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Cross-Cultural ‘Encounter’ Experiences and Neurohormonal Transmission
By Joseph Durwin
Part II
DMT EFFECTS: CLINICAL SETTINGS
"[The feeling of taking DMT] is as though one had been struck by noetic lightning… a hallucination whose alien character is its utter alienness…it virtually disappears from the organism in about ten minutes."
--Terence McKenna. (1992)
Dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, was first synthesized in 1931 (Mercke, 1931), and found to have hallucinogenic properties in 1956. In its pure form, it is a white, pungent-smelling, cystalline solid, insoluble in water. Its basic physical effects are few: mydriasis (pupil enlargement), tachycardia (rapid heartbeat), and mildly increased blood pressure. (Shulgin, 1976)
In the brain, more dramatic effects take place. Like LSD and Psilocybin, DMT is a serotonin antagonist, and its presence in the brasin abruptly stops the firing of 5HT (serotonin) neurons in the raphe nuclei, which provide most of the serotonin in the brain. It also causes enhanced firing of the locus coeruleus, a bundle of neurons in th hind brain from which stem axons which ramify all over the brain and provide most of the noepinephrine neuronal input in most brain regions. The locus coeruleus acts as a sort of funneling mechanism, which integrates all sensory input from the central nervous system (Snyder, 1996). DMT acts as as an antagonist on 5HT2 receptor; this effect is mediated by its agonist affect on 5HT1A site (Strassman, 1996). But what does this mean, in functional terms?
Researchers have designated various stages of the experience brought on by administration of DMT. Stage I features an extremely quick onset when injected or smoked freebase, from several seconds to two minutes. The effects typically begin with intense, highly colorful visual imagery, rapidly changing kaleidoscopic geometric patterns (Gracie; Zarkov, 1985). A "rushing" sensation is often felt, along with auditory hallucination - extremely common is a perceived "buzzing" sound. A sense of transcendence may follow.
In Stage II, a tunnel of "breakthrough" experience usually follows. A person may see or fly through a tunnel, very fast. There may be a sensation of breaking through a veil or rending a membrane. After the Stage II breakthrough experience, Stage III generally begins instantly if a high enough dose is administered. This typically features the experience of being in a large, 3-dimensional space. This stage is where reports of contact with "entities" (intelligent and communicating beings) is reported. The limits of this stage, if any, are unknown, although it is rumored by some who have gone very deeply into this experience that beyond this stage is another- "the White Light." The entire experiences comes on fast and ends fast- the effects are felt usually only for a few minutes, and are completely finished in less than a half hour.
The following are excerpts from accounts by DMT users of their experience, collected by Peter Meyer. These will show the many common points of the compound's effect.
Subject 1 (Female):
"…before me I see an iridescent membrane, taut and gently pulsating, something stretching and pushing towards me, on the other side, straining to emerge… a fissure rends… they peer towards me, eyes bright and watching in small faces… small white-blond imp kids… in bright mostly red togs and caps… very solemn and somewhat pleased…"
Subject 1, Second Experience:
"… they appeared much less colorful and altogether preoccupied with the task at hand, i.e., pouring a golden, viscous liquid through a network or long, intertwining, transparent conduits which led into the middle of my abdomen…"
Subject 2 (Female):
"The elves were "telling" me (or I was understanding them to say) that I had seen them before, in early childhood. Memories were flooding back of seeing the elves… laughing… showing me thoughts… teaching me to speak and read."
Subject 3 (Male):
"I was in a large space and saw what seemed to be thousands of entities… they were rapidly passing to and fro… I noticed what seemed to be an opening into a larger space, like looking through a cave opening to a starry sky…" (Meyer, 1997)
Other users have presented strikingly similar accounts from smoked DMT in the 40-60 milligram range.
Subject 1:
I began to hear a loud, high-pitched carrier wave. Closing
my eyes I got a glimpse of several entities moving in front
of a giant, complex control panel… I had a direct awareness
of an overwhelming powerful and knowledgeable presence
…the creatures were bipedal and roughly human size.
Subject 2:
A powerful buzz grew in my head… the little people… were
literally coming out of the woodwork… they were bouncing
a spinning, geometrical object between them.
(Zarkov; Kent, 1994)
Reports of coming in contact with "beings" stretch back to some of the earliest research done on the compound, on schizophrenics in the 1950's.
One schizophrenic patient who was given a medium dose via intramuscular injection said: "I saw strange creatures, dwarves or something, they were black and they moved about" (Szara, et al, 1958). Another schizophrenic patient reported: "I was in a big place, and they were hurting me. They were not human. They were horrible! I was living in a world of orange people" (Turner, Merlis, 1959).
More recently, in the mid-90's, Dr. Rick Strassman obtained federal permission to test the compound on human subjects for the first time since the seventies. The controlled administration to a wide cross-section of patients brought remarkable results. More than half of all the subjects who received DMT reported contact with some type of non-human "beings;"
the placebo subjects did not. Reports from subjects in these studies will help to further identify the most common facets of the effects of the compound.
Karl, 45, Blacksmith:
There were a lot of elves… prankish, ornery… four of them
appeared at the side of a stretch of interstate highway I travel
regularly. One of them made it impossible for me to move…
they were totally in control… laughing or talking at high-speed
volume. Chattering, tittering.
Aaron, 46:
First there was a mandala-like series of visuals… then an insect-
like thing got right into my face, hovering over me as the drug was
going in. This thing sucked me out of my head into outer space.
It was clearly outer space, a black sky with millions of stars. I
was in a large waiting room or something. It was very long. I felt
observed by the insect thing and others and like it. Then they lost
interest. I was taken into space and looked at. It's like they have
an agenda.
Lucas:
There is a sound, a bzzzz. It started off and got louder and louder
and faster and faster. I was coming on and coming on and then
POW! There was a space station below me and to my right. I was
also aware of many entities inside the space station. They seemed
have checkerboard patterns on parts of their bodies.
Gabe:
…first it felt like I was going through a cave or tunnel or into space…
there were lots of beings…
Chris, 35:
There were three beings… they wanted me to look into their
bodies. I saw inside them and understood reproduction and
what it's like before birth.
Jim, Schoolteacher, 37:
(During an initial tolerance study, Jim felt that there were "beings" beyond the bright colors ((phosphene hallucinations))/ After going "through" the colors):
…they were probing into my mind. There were sort of long
fiber-optic things that they were putting into my pupils."
(Strassman, 2001)
Some of the most interesting reports from these studies were reports that featured not only "contact" with strange beings, but the theme of experimentation on the test subjects by these beings. The reports that followed all feature involved experiences along these lines.
Jeremiah, retired military, 50:
At 0.4 mg/kg IM:
I was in a big room… there was one big machine in the center,
with round conduits, almost writhing… the machine felt as if it
were rewiring me, reprogramming me."
At 0.2 mg/kg IM:
"There were four distinct beings looking down on me, like
I was on an operating table…they had done something and
were observing and were observing the results… they
are vastly advanced scientifically and technologically."
Afterwards, Jeremiah offered this perspective: "It may not be as simple as that there's alien planets with their own societies. This is too proximal. It's not like some kind of drug. It's more like an experience of a new technology than a drug. [The feeling is] you can choose to attend to this or not. You return not to where you left off, but to where things have gone since you left… it's not like a hallucination, but an observation."
Dmitri, 26:
The first thing I noticed was a burning in the back of my neck.
Then there was a loud intense hum… and then... WHAM!…
I felt like I was in an alien laboratory… a sort of landing
bay or recovery area. They activated a sexual circuit, and
I was flushed with orgasmic energy… they had things to
show me… but they were waiting for me to acquait myself
with the environment and movement and language of this space.
Ben, 29:
It started with a sound. It was high-pitched like a tightly taut
wire… there were 4 or 5of them… they probed…they seemed
to know time was liited… they inserted something into my
left forearm, about 3 inches above the wrist. It [the attitude
of the beings] was 'simply business.'
Rex, 40, carpenter:
There was a humming sound… then I felt like I was in the
presence of an alien or of aliens, vaguely humanoid…
On a higher dose:
When I was first going under there were these insect creatures
all around me… the more I fought, the more demonic they
became, probing into my psyche and being… the thought came
to me that they were manipulating my DNA, changing its
structure.
After an even higher dose (his diastolic blood pressure became high at this point):
I was in a huge, infinite hive… there were insect-like
intellences everywhere… they were in a hyper-techno-
logical response… they were dripping stuff on me."
Sara, 42, Writer:
"There was a sound, like a hum that turned into a whoosh…
I quickly blasted through to the "other side." Suddenly, beings
appeared. They were cloaked, like silhouettes… they indicated
that they had had contact with me as an individual before… they
seemed pleased that we had discovered this technology… they
wanted to learn more about our physical bodies. They told me
humans exist on many levels.
Another dose:
I went directly into deep space. They knew I was coming back
and they were ready for me.
(Strassman, 2001)
Terence McKenna, who studied the ethnopharmacology of DMT for more than two decades, offered this perpspective: "You burst into a space…the entities there are completely formed…Theirs is a language that condenses as a visible syntax-overflowing the audio channels and entering the visual channels." (in Miller, 1993)
As evidenced in these reports, administration of DMT, in both a tribal and technological society, causes a very frequent perception of contact with advanced beings, usually small in stature. What is interesting is that no other psychoactive compound is known to create this perception -even though DMT is structurally similar and similar in neurological effects to LSD, Psilocybin, and other tryptamines. In a modern society -and one which, unlike the Yanomamo, does not possess a specified cultural script for the effects of the drug- additional details emerge. Particularly typical is the inference of machines and elaborate technology, as is the theme of medical experimentation. Many of the details of these accounts will coincide strongly with reports of experiences which occurred without the direct administration of the drug; these type of reports are perhaps more common that it is usually thought, and occur throughout our folklore.
FAIRY FOLKLORE
When W.Y. Evans-Wentz studied the folklore of the British Isles circa 1900, he recorded widespread belief in fairies/elves ("the wee folk" "the good people" "the Sidhe"), beings of another race or races who live in a realm normally beyond our perception. He was also given accounts from many sources claiming first hand encounters with such beings.
One account comes from a member of the Lower House of the Manx Parliament:
I looked across the river and saw a circle of supernatural
light, which I have now come to regard as the 'astral light'
or the light of nature, as is called by mystics, and in which
spirits became visible… into this space, and the circle of
light, from the surrounding sides apparently, I saw come
in twos and threes a great crowd of little beings smaller
than Tom Thumb and his wife. All of them, who appeared
like soldiers, were dressed in red. They moved back and forth
amid the circle of light, as they formed into order like troops
drilling. (Evans-Wentz, 1911)
The fairy lore of the British Isles, particularly in recent centuries, is filled with tales of abductions by fairies. Often, it is infants or small children who are abducted. In the case of the "West Ham Disappearances" of the early 1880's, a number of young girls vanished from the London slums. One of them, Eliza Carter, briefly returned before her final disappearance and told her school friends that the fairies had kidnapped her and now forbade her to go home (Briggs, 1984).
In the case of Stephen Mortimer Beckwith of Wiltshire, his four year-old daughter, Flossie, disappeared on May 13, 1888. He claims he saw her "lured off" by a female fairy about three feet, five inches tall. The fairy could not speak, but sang like "the wind in the telegraph wire." A thorough police search of the area revealed no trace of the girl, and she was never found (Hewlett, 1913).
This theme is prevalent in much Victorian art: Yeats' poem "Come Away Thou Human Child" (1888), Sir Joseph Noel Patton's painting "The Fairy Raid" (1867), and Henry Fuseli's "The Changeling Abduction by Moonlight" (1780) all treat this theme, and the paintings feature larger, beautiful fairies along with smaller, more grotesque attendees.
I many cases, the stolen children are replaced by changeling fairy-children. In these cases, the replacement children are either described as having large heads, stunted voices, squeaky chattering voices and great precocity, or as having defects not unlike progeria. (Spence, 1948; Rhys, 1907) In addition to child abductions, there are numerous tales of the "Fairy Midwife" or "Fairy Nurse"-featuring abductions of women for the purpose of aiding or interfering with their conceptions and pregnancies.
Evans-Wentz offered, as one possible conclusion, that a realm of discarnate, intelligent forces known as fairies, elves, etc, exist "as a supernormal state of consciousness into which men and women may enter temporarily in dreams, trances, or in various ecstatic conditions."
The study of Celtic folklore continues, and modern theorists have observed the changes in fairy accounts, as they complexify and mutate over time, with the entities seeming to get taller (Hawken, 1975) and preaching an increasingly ecological message (van Gelder, 1977; Warner, 1978). Some individuals assert that the fairy phenomenon has simply adapted to the modern human psyche, taking on the form of the modern UFO and "alien" phenomenon. Whitley Strieber suggests that perhaps fairies now wield mechanical devices and travel in flying discs because they too have enjoyed their own technological revolution (Strieber, 1986). Other contemporary theorists connect the elfin beings with ley lines, mysterious paths that overlie magnetic currents that flow through the earth (Bord, 1978). This becomes of interest later, as much of the more modern data on UFO and Abduction experiences associates the phenomemon with areas of high electromagnetic activity.
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