Intro, context
Hi, new to the Nexus, I've been wanting to write about this for a while. I want to talk about my naïve and utterly failed attempts at using DMT, what I perceived as an actual physical near death experience (separate to the 'feeling' DMT is known to give you), potential trauma from that experience, and I guess I want to ask what I should do regarding DMT use going forward. To be honest, I think I'm also writing this because I just want to get my thoughts on paper so to speak. I've spoken to friends about all this but, you know how it is. It's difficult to go into enough detail about it all to satisfy myself in a normal conversation. This also ended up being absurdly long so I've tried to divide it into sections. I would really appreciate if you read all of it.
Getting the contextual boilerplate out of the way - I'm 23, the previously mentioned experience was this year but I was also trying it at 22. I am not on any meds. I did not make the DMT myself, my father did. He said he followed the tek fine, was using the DMT himself to some success (though from what he's told me I don't think he's ever 'broken through'). He's also a chronic alcoholic, is currently in rehab for the 800th time, so it wouldn't be a stretch to assume his tek might've been a bit compromised. Not like I was with him at the time, not like I know for sure whether he was sober when he did it. After he permanently ruined his mind and hospitalized himself from drinking early last year, an event I was far more privy to than I wanted to be, I went to his place and took the last little vial of freebase he had. I let him know. I also found a hookup to start regularly buying weed. It was all to numb the pain.
Before his hospitalization and unrecoverable mental breakdown, my dad was really into psychedelics. Obsessive, even. It was his only interest. After decades of failed attempts to quit alcohol, he saw psychedelics as the last possible avenue to sobriety, ironic as that sounds. He'd drag me along to conferences where pro-psychedelic organisations would sell the benefits to you. I learned all about the history of LSD in America, the unwarranted demonization of these drugs, that everyone who thinks you should stay away from psychoactive drugs are just drones infected by government propaganda. I've more than half a mind to think this was the real propaganda. That there's a great deal of propaganda on both sides, and that neither side is helpful so long as they're pushy about it and trying to cuss out the other. But my dad was fully convinced. I think he genuinely wanted to use them for enlightenment, but I don't believe he ever tried very hard to integrate any of his experiences. Just like I ended up doing, it's possible he was convincing himself he was taking the drugs for some greater purpose than recreational use and escapism, while doing nothing additional that would bring himself closer to the enlightenment and freedom he desired. I told myself I would be different, that I'd "respect the substance", but I never did. Never even had a sitter.
First attempts. Get to the point, man.
Throughout last year, I would periodically attempt to use that batch of DMT. First I tried sandwich method, weed + dmt + weed in a bong. Later, I tried vaping it with my dad's Yocan Evolve. I never broke through, never saw 'hyperspace', never had any visual hallucinations at all outside of my hands looking weird and a bit of chromatic aberration. I don't have aphantasia, in fact I think my ability to conjure mental imagery is quite strong. Maybe it was a bad batch. Maybe it was old (I had no idea of its age, or even if that matters). Maybe I was breathing wrong. I don't know.
I did feel it though. And I sensed presences. People talk about jesters. I never saw jesters, but it felt like they were watching me, and from how others described their behaviour I felt sure that jesters is what they were. Sometimes they felt malicious, usually they seemed to just be laughing at my incompetence. At first I was scared of them, but eventually I learned to have fun with them. Mischievous little scamps. I liked them, intangible as they were. It was like they were my friends, but the sort of friends that are close enough to feel schadenfreude at your misfortune without it meaning they don't like you. I sorta miss them. But my jester friends aside, I felt a loss of sense of self, euphoria, bliss, newfound love for being alive and love for clarity and sobriety once the insanity simulator ended. But none of this was what I was looking for - which I now think is pretty stupid. What more could you want than a newfound love for just existing? I guess those effects were too fleeting, I'd quickly forget how I felt and what it meant to me. But I just wanted to see the cool stuff, hyperspace, entities.
I started using it less and less frequently going into this year, but last month I made my final attempt. It was early morning, I'd stayed up all night so I was a bit delirious and I guess I wanted to double down on that delirious feeling. By this point I wasn't under the illusion of using it for enlightenment any more. I wanted to use it for fun and I had accepted that. Maybe if I stopped lying to myself about my intentions, it'd work a bit better, I thought. This had been my train of thought the previous few times too, to no success, but I guess it takes me a while to learn my lessons.
Anyway, I thought I'd effectively run out, but I still had the vial and I knew there was a bit stuck to the sides. I scraped it off, tapped the vial a bit and to my surprise there was still quite a bit left, so into the Evolve it went. First couple tokes, I felt amazing. I even felt like I was getting some light visuals, but I knew this was like 1% of the insane hallucinatory experience I've read so much about. I got a bit aggressive with it, I guess. This was the last of the DMT, might as well go all in, right? So I took what I felt was a massive hit. Pulsed the button, breathed in until I physically couldn't anymore, until my vision was blurry. Then I held my breath, because I've been told you should do that.
Respiratory arrest. Dying.
In hindsight, it seems pretty fucking dangerous when you think about it. Interrupting your normal breathing patterns, introducing some other chemical to your lungs at a concerningly high imbalance to oxygen, then holding your breath while you essentially lose all sense of yourself? It almost felt like a half-assed incomplete suicide. Because, yeah - I stopped breathing. And I couldn't breathe again. I zoned out for, I genuinely don't know how long. Complete inattention. I don't think I was even hallucinating, I was just gone. I think this might be what some people refer to as a white-out? Opposed to a black out where you actually lose consciousness, but the sort where you just... stop thinking. Everything stops. There was no trip.
I was lying back on my bed, looking up at the ceiling. I guess the effect started to wear off just slightly, enough for me to - without intention - look down at myself. I wasn't wearing a shirt, and I saw that my chest and stomach looked almost concave. My ribs were very visible. My skin looked cold, clammy, off-colour. I managed to move my hand to my chest and it felt that way, too. I felt like a corpse. It was like all the air had been sucked out of me, like my flesh was vacuum sealed to my bones, or if you've seen Dragon Ball, like how people looked after Cell would absorb their essence. Shriveled up.
I realised I hadn't been breathing, sobered up just enough to attempt to breathe, and for a moment I actually couldn't even though I was now actively trying to. It felt like my lungs were 'locked'. There was resistance.
After some considerable panic my lungs 'unlocked' - I swear I even felt a click in my chest - and I took a huge breath. Sobered up instantly. I spent the next 30 minutes or so rolling around on my bed concentrating on my breathing, feeling my chest, just recovering and making sure everything was okay and muttering to myself how fucking stupid that was. My chest remained clammy and shallow for maybe about 5-10 minutes, and gradually started, uh, re-inflating. I don't know if I was actually close to death (or not death, but a passing out from lack of oxygen which might lead to death) or if I just imagined it as being worse than it was, but the effect was the same whether it was real or not. It was terrifying. I spent the next few days feeling short of breath, like I couldn't breathe in to full capacity, just hyper conscious of it. Spent those days considering my mortality and how much time I've wasted.
Now, whenever I think or read about DMT, the act of inhaling it, if I try to picture it, I'm there again. I get an instinctive feeling to touch my bare chest, and my skin feels as clammy as it did back then, when normally it doesn't. I start to feel anxious and I start to feel existential. I get this idea in my head that I really died back then, and everything after that point has been an illusion. Like I'm a walking corpse. I know logically that's not true, but what I know logically often takes a back seat. I associate DMT now not with fun escapism, or enlightenment, or cool cosmic entities and other dimensions, but with my own death. I picture myself on that bed, hands flexed out like claws in rigor mortis, mouth agape, eyes wide open, and chest completely sunken in. My cats not understanding why their friend just randomly fucking died one morning. My body wouldn't be found for a while. I'd probably melt into the bed a bit before I was found. A foolish, dead kid with a warped and twisted body lying in black decomposed sludge. For no good reason. Two dead cats, unless they ate me. I hate thinking about it.
What was I even inhaling?
I've looked into it and apparently 5-MeO-DMT has been known to cause respiratory failure. It's been discussed on this site. But what I had was supposed to be N,N-DMT. The tek my dad followed was supposed to produce N,N, and even if he did it wrong from what I understand it's not like you can accidentally make 5-MeO, it's a totally different process. But I've also read that 5-MeO is more associated with 'feeling' and that a lack of visual hallucinations is normal. All signs point to it being 5-MeO except for the actual way it was supposedly produced. It doesn't make sense. If anyone can shed more light on what the fuck I've been inhaling that would be helpful.
Anyway, after all that happened I threw out the vape pen and the vial of DMT even though there was a bit left. I wanted it gone, the temptation had to be completely removed.
Now
So that brings me to now. I've still never got to experience the magical wonders of DMT that everyone else seems to be able to. It gets called the most convenient psychedelic. Businessman's trip. Easy. Safe. Safe. Everyone else is having fun with it, but for me it seems to be almost fucking impossible to get anything out of it that isn't just 10 minutes of complete insanity. Euphoria aside, the other way I've interpreted the drug while using it is that it's just idiot smoke. It just makes me an idiot. For 10 minutes I can go back to being a stupid mindless baby who doesn't understand anything, staining my couch with drool, the somehow malicious-feeling sound of a whipper snipper buzzing in my head. And then I come out of it and there's nothing to even make sense of. There's no 'experience', not really. Unless I could properly hallucinate, of course.
I still want to see hyperspace and all the rest, although at this point I'm starting to doubt if it's actually real. Critical thinking would lead one to believe there's no way hundreds of people reporting seeing the same stuff are all collectively lying, but also maybe I've just been misinterpreting it. I don't know if you ACTUALLY ACTUALLY FOR REAL get visually and mentally transitioned into something like an Alex Gray painting. If that's actually what you see with your eyes. Or if it's just a method people use to communicate how it feels, and you just see your bedroom. I don't know. I think it's the former, but why the fuck doesn't it happen for me? Again, bad batch maybe? I'm getting sidetracked so I'll wrap it up:
I don't know what to do with DMT from here. I don't want to try it again any time soon, I don't feel like I even need it. This isn't meant to be a sob story post, in fact I think I'm in a better mental place now than I have been in a pretty long time. The horrible things I experienced and saw regarding my dad, I think I'm making really good progress recovering from it all, and I don't feel like I need to rely on drugs anymore. I feel good most days. I haven't smoked weed in about a week where before I was doing it daily, so we'll see if I can end up dropping it for good outside of the occasional smoke sesh every few months. That'd be nice.
But the next time I do try DMT... I don't know if I can ever go back to inhaling it. The trauma, the feelings I felt back then, I think they'd all come back and lead to an awful trip. Or, the same thing might happen again, and this time I won't start breathing again. I know you can make it into a tea, consume it with MAOIs or whatever. I think I'd much prefer that. Even when my respiratory system doesn't just give up, it's such an uncomfortable drug to take. Breathing it in feels like shit, it tastes like shit, you get light headed, if you don't do it just right, get it to the absolute perfect perfect temperature it just burns, like it's the hardest thing in the world to do properly. It's all incredibly prohibitive and uninviting. How are you supposed to lull yourself into some beautiful existential trip if the process to get to it is the most uncomfortable thing ever? Just drinking it sounds so much better, but I've also heard that MAOIs are - awesome! - another way to cause respiratory failure. So what the fuck? (Citation needed, I know, so correct me if I'm wrong here).
That's all, really. Just wanted to talk about my stupid, embarrassing attempts to take this deceptively inconvenient "most convenient" psychedelic. They resulted in nothing. Or, nothing might be an exaggeration, as I can take from it a new appreciation for life, which I've done, but my experiences with shrooms that I haven't even gone into were far more revelatory than this. I don't know. This post is pointless, I know, unless you want to see it as a cautionary tale or something. I just wanted to get it all off my chest, and hopefully some of you who are more experienced can give me some more perspective on it, explain why it never worked, or something else.
Thanks for reading.
edit: I just read that swearing and crass language is a bit frowned upon around here. Sorry about that. I'm Australian, we swear a lot, it's hard to not sprinkle that kind of language in, not that that's a very good excuse. I hope you can look past it and understand that I'm not trying to be vitriolic or condescending or anything else, those words are just how I express myself, and while I respect the attitude towards positive discussion I also don't want to self-censor for risk of this post not truly feeling genuine. With that said, I'll try not to swear in the first place going forward. Okay, I'm really done now. Thanks again for reading.
Hi, new to the Nexus, I've been wanting to write about this for a while. I want to talk about my naïve and utterly failed attempts at using DMT, what I perceived as an actual physical near death experience (separate to the 'feeling' DMT is known to give you), potential trauma from that experience, and I guess I want to ask what I should do regarding DMT use going forward. To be honest, I think I'm also writing this because I just want to get my thoughts on paper so to speak. I've spoken to friends about all this but, you know how it is. It's difficult to go into enough detail about it all to satisfy myself in a normal conversation. This also ended up being absurdly long so I've tried to divide it into sections. I would really appreciate if you read all of it.
Getting the contextual boilerplate out of the way - I'm 23, the previously mentioned experience was this year but I was also trying it at 22. I am not on any meds. I did not make the DMT myself, my father did. He said he followed the tek fine, was using the DMT himself to some success (though from what he's told me I don't think he's ever 'broken through'). He's also a chronic alcoholic, is currently in rehab for the 800th time, so it wouldn't be a stretch to assume his tek might've been a bit compromised. Not like I was with him at the time, not like I know for sure whether he was sober when he did it. After he permanently ruined his mind and hospitalized himself from drinking early last year, an event I was far more privy to than I wanted to be, I went to his place and took the last little vial of freebase he had. I let him know. I also found a hookup to start regularly buying weed. It was all to numb the pain.
Before his hospitalization and unrecoverable mental breakdown, my dad was really into psychedelics. Obsessive, even. It was his only interest. After decades of failed attempts to quit alcohol, he saw psychedelics as the last possible avenue to sobriety, ironic as that sounds. He'd drag me along to conferences where pro-psychedelic organisations would sell the benefits to you. I learned all about the history of LSD in America, the unwarranted demonization of these drugs, that everyone who thinks you should stay away from psychoactive drugs are just drones infected by government propaganda. I've more than half a mind to think this was the real propaganda. That there's a great deal of propaganda on both sides, and that neither side is helpful so long as they're pushy about it and trying to cuss out the other. But my dad was fully convinced. I think he genuinely wanted to use them for enlightenment, but I don't believe he ever tried very hard to integrate any of his experiences. Just like I ended up doing, it's possible he was convincing himself he was taking the drugs for some greater purpose than recreational use and escapism, while doing nothing additional that would bring himself closer to the enlightenment and freedom he desired. I told myself I would be different, that I'd "respect the substance", but I never did. Never even had a sitter.
First attempts. Get to the point, man.
Throughout last year, I would periodically attempt to use that batch of DMT. First I tried sandwich method, weed + dmt + weed in a bong. Later, I tried vaping it with my dad's Yocan Evolve. I never broke through, never saw 'hyperspace', never had any visual hallucinations at all outside of my hands looking weird and a bit of chromatic aberration. I don't have aphantasia, in fact I think my ability to conjure mental imagery is quite strong. Maybe it was a bad batch. Maybe it was old (I had no idea of its age, or even if that matters). Maybe I was breathing wrong. I don't know.
I did feel it though. And I sensed presences. People talk about jesters. I never saw jesters, but it felt like they were watching me, and from how others described their behaviour I felt sure that jesters is what they were. Sometimes they felt malicious, usually they seemed to just be laughing at my incompetence. At first I was scared of them, but eventually I learned to have fun with them. Mischievous little scamps. I liked them, intangible as they were. It was like they were my friends, but the sort of friends that are close enough to feel schadenfreude at your misfortune without it meaning they don't like you. I sorta miss them. But my jester friends aside, I felt a loss of sense of self, euphoria, bliss, newfound love for being alive and love for clarity and sobriety once the insanity simulator ended. But none of this was what I was looking for - which I now think is pretty stupid. What more could you want than a newfound love for just existing? I guess those effects were too fleeting, I'd quickly forget how I felt and what it meant to me. But I just wanted to see the cool stuff, hyperspace, entities.
I started using it less and less frequently going into this year, but last month I made my final attempt. It was early morning, I'd stayed up all night so I was a bit delirious and I guess I wanted to double down on that delirious feeling. By this point I wasn't under the illusion of using it for enlightenment any more. I wanted to use it for fun and I had accepted that. Maybe if I stopped lying to myself about my intentions, it'd work a bit better, I thought. This had been my train of thought the previous few times too, to no success, but I guess it takes me a while to learn my lessons.
Anyway, I thought I'd effectively run out, but I still had the vial and I knew there was a bit stuck to the sides. I scraped it off, tapped the vial a bit and to my surprise there was still quite a bit left, so into the Evolve it went. First couple tokes, I felt amazing. I even felt like I was getting some light visuals, but I knew this was like 1% of the insane hallucinatory experience I've read so much about. I got a bit aggressive with it, I guess. This was the last of the DMT, might as well go all in, right? So I took what I felt was a massive hit. Pulsed the button, breathed in until I physically couldn't anymore, until my vision was blurry. Then I held my breath, because I've been told you should do that.
Respiratory arrest. Dying.
In hindsight, it seems pretty fucking dangerous when you think about it. Interrupting your normal breathing patterns, introducing some other chemical to your lungs at a concerningly high imbalance to oxygen, then holding your breath while you essentially lose all sense of yourself? It almost felt like a half-assed incomplete suicide. Because, yeah - I stopped breathing. And I couldn't breathe again. I zoned out for, I genuinely don't know how long. Complete inattention. I don't think I was even hallucinating, I was just gone. I think this might be what some people refer to as a white-out? Opposed to a black out where you actually lose consciousness, but the sort where you just... stop thinking. Everything stops. There was no trip.
I was lying back on my bed, looking up at the ceiling. I guess the effect started to wear off just slightly, enough for me to - without intention - look down at myself. I wasn't wearing a shirt, and I saw that my chest and stomach looked almost concave. My ribs were very visible. My skin looked cold, clammy, off-colour. I managed to move my hand to my chest and it felt that way, too. I felt like a corpse. It was like all the air had been sucked out of me, like my flesh was vacuum sealed to my bones, or if you've seen Dragon Ball, like how people looked after Cell would absorb their essence. Shriveled up.
I realised I hadn't been breathing, sobered up just enough to attempt to breathe, and for a moment I actually couldn't even though I was now actively trying to. It felt like my lungs were 'locked'. There was resistance.
After some considerable panic my lungs 'unlocked' - I swear I even felt a click in my chest - and I took a huge breath. Sobered up instantly. I spent the next 30 minutes or so rolling around on my bed concentrating on my breathing, feeling my chest, just recovering and making sure everything was okay and muttering to myself how fucking stupid that was. My chest remained clammy and shallow for maybe about 5-10 minutes, and gradually started, uh, re-inflating. I don't know if I was actually close to death (or not death, but a passing out from lack of oxygen which might lead to death) or if I just imagined it as being worse than it was, but the effect was the same whether it was real or not. It was terrifying. I spent the next few days feeling short of breath, like I couldn't breathe in to full capacity, just hyper conscious of it. Spent those days considering my mortality and how much time I've wasted.
Now, whenever I think or read about DMT, the act of inhaling it, if I try to picture it, I'm there again. I get an instinctive feeling to touch my bare chest, and my skin feels as clammy as it did back then, when normally it doesn't. I start to feel anxious and I start to feel existential. I get this idea in my head that I really died back then, and everything after that point has been an illusion. Like I'm a walking corpse. I know logically that's not true, but what I know logically often takes a back seat. I associate DMT now not with fun escapism, or enlightenment, or cool cosmic entities and other dimensions, but with my own death. I picture myself on that bed, hands flexed out like claws in rigor mortis, mouth agape, eyes wide open, and chest completely sunken in. My cats not understanding why their friend just randomly fucking died one morning. My body wouldn't be found for a while. I'd probably melt into the bed a bit before I was found. A foolish, dead kid with a warped and twisted body lying in black decomposed sludge. For no good reason. Two dead cats, unless they ate me. I hate thinking about it.
What was I even inhaling?
I've looked into it and apparently 5-MeO-DMT has been known to cause respiratory failure. It's been discussed on this site. But what I had was supposed to be N,N-DMT. The tek my dad followed was supposed to produce N,N, and even if he did it wrong from what I understand it's not like you can accidentally make 5-MeO, it's a totally different process. But I've also read that 5-MeO is more associated with 'feeling' and that a lack of visual hallucinations is normal. All signs point to it being 5-MeO except for the actual way it was supposedly produced. It doesn't make sense. If anyone can shed more light on what the fuck I've been inhaling that would be helpful.
Anyway, after all that happened I threw out the vape pen and the vial of DMT even though there was a bit left. I wanted it gone, the temptation had to be completely removed.
Now
So that brings me to now. I've still never got to experience the magical wonders of DMT that everyone else seems to be able to. It gets called the most convenient psychedelic. Businessman's trip. Easy. Safe. Safe. Everyone else is having fun with it, but for me it seems to be almost fucking impossible to get anything out of it that isn't just 10 minutes of complete insanity. Euphoria aside, the other way I've interpreted the drug while using it is that it's just idiot smoke. It just makes me an idiot. For 10 minutes I can go back to being a stupid mindless baby who doesn't understand anything, staining my couch with drool, the somehow malicious-feeling sound of a whipper snipper buzzing in my head. And then I come out of it and there's nothing to even make sense of. There's no 'experience', not really. Unless I could properly hallucinate, of course.
I still want to see hyperspace and all the rest, although at this point I'm starting to doubt if it's actually real. Critical thinking would lead one to believe there's no way hundreds of people reporting seeing the same stuff are all collectively lying, but also maybe I've just been misinterpreting it. I don't know if you ACTUALLY ACTUALLY FOR REAL get visually and mentally transitioned into something like an Alex Gray painting. If that's actually what you see with your eyes. Or if it's just a method people use to communicate how it feels, and you just see your bedroom. I don't know. I think it's the former, but why the fuck doesn't it happen for me? Again, bad batch maybe? I'm getting sidetracked so I'll wrap it up:
I don't know what to do with DMT from here. I don't want to try it again any time soon, I don't feel like I even need it. This isn't meant to be a sob story post, in fact I think I'm in a better mental place now than I have been in a pretty long time. The horrible things I experienced and saw regarding my dad, I think I'm making really good progress recovering from it all, and I don't feel like I need to rely on drugs anymore. I feel good most days. I haven't smoked weed in about a week where before I was doing it daily, so we'll see if I can end up dropping it for good outside of the occasional smoke sesh every few months. That'd be nice.
But the next time I do try DMT... I don't know if I can ever go back to inhaling it. The trauma, the feelings I felt back then, I think they'd all come back and lead to an awful trip. Or, the same thing might happen again, and this time I won't start breathing again. I know you can make it into a tea, consume it with MAOIs or whatever. I think I'd much prefer that. Even when my respiratory system doesn't just give up, it's such an uncomfortable drug to take. Breathing it in feels like shit, it tastes like shit, you get light headed, if you don't do it just right, get it to the absolute perfect perfect temperature it just burns, like it's the hardest thing in the world to do properly. It's all incredibly prohibitive and uninviting. How are you supposed to lull yourself into some beautiful existential trip if the process to get to it is the most uncomfortable thing ever? Just drinking it sounds so much better, but I've also heard that MAOIs are - awesome! - another way to cause respiratory failure. So what the fuck? (Citation needed, I know, so correct me if I'm wrong here).
That's all, really. Just wanted to talk about my stupid, embarrassing attempts to take this deceptively inconvenient "most convenient" psychedelic. They resulted in nothing. Or, nothing might be an exaggeration, as I can take from it a new appreciation for life, which I've done, but my experiences with shrooms that I haven't even gone into were far more revelatory than this. I don't know. This post is pointless, I know, unless you want to see it as a cautionary tale or something. I just wanted to get it all off my chest, and hopefully some of you who are more experienced can give me some more perspective on it, explain why it never worked, or something else.
Thanks for reading.
edit: I just read that swearing and crass language is a bit frowned upon around here. Sorry about that. I'm Australian, we swear a lot, it's hard to not sprinkle that kind of language in, not that that's a very good excuse. I hope you can look past it and understand that I'm not trying to be vitriolic or condescending or anything else, those words are just how I express myself, and while I respect the attitude towards positive discussion I also don't want to self-censor for risk of this post not truly feeling genuine. With that said, I'll try not to swear in the first place going forward. Okay, I'm really done now. Thanks again for reading.
