Dr. Rick Strassman on the DMT Realm: An Interview Archive
What caught both me and the volunteers off guard was this: we had expected something like a formless white light, the dissolution of the ego into pure brightness. A large dose of DMT does carry you into a world of light. But once there, people found the space wasn't empty or abstract at all. It was busy. It had content. It responded to them.
A big injected dose works fast. The rush hits almost the moment the drug goes in and climbs to its top within a minute or two. You sit inside that peak for maybe 5 to 10 minutes, then begin to descend, and by the half-hour or 45-minute mark most people feel more or less themselves again. At the top of the rush, the mind seems to come loose from the body. Consciousness then crosses into a field of light that is more saturated, more vividly colored, faster-moving and more constantly shifting than anything the person has met in waking life, in dreams, or under any other drug.
The thing that struck me most was how solid it all felt. The DMT world didn't register as a hallucination that one could dismiss afterward. People described it as real, sometimes more real than ordinary reality, and far more real than dreams or other drug states. That conviction about its reality came up again and again.
In my group, somewhere between half and three quarters of the time, the volunteer's awareness didn't just observe the space. It interacted with what was in it. And what was in it often took recognizable shape: reptilian forms, insects, humanoids, actual humans, machinery, plants, now and then a piece of furniture, sometimes the kaleidoscopic geometry itself. The entities came across as intelligent, powerful, and keen to engage.
Frequently the beings seemed to anticipate the person, almost glad they had arrived, ready to get on with whatever came next. Communication tended to be easy and direct. Occasionally it felt like a foreign language was in play; other times the exchange was perfectly clear. More often than words heard with the ears, it was something like telepathy, which is a feature I think deserves closer study down the line.
So rather than the enlightenment I had anticipated, what showed up was a fully interactive condition. The volunteer kept a sense of being themselves. They could engage with the contents, pose questions, and get answers back. The beings would act on the volunteer's DMT mind and body: healing, teaching, instructing, passing along all sorts of information. And sometimes frightening them. Not every encounter was warm or kind. Some people went through genuinely terrifying episodes.
I ran the study from 1990 to 1995, administering roughly 400 doses of DMT to nearly five dozen volunteers. When it wrapped in 1995, I had to return, in several respects, to the drawing board regarding the models I had carried into the original work.