When reviewing my bedside notes, I continually feel surprise in seeing how many of our volunteers “made contact” with “them,” or other beings. At least half did so in one form or another. Research subjects used expressions like “entities,” “beings,” “aliens,” “guides,” and “helpers” to describe them. The “life-forms” looked like clowns, reptiles, mantises, bees, spiders, cacti, and stick figures. It still is startling to see my
written records of comments like, “There were these beings,” “I was being led,” “They were on me fast.” It’s as if my mind refuses to accept what’s there in black and white.
[...]
As strange as the reports that follow are, our 1990s research was not the first in the scientific literature to describe DMT-induced “contact.” There also are reports from the 1950s quoting volunteers to that effect. These older DMT cases are remarkable in their foreshadowing of the stories we were going to hear almost forty years later. What is even more striking is that I have been unable to locate any similar reports in research subjects taking other psychedelics. Only with DMT do people meet up with “them,” with other beings in a nonmaterial world.
These older clinical excerpts derive from patients with schizophrenia, many of whom had been hospitalized for years, if not decades. They were not especially verbal, insightful, or personable. They received DMT in studies attempting to determine how similar the DMT state was to schizophrenia.
Researchers also were interested in gauging whether naturally psychotic patients were more or less sensitive to DMT’s effects. A patient with schizophrenia in a study at Stephen Szára’s former laboratory in Hungary reported the following after a high dose of intramuscular DMT:
“I saw such strange dreams, but at the beginning only. . . . I saw strange creatures, dwarves or something, they were black and moved about.”
An American research team also gave DMT to patients with schizophrenia. Of the nine subjects, the only one who could say anything about her experience was an unfortunate woman who, after getting a robust dose of 1.25 mg/kg IM DMT, stated:
“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.”
These little vignettes should keep us from becoming too complacent in believing that what our volunteers reported is purely a New Age, 1990s-in-Santa Fe phenomenon. The spirit molecule revealed unseen worlds, and their inhabitants, to Western science long before our research began. Karl’s early encounter with life-forms, like his visions of DNA described in the last chapter, offered a prelude to future, more elaborate stories from other volunteers. Karl was a forty-five-year-old blacksmith. He was married to Elena, whose enlightenment experience we’ll read about later. Eight minutes into his non-blind high-dose injection, he described this encounter:
“That was real strange. There were a lot of elves. They were prankish, ornery, maybe four of them appeared at the side of a stretch of interstate highway I travel regularly. They commanded the scene, it was their terrain! They were about my height. They held up placards, showing me these incredibly beautiful, complex, swirling geometric scenes in them. One of them made it impossible for me to move. There was no issue of control; they were totally in control. They wanted me to look! I heard a giggling sound—the elves laughing or talking at high-speed volume, chattering, twittering.”
In the last chapter, we heard about Aaron’s experiences of unseen worlds. Let’s return to his first non-blind high dose of DMT. He looked at me about 10 minutes after the injection and shrugged, laughing: “First there was a mandala-like series of visuals, fleurs-de-lis-type visions. 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 very large waiting room, or something. It was very long. I felt observed by the insect-thing and others like it. Then they lost interest. I was taken into space and looked at.” Aaron summarized his encounters with these beings after a subsequent double-blind high dose:
“There is a sinister backdrop, an alien-type, insectoid, not quite-pleasant side of this, isn’t there? It’s not a ‘we’re-going-to get-you-mother*****.’ It’s more like being possessed. During the experience there is sense of someone, or something else, there taking control. It’s like you have to defend yourself against them, whoever they are, but they certainly are there. I’m aware of them and they’re aware of me. It’s like they have an agenda. It’s like walking into a different neighborhood. You’re really not quite sure what the culture is. It’s got such a distinct flavor, the reptilian being or beings that are present.”
“How about the scary element?” I asked. “What’s the worst they could do if they are unleashed with access to you?”
“That’s what it’s about. It’s the sense of the possibility that’s so strange.”