What endlessness wrote: read read read. If you have questions: search, search and read, read. If your questions persist, but you have done enough homework to post a well-articulated question, only then ask on the forum.
Since you report yourself to be "a bit of a noob", you should not just read the FAQ and some of the "sticky" threads on top of the subforums, you should study them. I re-emphasize the sticky threads, these are made sticky because they contain important and/or very useful information.
Lye can blind you only if you get splashes of lye solution in your eyes. That is why it is very important to employ safety precautions while extracting, like always wearing safety glasses when handling lye. Similarly, flammable solvents should be kept meticulously away from sources of ignition and only used in well-ventilated spaces. The vapors are flammable (or even explosive in the right concentrations), and in many cases also toxic.
Very small remnants of lye in your product will not make you blind, unless you rub several grams of highly contaminated dmt in your eyes. The alkalinity of freebase dmt itself would probably be more harmful in that case than the minute amounts of lye. I personally think that lye contamination is overrated and can easily be eliminated by proper extraction procedure. Contamination from dirty solvents is a more likely problem, especially when people simply evaporate all the solvent instead of doing a freeze precipitation or FASA precipitation.
An advantage of lye over lime is that it is much better soluble than lime and is a much stronger base. If you want to do a STB extraction, lye is sort of indispensable. If you do an A/B extraction, you can use far more gentle bases, such as sodium carbonate even.
Try to understand the "whys" of the "hows" of extraction teks before you get your hands dirty. If you do not understand things, do some searching and some more reading, both on the forum and the wiki. Even if you do not get the straight answer that you were looking for, you'll likely learn other things that will come in handy eventually.
