think it's important to stress the fact that DMT does not feel like being thrown in a meat-grinder, or being impaled in a car accident, or any other grisly way to die. Really, it might be more correct to say "Death might feel like a DMT trip" because many have experienced a DMT trip, but it's not every day you get to experience death. Of course, it makes for a less interesting title.
- jdc 8y ago
  People experience death (and psychoactives) in a variety of ways, and its metaphorical usage reflects that. The meat-grinder sense maps better to stimulants (ie., caffeine, amphetamine, etc) whereas the exhausting, perhaps harrowing and enlightening sense of death is what we tend to experience with the psychedelics.
  - browsercoin 8y ago
    back in the day I experimented with psilocybin mushrooms and experienced what is called 'ego death'. basically, you lose a sense of self and identity. You are literally a blank slate. It was a surreal experience and I felt panicky like 'oh shit i think im dead but im still concious'. Before I reached this state I was seeing math formulas everywhere. Basically when my internal thoughts stopped, that is I was experiencing reality in the rawest form, the only truth we have in the universe is math, in all shapes and forms, we live inside the 'body of god' that is math, but of course, so extremely complex to express in our 3rd dimensional world.
    - mirimir 8y ago
      Yeah, that can be a frightening state. And yet, it was my favorite part, during the peak of the peak. To some degree, the rest of the trip was just something to be endured. Although I eventually learned to go dancing or bike riding or whatever. The absolute worst combination is marijuana on the tail of an LSD peak. Your short term memory drops to about 100 msec. I spent a few hours, decades ago, reminding a friend who they were, and that everything would be OK in a few hours. And it was hard work, because I could barely remember who I was, and who they were ;) edit: clarity
breatheoften 8y ago
I just associate DMT with nausea — and have no desire to repeat that pain. I did an ayuasca ceremony and only managed to drink one dose (you are encouraged to drink a lot more) — but my body felt so awful and all the evidence suggested the pretty obvious cause that there was no part of me that wanted to drink more and I felt completely fine with my decision to stop.
- dkersten 8y ago
  ayuasca and smoked DMT are too very different experiences.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Yes. And the article didn't make that clear enough. The biological lifetime of DMT is very short, because there are enzymes (monoamine oxidase aka MAO) in many tissues. So the effects last 15-30 minutes. But ayahuasca includes MAO inhibitors, so the effects can last for many hours. And it's mainly the MAO inhibitors that make users feel ill.
    - simonsaidit 8y ago
      Changa includes rima (hamalas from b.capii) and lasts around an hour if good. And No nausia or effect from food.
      - mirimir 8y ago
        Hey, thanks for that! I used to have a book about ayahusca-like formulations, using plants from various continents. But I've forgotten the name. Basically, many plants contain DMT, and many others contain MAO inhibitors. Also, I believe that one can combine some MAO inhibiting antidepressants, such as selegiline, with DMT.
- sutterbomb 8y ago
  Did you not expect that going in? Or it was worse than anticipated?
jtmcmc 8y ago
I feel at some point we changed what an NDE was really categorized as. When Rick Strassman did his research in the 90's and wrote DMT the spirit molecule he stated that classical NDEs were distinct from alien encounters and that in his trials alien encounters were far more common than NDE. Now it seems that alien encounters are also considered NDEs.
ggm 8y ago
Can anyone give a reason in darwinian terms, for why brains would evolve a feeling of detachment and contentment near death? I can't project a selfish-gene reason. Maybe, if you hypothesise its in the 'I die, so others live' space, its like altruistic behaviour and favours the group genome, not the individual
- mjg59 8y ago
  Unless it has an impact on your ability to reproduce, there's no reason at all. Lots of biology is just a consequence of implementation details.
  - Vadoff 8y ago
    That's not entirely true. If it impacts your direct descendents or even distant relatives, there'll still be an impact assuming you share the genes in question.
    - bigiain 8y ago
      If you consider taking a role of "grandparenting" to be a potentially positive role in "your ability to reproduce", then both you and mjg59 are kind of agreeing there.
      - d33 8y ago
        You don't have to copulate in order to express "your ability to reproduce". Keep in mind that your family also has your genes so if you just provide resources for them to reproduce, a part of you reproduces as well. This could be a mechanism to combat fear of death, which perhaps was making people less likely to have sex?
- drak0n1c 8y ago
  Sometimes there is no reason. That might just be symptoms of gradual neuronal failure. It’s unlikely that the sensation of dying significantly increases or decreases the likelihood of passing on one’s lineage, except maybe imparting a peaceful impression on family around you.
mattdeboard 8y ago
Can we hear this "specially commissioned ambient soundtrack" somewhere?
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jacobush 8y ago
Am I the only one who read this as "A trip to the DMV feels like dying - and scientists now agree" ?
- shanusmagnus 8y ago
  Nope. The world briefly made sense, and now it doesn't again.
- pluma 8y ago
  Being neither an experienced drug user nor American, I misread that similarly (Department of Motor Transport?) before remembering that DMT is a drug because I saw it in the title of a documentary on Netflix. I don't know if my life has just been too sheltered, or not sheltered enough, because I wouldn't even know where to begin if I wanted to buy anything not available over the counter.
JohnBooty 8y ago
“My body just didn’t seem relevant anymore," says Iona. "And I felt like I arrived in some consciousness soup which seemed like a different realm to the one I ordinarily inhabit – even in dreams. It just seemed like everything was rotating and swirling and spiralling. It didn’t seem like there were normal space-time proportions going on.” I'm not exactly sure how close I came to dying, but I had the exact opposite experience in the ER one night. I had a bout of acute pericarditis, a swelling of the sac that protects the heart, essentially preventing it from beating. Usually it's a milder chronic condition but for whatever reason (freak infection?) I had an intense acute attack one night. It presented almost exactly like a heart attack which is why I rushed to the ER. We got there just in time. My lips were turning blue and I was drenched in sweat, semiconscious as I was wheeled back to the ER. Heart rate plummeting, etc. So anyway I was hyper attuned to my body as the doctors worked on me. I was terrified and didn't want to die so for a lack of any other options whatsoever in my barely conscious state I became profoundly aware of my breathing. I could feel that I perhaps going to die, and didn't want that to happen, so I just focused on being the best damn breather the world had ever seen. I figured whatever the hell was happening...well, I was alive as long as I was breathing, and the more oxygen I could suck into my body the better. I have never, ever felt more connected to my body than in those moments. Think about times you've been asked to focus on your breathing during yoga, meditation, etc. Like that, except times ten or twenty or a billion or something. After some completely amorphous amount of time during which they worked feverishly, the doctors gave me a jab of atropine and I was more or less instantly OK, hilariously enough.
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- Stratoscope 8y ago
  Mobile-readable quote: > “My body just didn’t seem relevant anymore," says Iona. "And I felt like I arrived in some consciousness soup which seemed like a different realm to the one I ordinarily inhabit – even in dreams. It just seemed like everything was rotating and swirling and spiralling. It didn’t seem like there were normal space-time proportions going on.”
bongo662 8y ago
Ive done DMT probably 10-15 times in my life so far but quit all recreational drugs ~3 years ago. My last trip being the most intense; me and a friend used a dabbing rig and poured about a gram of dmt onto the heated metal nail - for 20 minutes but what seemed like eternity I Observed the birth, life, and death of myself multiple times over until I finally came back down to the ‘real world’.
- dustingetz 8y ago
  did you regret that last one? how much of a DMT trip can you actually remember?
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  - akvadrako 8y ago
    In general it doesn't seem like memory is affected; the main difficulty is making sense of what you experienced.
    - KennyCason 8y ago
      This. I spent a solid year reflecting and trying to understand everything that happened during my first LSD experience. The whole thing simply transcends anything you have ever experienced. When you “see” a strange loop involving your mind creating the physical world as you know it, and at the same time realizing the physical world enables your mind, it can take a long time to unpack. Sure when I’m here, we say that the mind is just a construct within he physical world, that just happens to be modeling the physical world. But that Doesn’t make it any less of a significant experience. It was like seeing the concept of ying-yang (duality and mutual dependence) reflected onto mind-body problem, and everything else. Oh great times when you get bored of all the analytical logic problems of the everyday world. :)
noahdesu 8y ago
One thing people talk about is the short-lived effects of DMT, and how they would like more time in the the DMT space. But as I understand it, your body doesn't build up a resistance to it. The DMTx [0] project is seeking to exploit this property and created extended-state DMT experiences using some basic medical techniques. Also, they are looking for volunteers. [0]: https://www.dmtx.org https://www.dmtx.org
- md224 8y ago
  That sounds awesome. I wish I could pay to lie in a hospital bed and have a medical professional administer intravenous DMT just for a short period (at least initially). Hopefully this work will bring us closer to a world where supervised DMT voyages are available to the public.
  - nprateem 8y ago
    They're looking for volunteers in the UK for psilocybin experiments: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Volunteers%20sought%20to%20take%20%27magic%20mushrooms%27%20ft https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Volunteers%20sought%20...
  - simonsaidit 8y ago
    Make your own changa its quite easy and pure dmt you dont need to inject... too much you wont Remember What happend anyway.
- akvadrako 8y ago
  Why can't they just use an intravenous drip?
  - filoeleven 8y ago
    IV drip doesn’t have the amount of fine regulation and monitoring necessary to keep someone in the DMT state. Last I heard they were planning to get a dialysis machine to do it.
  - noahdesu 8y ago
erikpukinskis 8y ago
> “There is nothing here to begin to enable us to propose that on DMT, you literally transcend the laws of this universe and do actually go to another world,” he says. This is faulty thinking. An afterlife doesn’t presuppose a violation of natural laws, or a separate world. It just means you continue living in a different form. The only thing that would be required for that is a causal relationship (yet to be observed in science) between your dying mind and some other living structure. The causal eelationship needn’t even be mind-out. If your mind is caused by the enduring structure and you experience its presence at death, that would be physically indistinguishable from you becoming that thing. Given that we continue to discover entirely new structures in both the biological world and our own bodies, which were hiding in plain sight, I don’t find this implausible. That’s not to mention psychoaocial structures which science hardly can model, and to which our individual minds are very tightly coupled.
- spraak 8y ago
  Thanks for sharing that, it really helped me unlock some mental pathways for me.
- drakonka 8y ago
  Thank you for sharing. I think too often we assume the concept of an "afterlife" implies some kind of supernatural or religious phenomenon. Since we don't have proof of it I can't say I definitely believe such a thing exists, but I certainly believe it's possible. If there is an "afterlife" I believe it fits into our natural laws and can be explained and observed scientifically - we just haven't discovered all of the information we need yet.
  - filoeleven 8y ago
    It’s tricky, because the kinds of natural laws that are necessary for the existence of an afterlife are the same kinds of natural laws that invalidate the principle of physicalism or materialism, which is the consensus view of the scientific establishment today. So if you decide to investigate something easier to test for than “the afterlife” which could also plausibly exist with these expanded natural laws—like remote viewing, or the effects that consciousness has on physical systems—your research will be generally dismissed as quackery. Not many folks will try to replicate your results, or even spend the effort to examine them deeply for flaws, because the assumption is “we already know that cannot happen, so you’ve done something wrong in your setup or you’re lying.” There is plenty of evidence out there that points to something odd going on; the challenge lies in getting more skeptics to seriously evaluate it. Some HNer years ago turned me onto the book Irreducible Mind, whose last hundred pages or so is a bibliography of evidence for this kind of thing provided by people who say “I don’t believe it, but I can’t explain it.” But a lot of that evidence comes from skeptics testing exceptional individuals, and James Randi did a good job of showing how fakers can fool scientists, so I can’t really say how reliable it is other than as a jumping-off point for further study. I came across an interesting and more rigorous set of studies done recently on how consciousness can influence quantum effects. They had observers try to influence the amount of interference generated by the double-slit experiment, and have repeatedly under various conditions gotten a significant effect. Perhaps most interesting is that while all humans had an effect, the meditators reliably outperformed the non-meditators. The setup is simple enough that it’s just begging for replication. Here’s the video link for any curious folks. Skip the first 5 minutes which is just a refresher on what the double slit experiment is: https://youtu.be/nRSBaq3vAeY https://youtu.be/nRSBaq3vAeY
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bariswheel 8y ago
On the other hand, 5-Meo-DMT (5-Methoxy-N,N-Dimethyltryptamine), comes in the form of an organic lab-produced extract, or the Bufo Alvarius venom, takes it to a completely different level of non-duality and complete and utter shattering of your ego (temporarily of course, for about 20 minutes). Someone named Albert Most discovered this bizarre compound a few decades back by smoking the venom from the glands of a Sonoran Desert toad somewhere in New Mexico if I recall correctly. I haven't tried it myself but going down a rabbit hole of reports and practitioners on YouTube is in and of itself a profound trip: https://youtu.be/PQctOMSmBuk https://youtu.be/PQctOMSmBuk . EDIT: Here is the piece Vice did on Albert Most: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00jbzI4bcUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00jbzI4bcUw
- malux85 8y ago
  > Smoking venom from the glands of a Sonoran Desert Toad somewhere in New Mexico I don’t know why but I just found this hilariously funny. Suddenly my life seems very mundane.
  - arminiusreturns 8y ago
    Have you lived or been to new mexico? Mundane life is what results in actions like that. Boredom breeds strange creativity.
    - ianai 8y ago
      It seems mundane when you live in NM. But I spent a decade in LV, NV. I’m very grateful to be back in NM. This place even had a Burning Man celebration before California afaik.
      - panarky 8y ago
        Burning Man is in Nevada, 100 miles north-northeast of Reno.
    - KennyCason 8y ago
      Grew up in Arkansas, I can confirm this phenomenon.
armitron 8y ago
The feature that sets DMT apart from other psychedelics such as LSD or mushrooms is the persistent environment called "hyperspace". In short, various psychonauts over the years have discovered an environment - for lack of a better word - they named hyperspace, which consists of surprisingly similar perceived attributes _over many different observers_. Experienced LSD/mushroom users know that there is a tremendous degree of subjectivity and symbol/archetype emergence in their trips. If I only had a few words to describe the LSD/mushroom experience it would be "lack of clarity". It's as if one is looking through a scanner darkly (personal unconscious). With DMT, this is not the case. There is no perceived intermediate filter, nothing impure or fuzzy. One feels as if one is already there and directly interfacing with the space itself. Rather than exploring his own psyche, a DMT user feels like he's exploring an entirely new space. This becomes apparent even when dealing with the difficulties of trying to use shared language to describe the experience with other explorers in order to discover common attributes [1]. [1] https://wiki.dmt-nexus.me/Hyperspace_lexicon https://wiki.dmt-nexus.me/Hyperspace_lexicon
- akvadrako 8y ago
  This is often my experience too - DMT is like being in VR. The geometry is simplified - lots of smooth curves and sharp angles, mostly flat textures or gradients. And it's populated by barely intelligent entities made of the same stuff.
synecdoche 8y ago
Once when taking mushrooms I saw myself go into countless pieces in something that resembled a starburst. It was beautiful. I felt completely at ease. Then a profound realisation came to me; This is death. Then I connected the two.
simonsaidit 8y ago
It feels like having sex with the Universe. Pure dmt is more “cold” experience. With hamalas (changa/rima) its a more warm prolonged loving experience that happens more gradually Where the pure is more a fast blast into space. Its medicine and Works sonders for the mind. It saved marriges, lifes, jobs among my friends.

213 points by jeffwass 8y ago

The key distinction here is between dying and all of the unpleasant stuff that normally comes with it. I've experienced loss of body awareness with LSD, psilocybin and DMT. But what didn't come with it was pain, cardiopulmonary stress, cramping, and so on. So it was easy to relax, and let go of body and consciousness. With just naked virtual awareness left. So anyway, I can imagine that a pleasant death from opioid or barbiturate overdose might be comparable. Or maybe breathing helium, where there's no overt respiratory feedback. Or maybe hypothermia, although in my experience that involved too much twitching around.

jetrink 8y ago

The subhead is a much better title: "A new scientific study suggests strong similarities between near death experiences and [DMT]"

r00fus 8y ago

I wonder if "beta thanatine" from Altered Carbon was based on DMT...

kr3wn 8y ago

I died in a dream. Does that count?

tom_ 8y ago

If it's near death experiences you want, no need to push the boat out - just skip dinner, go to the pub, drink 7 pints of beer, have a kebab (you'll probably be hungry by then), go home, drink the 2 bottles of beer you found in the fridge, that and eat the pork pie, then sleep for 6 hours, then wake up.

imesh 8y ago
FWIW DMT is far more pleasant and far less of a hangover than the experience you're describing.
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peatmoss 8y ago
The article says the administered dose is well short of toxic and merely simulates a near death experience. People can and frequently do experience actual actual death while engaging in alchoholic revelry. I’m not opposed to drinking, but the risks of a controlled study described in the article don’t seem remotely comparable to an evening out on the town. If I had a dollar for every person who died from falling over or passing out and drowning in their own vomit due to alcohol, I’m pretty sure I could afford all the South America shamen-led ayahuasca trips I wanted.(1) (1) EDIT: which is admittedly somewhere between zero and one.
- tom_ 8y ago
  Hash tag british humour. But wait. Is it even humour at all?! :O - well now, isn't that always the question.
  - peatmoss 8y ago
    Every comedian needs a straight man as a foil, no? ;-)
swingline-747 8y ago
So most Thursdays and a few Sundays then.
drmpeg 8y ago
I'm not sure what British pork pie is like, but one of my ex girlfriends used to make pork pies. They were delicious, but as dense as neutronium and difficult to digest even under ideal conditions.
- tom_ 8y ago
  Yes, quite so, and British pork pies are exactly the same. Very nice - tasty pig meat, tasty jelly, and a tasty lard casing :D - but extremely dense. Normally you'd have a small slice, appreciate it for what it is, then put it back in the fridge and ignore it until at least the next day. Normal rules do not apply when shitfaced, however, and it turns out you'll just quite happily pop half a kilo of this stuff into your piehole without even thinking. Fast forward 8-12 hours, and... well, you can guess the rest. It is the devil's own food, and it probably ought to be banned. How are folk supposed to manage, if after drinking a mere 7-10 pints of beer it proves so irresistible?

Alex3917 8y ago

If anyone is in NYC this week, this conference on DMT has a ridiculously stacked speaker list: https://events.theassemblage.com/dmtdialogues https://events.theassemblage.com/dmtdialogues

neom 8y ago
A HN friend and I are going to this. Email in bio if anyone attending is interested in meeting up.
- ada1981 8y ago
  I’m looking into it for at least part of the day.
- codetrotter 8y ago
  I don’t live in the US so I don’t have the opportunity to meet up with you guys, but I just wanted to say that your mention of “a HN friend” piqued my interest. Is that to say you guys met through HN? Does that happen often, that people meet through HN?
  - kaielvin 8y ago
    Most likely a friend who is also a HN user. But who knows — he is calling for people to meet up after all.
tomjakubowski 8y ago
If they had Cliff Pickover I would consider making the trip from LA.

neom 8y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17795900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17795900

api_or_ipa 8y ago

I think it's important to stress the fact that DMT does not feel like being thrown in a meat-grinder, or being impaled in a car accident, or any other grisly way to die. Really, it might be more correct to say "Death might feel like a DMT trip" because many have experienced a DMT trip, but it's not every day you get to experience death. Of course, it makes for a less interesting title.

jdc 8y ago
People experience death (and psychoactives) in a variety of ways, and its metaphorical usage reflects that. The meat-grinder sense maps better to stimulants (ie., caffeine, amphetamine, etc) whereas the exhausting, perhaps harrowing and enlightening sense of death is what we tend to experience with the psychedelics.
- browsercoin 8y ago
  back in the day I experimented with psilocybin mushrooms and experienced what is called 'ego death'. basically, you lose a sense of self and identity. You are literally a blank slate. It was a surreal experience and I felt panicky like 'oh shit i think im dead but im still concious'. Before I reached this state I was seeing math formulas everywhere. Basically when my internal thoughts stopped, that is I was experiencing reality in the rawest form, the only truth we have in the universe is math, in all shapes and forms, we live inside the 'body of god' that is math, but of course, so extremely complex to express in our 3rd dimensional world.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Yeah, that can be a frightening state. And yet, it was my favorite part, during the peak of the peak. To some degree, the rest of the trip was just something to be endured. Although I eventually learned to go dancing or bike riding or whatever. The absolute worst combination is marijuana on the tail of an LSD peak. Your short term memory drops to about 100 msec. I spent a few hours, decades ago, reminding a friend who they were, and that everything would be OK in a few hours. And it was hard work, because I could barely remember who I was, and who they were ;) edit: clarity

breatheoften 8y ago

I just associate DMT with nausea — and have no desire to repeat that pain. I did an ayuasca ceremony and only managed to drink one dose (you are encouraged to drink a lot more) — but my body felt so awful and all the evidence suggested the pretty obvious cause that there was no part of me that wanted to drink more and I felt completely fine with my decision to stop.

dkersten 8y ago
ayuasca and smoked DMT are too very different experiences.
- mirimir 8y ago
  Yes. And the article didn't make that clear enough. The biological lifetime of DMT is very short, because there are enzymes (monoamine oxidase aka MAO) in many tissues. So the effects last 15-30 minutes. But ayahuasca includes MAO inhibitors, so the effects can last for many hours. And it's mainly the MAO inhibitors that make users feel ill.
  - simonsaidit 8y ago
    Changa includes rima (hamalas from b.capii) and lasts around an hour if good. And No nausia or effect from food.
    - mirimir 8y ago
      Hey, thanks for that! I used to have a book about ayahusca-like formulations, using plants from various continents. But I've forgotten the name. Basically, many plants contain DMT, and many others contain MAO inhibitors. Also, I believe that one can combine some MAO inhibiting antidepressants, such as selegiline, with DMT.
sutterbomb 8y ago
Did you not expect that going in? Or it was worse than anticipated?

jtmcmc 8y ago

I feel at some point we changed what an NDE was really categorized as. When Rick Strassman did his research in the 90's and wrote DMT the spirit molecule he stated that classical NDEs were distinct from alien encounters and that in his trials alien encounters were far more common than NDE. Now it seems that alien encounters are also considered NDEs.

ggm 8y ago

Can anyone give a reason in darwinian terms, for why brains would evolve a feeling of detachment and contentment near death? I can't project a selfish-gene reason. Maybe, if you hypothesise its in the 'I die, so others live' space, its like altruistic behaviour and favours the group genome, not the individual

mjg59 8y ago
Unless it has an impact on your ability to reproduce, there's no reason at all. Lots of biology is just a consequence of implementation details.
- Vadoff 8y ago
  That's not entirely true. If it impacts your direct descendents or even distant relatives, there'll still be an impact assuming you share the genes in question.
  - bigiain 8y ago
    If you consider taking a role of "grandparenting" to be a potentially positive role in "your ability to reproduce", then both you and mjg59 are kind of agreeing there.
    - d33 8y ago
      You don't have to copulate in order to express "your ability to reproduce". Keep in mind that your family also has your genes so if you just provide resources for them to reproduce, a part of you reproduces as well. This could be a mechanism to combat fear of death, which perhaps was making people less likely to have sex?
drak0n1c 8y ago
Sometimes there is no reason. That might just be symptoms of gradual neuronal failure. It’s unlikely that the sensation of dying significantly increases or decreases the likelihood of passing on one’s lineage, except maybe imparting a peaceful impression on family around you.

mattdeboard 8y ago

Can we hear this "specially commissioned ambient soundtrack" somewhere?

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jacobush 8y ago

Am I the only one who read this as "A trip to the DMV feels like dying - and scientists now agree" ?

shanusmagnus 8y ago
Nope. The world briefly made sense, and now it doesn't again.
pluma 8y ago
Being neither an experienced drug user nor American, I misread that similarly (Department of Motor Transport?) before remembering that DMT is a drug because I saw it in the title of a documentary on Netflix. I don't know if my life has just been too sheltered, or not sheltered enough, because I wouldn't even know where to begin if I wanted to buy anything not available over the counter.

JohnBooty 8y ago

“My body just didn’t seem relevant anymore," says Iona. "And I felt like I arrived in some consciousness soup which seemed like a different realm to the one I ordinarily inhabit – even in dreams. It just seemed like everything was rotating and swirling and spiralling. It didn’t seem like there were normal space-time proportions going on.” I'm not exactly sure how close I came to dying, but I had the exact opposite experience in the ER one night. I had a bout of acute pericarditis, a swelling of the sac that protects the heart, essentially preventing it from beating. Usually it's a milder chronic condition but for whatever reason (freak infection?) I had an intense acute attack one night. It presented almost exactly like a heart attack which is why I rushed to the ER. We got there just in time. My lips were turning blue and I was drenched in sweat, semiconscious as I was wheeled back to the ER. Heart rate plummeting, etc. So anyway I was hyper attuned to my body as the doctors worked on me. I was terrified and didn't want to die so for a lack of any other options whatsoever in my barely conscious state I became profoundly aware of my breathing. I could feel that I perhaps going to die, and didn't want that to happen, so I just focused on being the best damn breather the world had ever seen. I figured whatever the hell was happening...well, I was alive as long as I was breathing, and the more oxygen I could suck into my body the better. I have never, ever felt more connected to my body than in those moments. Think about times you've been asked to focus on your breathing during yoga, meditation, etc. Like that, except times ten or twenty or a billion or something. After some completely amorphous amount of time during which they worked feverishly, the doctors gave me a jab of atropine and I was more or less instantly OK, hilariously enough.

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Stratoscope 8y ago
Mobile-readable quote: > “My body just didn’t seem relevant anymore," says Iona. "And I felt like I arrived in some consciousness soup which seemed like a different realm to the one I ordinarily inhabit – even in dreams. It just seemed like everything was rotating and swirling and spiralling. It didn’t seem like there were normal space-time proportions going on.”

bongo662 8y ago

Ive done DMT probably 10-15 times in my life so far but quit all recreational drugs ~3 years ago. My last trip being the most intense; me and a friend used a dabbing rig and poured about a gram of dmt onto the heated metal nail - for 20 minutes but what seemed like eternity I Observed the birth, life, and death of myself multiple times over until I finally came back down to the ‘real world’.

dustingetz 8y ago
did you regret that last one? how much of a DMT trip can you actually remember?
- deleted 8y ago
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- akvadrako 8y ago
  In general it doesn't seem like memory is affected; the main difficulty is making sense of what you experienced.
  - KennyCason 8y ago
    This. I spent a solid year reflecting and trying to understand everything that happened during my first LSD experience. The whole thing simply transcends anything you have ever experienced. When you “see” a strange loop involving your mind creating the physical world as you know it, and at the same time realizing the physical world enables your mind, it can take a long time to unpack. Sure when I’m here, we say that the mind is just a construct within he physical world, that just happens to be modeling the physical world. But that Doesn’t make it any less of a significant experience. It was like seeing the concept of ying-yang (duality and mutual dependence) reflected onto mind-body problem, and everything else. Oh great times when you get bored of all the analytical logic problems of the everyday world. :)

noahdesu 8y ago

One thing people talk about is the short-lived effects of DMT, and how they would like more time in the the DMT space. But as I understand it, your body doesn't build up a resistance to it. The DMTx [0] project is seeking to exploit this property and created extended-state DMT experiences using some basic medical techniques. Also, they are looking for volunteers. [0]: https://www.dmtx.org https://www.dmtx.org

md224 8y ago
That sounds awesome. I wish I could pay to lie in a hospital bed and have a medical professional administer intravenous DMT just for a short period (at least initially). Hopefully this work will bring us closer to a world where supervised DMT voyages are available to the public.
- nprateem 8y ago
  They're looking for volunteers in the UK for psilocybin experiments: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Volunteers%20sought%20to%20take%20%27magic%20mushrooms%27%20ft https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Volunteers%20sought%20...
- simonsaidit 8y ago
  Make your own changa its quite easy and pure dmt you dont need to inject... too much you wont Remember What happend anyway.
akvadrako 8y ago
Why can't they just use an intravenous drip?
- filoeleven 8y ago
  IV drip doesn’t have the amount of fine regulation and monitoring necessary to keep someone in the DMT state. Last I heard they were planning to get a dialysis machine to do it.
- noahdesu 8y ago

erikpukinskis 8y ago

> “There is nothing here to begin to enable us to propose that on DMT, you literally transcend the laws of this universe and do actually go to another world,” he says. This is faulty thinking. An afterlife doesn’t presuppose a violation of natural laws, or a separate world. It just means you continue living in a different form. The only thing that would be required for that is a causal relationship (yet to be observed in science) between your dying mind and some other living structure. The causal eelationship needn’t even be mind-out. If your mind is caused by the enduring structure and you experience its presence at death, that would be physically indistinguishable from you becoming that thing. Given that we continue to discover entirely new structures in both the biological world and our own bodies, which were hiding in plain sight, I don’t find this implausible. That’s not to mention psychoaocial structures which science hardly can model, and to which our individual minds are very tightly coupled.

spraak 8y ago
Thanks for sharing that, it really helped me unlock some mental pathways for me.
drakonka 8y ago
Thank you for sharing. I think too often we assume the concept of an "afterlife" implies some kind of supernatural or religious phenomenon. Since we don't have proof of it I can't say I definitely believe such a thing exists, but I certainly believe it's possible. If there is an "afterlife" I believe it fits into our natural laws and can be explained and observed scientifically - we just haven't discovered all of the information we need yet.
- filoeleven 8y ago
  It’s tricky, because the kinds of natural laws that are necessary for the existence of an afterlife are the same kinds of natural laws that invalidate the principle of physicalism or materialism, which is the consensus view of the scientific establishment today. So if you decide to investigate something easier to test for than “the afterlife” which could also plausibly exist with these expanded natural laws—like remote viewing, or the effects that consciousness has on physical systems—your research will be generally dismissed as quackery. Not many folks will try to replicate your results, or even spend the effort to examine them deeply for flaws, because the assumption is “we already know that cannot happen, so you’ve done something wrong in your setup or you’re lying.” There is plenty of evidence out there that points to something odd going on; the challenge lies in getting more skeptics to seriously evaluate it. Some HNer years ago turned me onto the book Irreducible Mind, whose last hundred pages or so is a bibliography of evidence for this kind of thing provided by people who say “I don’t believe it, but I can’t explain it.” But a lot of that evidence comes from skeptics testing exceptional individuals, and James Randi did a good job of showing how fakers can fool scientists, so I can’t really say how reliable it is other than as a jumping-off point for further study. I came across an interesting and more rigorous set of studies done recently on how consciousness can influence quantum effects. They had observers try to influence the amount of interference generated by the double-slit experiment, and have repeatedly under various conditions gotten a significant effect. Perhaps most interesting is that while all humans had an effect, the meditators reliably outperformed the non-meditators. The setup is simple enough that it’s just begging for replication. Here’s the video link for any curious folks. Skip the first 5 minutes which is just a refresher on what the double slit experiment is: https://youtu.be/nRSBaq3vAeY https://youtu.be/nRSBaq3vAeY

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bariswheel 8y ago

On the other hand, 5-Meo-DMT (5-Methoxy-N,N-Dimethyltryptamine), comes in the form of an organic lab-produced extract, or the Bufo Alvarius venom, takes it to a completely different level of non-duality and complete and utter shattering of your ego (temporarily of course, for about 20 minutes). Someone named Albert Most discovered this bizarre compound a few decades back by smoking the venom from the glands of a Sonoran Desert toad somewhere in New Mexico if I recall correctly. I haven't tried it myself but going down a rabbit hole of reports and practitioners on YouTube is in and of itself a profound trip: https://youtu.be/PQctOMSmBuk https://youtu.be/PQctOMSmBuk . EDIT: Here is the piece Vice did on Albert Most: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00jbzI4bcUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00jbzI4bcUw

malux85 8y ago
> Smoking venom from the glands of a Sonoran Desert Toad somewhere in New Mexico I don’t know why but I just found this hilariously funny. Suddenly my life seems very mundane.
- arminiusreturns 8y ago
  Have you lived or been to new mexico? Mundane life is what results in actions like that. Boredom breeds strange creativity.
  - ianai 8y ago
    It seems mundane when you live in NM. But I spent a decade in LV, NV. I’m very grateful to be back in NM. This place even had a Burning Man celebration before California afaik.
    - panarky 8y ago
      Burning Man is in Nevada, 100 miles north-northeast of Reno.
  - KennyCason 8y ago
    Grew up in Arkansas, I can confirm this phenomenon.

armitron 8y ago

The feature that sets DMT apart from other psychedelics such as LSD or mushrooms is the persistent environment called "hyperspace". In short, various psychonauts over the years have discovered an environment - for lack of a better word - they named hyperspace, which consists of surprisingly similar perceived attributes _over many different observers_. Experienced LSD/mushroom users know that there is a tremendous degree of subjectivity and symbol/archetype emergence in their trips. If I only had a few words to describe the LSD/mushroom experience it would be "lack of clarity". It's as if one is looking through a scanner darkly (personal unconscious). With DMT, this is not the case. There is no perceived intermediate filter, nothing impure or fuzzy. One feels as if one is already there and directly interfacing with the space itself. Rather than exploring his own psyche, a DMT user feels like he's exploring an entirely new space. This becomes apparent even when dealing with the difficulties of trying to use shared language to describe the experience with other explorers in order to discover common attributes [1]. [1] https://wiki.dmt-nexus.me/Hyperspace_lexicon https://wiki.dmt-nexus.me/Hyperspace_lexicon

akvadrako 8y ago
This is often my experience too - DMT is like being in VR. The geometry is simplified - lots of smooth curves and sharp angles, mostly flat textures or gradients. And it's populated by barely intelligent entities made of the same stuff.

synecdoche 8y ago

Once when taking mushrooms I saw myself go into countless pieces in something that resembled a starburst. It was beautiful. I felt completely at ease. Then a profound realisation came to me; This is death. Then I connected the two.

simonsaidit 8y ago

It feels like having sex with the Universe. Pure dmt is more “cold” experience. With hamalas (changa/rima) its a more warm prolonged loving experience that happens more gradually Where the pure is more a fast blast into space. Its medicine and Works sonders for the mind. It saved marriges, lifes, jobs among my friends.