I recently had the chance to interview someone who’s had 50+ vaporized N,N-DMT experiences. The person in question (who wishes to remain anonymous) is extremely smart, philosophically literate, and has a PhD in a STEM field from a top US university. Based on the interview notes I took, I wrote down what the progression of a “typical” experience looks like. The anonymous reader confirmed that this description provides an accurate account.

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Progression for Waiting Room or Breakthrough-level DMT experiences (15-40mg range):

Onset stage (1-20 seconds): Psychedelic Molting – Sharpening of colors and edges, the world acquires a secondary layer (as if the world is “molting”), and then this second layer becomes unified and starts to resonate across the entire field of experience.

Early come-up (20-40 seconds): The Hyper-Edge Capacitor – Visual field gets saturated with the Chrysanthemum, which starts to give way to 3D shapes. At this point a center of high-dimensional correlations between planes of experience starts bubbling up correlated subspaces for later use: planes, then 3D spaces, then hyper-planes, etc. And as these “high-dimensional Lego pieces” are made, they start becoming the elements of the scene (the walls, the objects, the space, the sense of presence, etc.).

Middle come-up (40-80 seconds): Crystal Worlds – In this phase of the experience there are a lot of “Buddhist no-self universes” of perfect resonance along many axes. Cave worlds, column worlds, pentagonal tiling of mirror chambers worlds, transparent blinds oceanic worlds, etc. There is a feeling that “these worlds exist independently of you” and that they are kinds of high-grade meditative states achievable by highly-attained monks and beings from other dimensions. They are sterile in some sense, though, which is that they lack evolution. They are attractor points of high-dimensional resonance. Insanely beautiful and ecstatic but also not perfect (for reasons that are hard to articulate).

Late come-up (80-100 seconds): Hyperbolic Gear World – At this point you start to see high-dimensional hyperbolic mechanisms. One intuitively feels that the state has too much energy to be contained in a Crystal World, which gives rise to stitching parallel Crystal Worlds into a unified hyperbolic world-sheet. Incredibly, this world-sheet is precise and seamless. The information contained in it is highly-specific. At this point number theory, hyperbolic geometry, and high-dimensional dynamics start to be very relevant. Irreducibly complex mathematical interlocking objects appear in very crisp and precise ways (it’s not just a fuzzy but intense impression of precision – it is a precise experience of precision clockwork machinery). 3D gear mechanisms with a prime-number of teeth that only repeat when they make as many cycles as the minimum common multiple of all the gears may show up, scenes with ‘plasma consciousness’ contained in hyperbolically-folded cavities with laminar color flow arise, spontaneous chaotic symmetry breaking devices arranged in the form of complex vibrating metallic flowers will materialize, etc. These devices also build on each other’s innovations. They can swap elements to become more interesting, more complex, more energetic, more hypnotizing, and more pleasurable than before.

Plateau (100-180 seconds): DMT Tykes – One starts to hallucinate things that are higher up in the visual hierarchy. “DMT Tykes” (another name for “DMT elves”) are humanoid forms that start to appear at this point. They are ever-evolving, and constructed of a high-dimensional hyperbolic world-sheet made of networks of interlocking Rabbit-Duck bistable percepts. In some sense the entities you see are not the DMT Tykes themselves. Instead, it feels like there are still higher-dimensional entities that interface with the space you’re at and it is those entities that control the rendered humanoid bistable percepts. The devices you saw in the immediately preceding stage (Hyperbolic Gear World) are revealed to be artifacts created by these higher-dimensional beings. As reported by others before, this space gives off the impression of being a gallery, a museum, a factory, or some kind of scientific testing facility, where entities are trying out new qualia configurations to study their properties: how they feel, what they can be used for, what it is like to experience them as a human being, etc. They are trying to compel you to take these things seriously, to see through how groundbreaking they would be for humans. Whenever one is too overwhelmed with the information presented (common misgivings are of the sort: “this is too much for a simple human” or “too beautiful, I don’t deserve this” or “what if people find out I know this?”) the experience becomes calming and things that you recognize as a human start being presented: jungles, hedonically-charged human scenes, locations, archetypes, stories about the origin of humanity, etc. And when one feels ready again to look at the complex machinery then there is this sense that the entities will continue to show you more and more of the irreducibly complex phenomenal objects native to that space.

Early comedown (180-240 seconds): High-Dimensional Breakdown – Entities may become a bit desperate to make sure they have sent along the most important information. The intensity starts subsiding and there is a lot of revisiting of earlier stages, gathering of essential insights, and decisions made about what to definitely try to bring back to one’s baseline state. Often one fears that one’s brain will never get back to normal during the earlier parts, but at this point one recognizes that there is a downward trend and that it’s all going to be ok after all. Paranoia, if present beforehand, starts to subside at this point. In terms of narrative, at this point one is usually coming to terms with what the experience will mean for your everyday life, whether you believe that the entities were real, and whether all of this was just a hallucination. The intuitive understanding that even if it is all just in your mind it still contained information of very high-value is clear at this stage (but may subside if you don’t properly encode it). Key undeniable facts of the experience at this point are: (1) there are heights of bliss and pain way outside of the range of human experience, (2) there are heights of mathematical complexity possible to experience directly that are beyond the scope of normal human cognition, and (3) there are types of qualia that matter both for intelligence and wellbeing that exist but humans are utterly clueless about. Disregarding the veracity of the entities or the literal interpretations of the experience, these three facts are straightforward to acknowledge at this stage of the trip.

Late comedown (240-360 seconds): Psychedelic Dampening – There is a clear sense that some of the information you were able to easily see and grock earlier in the experience is completely inaccessible now. You lose contact with what felt like higher forms of intelligence but you still see a lot of interesting patterns and complex geometry that you somehow realize is not as important as what happened just before. Even though it still feels like you are “very high”, it feels like one’s unique privileged access to information about consciousness is gone and that what you could discover now would not belong to the same level of “scientific breakthrough” as what you experienced before.

After-effects (360-600 seconds): Fast Sobering Up – Thinking about meta-narratives is very common at this stage, just like it is on traditional psychedelics. Things like “Where is the human world headed? What kind of consciousness will we experience as our default mode in 100 years from now? What will happen once scientists, engineers, and mathematicians start to do systematic research on the mathematics of the irreducibly-complex phenomenal objects at the peak of the experience? Etc.” Somewhere in along this stage the world finally becomes solidly uni-layered and then it just feels like a low dose of shrooms for a couple more minutes, at most.

Baseline (600 seconds onwards): Re-Grounding Stage – You start wondering what that was all about. The realization that you came back to normal again so quickly is likely to make you feel like you should have not been so afraid to try out the experience to begin with. At the same time, you also may feel a strong pull towards not experiencing that for a while (depends – some people feel braver at this point and redo the experience). In most circumstances one will feel a mood boost for several hours (up to days) for two reasons. First is the sense of significance and profundity in the form of gratitude and the feeling of being special that such an experience confers. And second, there seems to be an essentially physiological response to having gone through such an intense experience without getting harmed (if one wasn’t harmed, of course). Perhaps the annealing frame is adequate in this context. Namely, that the experience somehow smoothed out a lot of pinch points and imperfections latent in one’s psyche. The fear of “the worst that could happen to me” subsides and one experiences a sense of connection to other humans that is significantly above baseline.