The DMT Experience: A thread on the different levels of a DMT breakthrough
Stage 1: The Threshold [1-5mg]
At this stage your vision is enhanced and your setting feels much more important / aesthetically pleasing. You feel slightly stoned- but with a feeling of great significance.
"There's this feeling which comes over your body - half arousal, half anaesthesia. The air appears to suddenly have been sucked out of the room because all the colors brighten visibly, as though some intervening medium has been removed."
[Terence on the threshold level]
"And then there's a sound, like a piece of bread wrapper or cellophane being scrunched up and thrown away."
This sound begins to increase in frequency until it turns into a whining hum. Once you hear this, you are beyond the threshold.
Stage 2: The Chrysanthemum [5-10mg]
This is the stage in which reality begins to melt.
"You close your eyes and you see a floral pattern rotating in space, usually yellow-orange. It’s a floral pattern like a pattern in a Chinese brocade."
These patterns can vary immensely in style, color, and the feeling that they evoke. As the patterns increase in intensity, so does the sound and the high.
The body high is a mix between euphoria and being out of body, a feeling that doesn't stabilize until after breakthrough.
If you were to open your eyes at this stage, normal reality would be covered with embedded geometry and bright colors.
Defined by increasing complex visuals, accelerated movement, and an intense body high, this is the period between the Chrysanthemum and The Waiting Room. There is a feeling of being sucked towards *something*.
As the visuals increase, so does the sound. As the humming reaches a crescendo, there is a sudden switch. The humming stops. A new world is created out of the previous scene flawlessly.
Stage 4: The Waiting Room [15-20mg]
The final space before a full breakthrough, the waiting room feels like a liminal, hyper dimensional version of 'The Backrooms'.
At this point, if you open your eyes, your scene will not change. You are fully immersed in hyperspace.
Like all aspects of a DMT experience, waiting rooms can vary in style immensely. Here are some other examples.
The environment is constantly morphing, and entities may be present at this stage. If entities choose to communicate at this stage, it will probably be telepathically.
Stage 5: Breakthrough [20mg+]
You enter a new world. One of the first feelings of breaking through is that hyperspace feels "more real than real".
There is a feeling of intense familiarity combined with absolute amazement. The body high transforms into intense euphoria.
Entity encounters are an almost universal experience at breakthrough level doses. There are a variety of entities, which will be described below.
In general, entities are benevolent and excited to see you.
Jesters:
Magical beings with the unmistakable appearance and character of clowns or jesters. They can be mean and make one feel bullied or ridiculed, or can help one feel liberated and finally 'in on the joke'.
Machine Elves:
They are the primary inhabitants of the Hyperspace. Machine Elves seem to live in, and be part of, some kind of Folding Rooms, and appear to be capable of transforming their own shapes freely.
Mother Goddess:
A huge, bright, feminine Goddess. Really bright light, caring, loving, caressing away all pain and all tears. May in some instances materialize as disjunct impressions and images of femininity, lips, vulvas, eyes, all loving, both maternal and sexual.
Gods & Goddesses:
These beings resemble various cultural archetypal godheads. They don't usually judge you, but rather have a kind-of infinite compassion... although you can't always count on that. They are of different temperaments and personalities.
Your environment can vary immensely. You could be in a vast landscape or a small room. Here are some breakthrough-level landscapes:
Surreal Landscapes [Ilene Meyer]
Cartoon Landscapes [Harry Pack]
This thread is the very tip of what DMT can offer. Every experience is difference, this thread was focused on commonalities.
Often the first thing that people notice; colors around you increase in both brightness and saturation. Colors will seem much more distinct, intense, and complex than when sober.
Acuity Enhancement-
Often arriving at the same time as color enhancement, acuity enhancement is makes your vision clearer and increases edge detection. This often results in an appreciation for the complexity of different textures.
[moss & towel pictured]
Are mushrooms an ancient engineered artifact from alien civilization that were spread here for the purpose of communication? (based on a Terence lecture, a🧵)
Let’s set the scenario- imagine you are an alien civilization trying to send communication across the entire universe.
You have extremely advanced technology, but there are constraints: can’t violate any known laws of physics (lightspeed), the universe is massive, and there are ~10^23 stars & innumerable other celestial bodies to contact.
Self replicating probes would be a good place to start.
By sending them out in different directions, and having them self replicate at a set interval, you could keep a steady spatial density as they spread across the universe.
There are some problems with this - the two biggest problems are raw materials and energy for propulsion.
Did psilocybin mushrooms help evolve human consciousness?
Could early psilocybin use be responsible for a rapid increase in brain size ~200,000 years ago?
[Art by Jim Figora]
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To set the background, you need to imagine the environment of early humans. We existed mostly as nomadic pastoralists who also foraged and hunted. Our survival strategy was staying in groups and following large packs of mammals.
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While early humans would occasionally hunt, they foraged every day. Nuts and berries might sound nice, but a constant foraging source in grasslands is actually poop. Dung often contains seeds, grubs, or other bugs. Here's an example of a baboon searching through shit: