DMT EXPERIENCE Many factors contribute to the DMT experience, including dose, mindset, setting, and your body’s personal chemistry. With that in mind, each individual journey will be unique to the person, time, and place, and there’s no way to predict exactly what will happen. That being said, DMT does induce some common experiences and effects that can help you prepare for your journey.
What to expect
DMT-induced psychedelic experiences occur when a dose of 0.2 mg/kg or higher is ingested. When smoked, DMT is a very fast-acting substance with peak subjective experience occurring around 2 minutes after ingestion and completely resolving within 15 to 20 minutes.[1] When taken as an ayahuasca brew, the effects can take up to an hour to appear and may last for several hours.
Mixing DMT into the liquids found in vape pens is a newer form of ingestion. The benefit of this is the ease of consumption. And because the intensity of DMT depends on the dose, vaping it can cause hallucinations that are as or more intense than consuming it in more traditional ways. This can be a good or a bad thing. However, some believe that vaping DMT isn’t the safest way to consume the drug and should be approached with caution.
Low doses (0.05 to 0.1 mg/kg) of DMT primarily affect physical and emotional states with few to no perceptual hallucinations. Higher doses typically produce rapid kaleidoscopic images full of intensely “techno-colored” abstract and representational displays. Auditory hallucinations are less common and usually aren’t a very prominent feature of the experience. Some people experience alternating sensations of hot and cold.
Passing states of anxiety are common, though so are euphoric states. Somewhat paradoxically, these two states can be experienced simultaneously. Out-of-body experiences, or dissociation of awareness from the physical body, is very common with DMT at higher doses. Many people consider this a hallmark of the experience.
In his 2000 book, The Spirit Molecule, psychedelic researcher and psychologist Rick Strassman describes studies in which about half of the volunteers entered “freestanding, independent levels of existence” during a DMT trip or psychological planes where “intelligent beings”, “entities”, “aliens”, “guides” and “helpers” were found. Ethnobotanist and psychonaut Terrence McKenna called these beings “machine elves.” According to Strassman’s work, they take the form of “clowns, reptiles, mantises, bees, spiders, cacti, and stick figures.” Reports of these kinds of beings seem to be unique to DMT trips.
For more in-depth descriptions of DMT’s effects, see Tikhal: The Continuation by Alexander and Ann Shulgin.