DMT has been doing a very good job instilling the highest respect in me for itself and the gates it opens. All my DMT experiences, and post-DMT psilocybin experiences have been extremely heavy and deep (but ultimately positive), so much so that I seriously wonder how some people can feel so "at home" with these substances...

(Truth be told though, I know from experience that psilocybin does have an incredibly friendly face, too...)

1. "Maybe the changa was a bad idea..."

So my last experience was at a festival, when I got offered some changa by a friend. I don't know the dosage, I relied on him for a "light" load. I was severely exhausted and had built up very high tolerance to LSD in the previous days, and had my serotonin levels somewhat depleted by candy flipping the day before...

After the second toke, I was wondering if some ganja got in the changa, as I was overcome with an uncomfortable nauseous, stoned feeling, like from overdoing cannabis. (Later my friend told me there was barely any or no weed in there.) I also got the glowy visual effects of coming up on DMT, colors becoming vivid and forms subtly dissociating. Closed-eye visuals were very subtle too, consisting of ripples crossing my field of vision in synch with the music filtering up from the stages.

I specifically didn't want to break through (I had no intention of finding out what a breakthrough in this kind of depleted and exhausted state feels like), so I took a very light third toke, in hope of getting some more vivid visuals.

Well, thankfully I didn't break through, but my body did decide that this was enough psychedelics for one week. I was overcome with incredible nausea, which was made worse by the forms and colors of my vision completely dissociating from each other. As opposed to the colorful tent above, I was seeing separate rectangles of painfully bright red, blue, green and yellow. I felt waves of heat (it WAS pretty darn hot objectively), and had to lay down on the ground to help cool my body. Still no "proper" open-eye visuals beyond an all-encompassing feeling of disorientation and dissociation.

After a rather uncomfortable visit to the toilets, I put myself down on the ground, sweating heavily. After telling the others that I was feeling really bad, I got taken care of, given water, and a friend watching over me, with a gentle hand on my forehead. So I let reality go, closed my eyes and gave myself over to the trip.

2. A most dissociated trip

The nature of my closed eye visuals was quite peculiar. I had "traditional" DMT visuals of faces, elves, robots and monsters built of fractal blocks and geometrical shapes, ever changing and transforming, but it was all projected on a flat screen that filled most of my field of vision.

Almost as if I was looking at the image of a VR headset, or a television up close. The images and scenes changed a lot, from the mentioned psychedelic monsters to realistic and mundane scenes of bathrooms, houses, streets. At times I had feelings that I was face to face with a conscious entity, at other times, it was "just a movie".

Overall, as long as I didn't try to move my body, or orient myself in consensus space, I was comfortable, even though I was a little disturbed by the fact that I was well over 40 minutes into the trip, when my former changa experiences never took longer than half an hour.

I noticed that I could steer my point of view in the "virtual space" I saw. Whenever I was shown a mundane scene, I navigated the "camera" off the route, into a wall or turned it around, and in these spaces the mundane scapes were replaced by ever-changing fractal chaos, as if I was looking at areas that hadn't been "coded", like glitching out of the gameworld of a computer game...

It was fun, but after a while I tried to move my "real" point of view, to see what's around the television screen I was looking at... And I saw a grey, moonlit hilly landscape, with small congregations of dark hooded figures holding the screen on both sides. It didn't look like they took any exception to my detachment from the virtual reality, in fact they were devoid of any form of reaction.

After this though, the psychedelic effects seemed to lessen, and I was finally able to reorient in consensus space without feeling like I'd vomit all over the campsite. I gathered myself slowly, and found out that I was tripping for over a solid two and a half hours.

3. Dreams and derealization or reality

In the week following this experience, I had extremely vivid dreams of DMT-like beings and scapes. It was like I was reconnected with a parallel reality.

Some were quite comforting and uplifting, oriented around joining and building autonomous rebel enclaves composed of a diverse group of beings, discussing trade (in rather obscure and metaphorical goods), defense, diplomacy... It was all so incredibly otherworldly that I cannot even come close to explaining it in consensus reality terms, and yet extremely familiar. I really felt "home" in those dreams.

Some were pure chaos and weirdness, one thing I remember is a strange elfin creature with frog-like limbs and a "face" composed of hundreds of pins, pipes and tentacles with whom I was engaged in some form of negotiation. These were more disturbing than the former ones, but only after waking up - when I was in them, they felt totally natural and okay.

Then there were the dystopian reality dreams, like a strange game that we played with the freedom of our souls on the line - think Yu-Gi-Oh, but with labyrinths and weird magical weapons instead of cards, and a complex and baroque set of rules (like you had a certain limit of distance you could travel for a set amount of time, limits on when and how you could act when others were present, and had a "token", a regular and unassuming object signifying your status in the game, which you needed to protect at all costs, for if others obtained and recognized it as your token, they could use it to defeat you).

At the same time, consensus reality seemed to become derealized, mostly due to the MDMA abuse (which I totally forswore a year ago for the very same reason, but decided to go at again in a weak moment), and these dream realities seeped into my waking consciousness, failed to fit properly into the reference frame of my waking human mind, and thus caused some emotional distress and feelings of being lost.

I managed to turn the emotional tide by reframing being lost into exploring new land. And were not many of my dream experiences that of freedom and growth? After having stabilized my emotions, I returned to baseline after about a week, with the weird dreams becoming less prominent, and the feeling of derealization seeping away.

All in all, with all the discomfort, I really am happy for this experience, and I decided to follow up on it later, with a more respectful set and setting for the substance.

Whether my dreams were memories of past realities, current experiences of other parts of my being, or just metaphorical representations of my own mind, I felt like I was reconnected with something extremely important and positive, that I felt I had lost long before. (The last stretch of very similar dreams - brought on by spiritual practice as opposed to drugs -, was ended with a spiritual adversary defeating me. I had the feeling at that time that I was somehow forcibly "ejected" from that reality, like being kicked or DDoS'ed off of a server.)

Thanks a lot, DMT.