The Breakthrough Experience: DMT

Hyperspace and its Liminal Aesthetics

graham st john
Independent Researcher,
g.stjohn@warpmail.net

abstract

Known to produce out-of-body states and profound changes in sensory

perception, mood, and thought, DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine) is a potent
short-lasting tryptamine that has experienced growing appeal in the last
decade, independent from ayahuasca, the Amazonian visionary brew in which
it is an integral ingredient. Investigating user reports available online as well
as a variety of other sources consulted in extended cultural research, this
article focuses on the “breakthrough” event commonly associated with the
DMT trance. The DMT breakthrough event coincides with significant
revelatory outcomes associated with perceived contact with “entities” and the
transmission of information often in the form of visual language. Examination
of the breakthrough event offers insight on the liminal phenomenology of
DMT and other tryptamines, a liminality that is given primary expression in
reported travels in “hyperspace.” The article examines user reports of DMT
“hyperspace” observing a transitional process that, unlike conventional passage
rites, is private, individualized, internal, and “ritual like.” As an exploratory
discussion of an under-researched phenomenon, the article enters this virtual
terrain through a discussion of the gnostic, therapeutic, and recreational
modalities of DMT use, before exploring ritual-like modes of transmission and
concluding with comments on the ontological significance of the DMT trance.
k e y w o r d s : DMT, entheogens, hyperspace, liminality, gnosis

In the Amazon and other places where visionary plants are understood
and used, you are conveyed into worlds that are appallingly different
from ordinary reality. Their vividness cannot be stressed enough. They are

Anthropology of Consciousness, Vol. 29, Issue 1, pp. 57–76, ISSN 1053-4202, © 2018 by the
American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved
DOI: 10.1111/anoc.12089

57
58 anthropology of consciousness 29.1

more real than real, and that is something that you sense intuitively.
They establish an ontological priority. (McKenna 1991, 78)

Today one need not travel to South America to rupture one’s ontological cer-
tainty by way of visionary plants and the nonordinary states of consciousness
they induce. For example, ayahuasca, the visionary drink of the Amazonas, is
now prepared for use in regions worldwide (Labate and Cavnar 2014; Labate,
Cavnar, and Gearin 2017) DMT (N,N-dimethyltriptamine), a principal com-
ponent of ayahuasca, is used independently in private underground practices
informed by knowledge of chemical synthesis, botanical identification, and
extraction techniques widely available on the Internet. While DMT has been
outlawed in most nations following the UN Convention on Psychotropic
Substances 1971, recent surveys have shown that the tryptamine compound
has grown increasingly desirable and—by comparison with drugs of addic-
tion, such as heroin and cocaine, with which it is commonly classified—is
relatively harmless (Sledge and Grim 2013; Winstock, Kaar, and Borschmann
2013). While sociocultural research on this phenomenon remains scarce, a
circumstance hampered by drug law, evidence builds on familiarity with the
effects of DMT, as evidenced in clinical research (Strassman 2001) and
through research using interviews (Tramacchi 2006), surveying (Cott and
Rock 2008), ontology (Luke 2008, 2011), and cultural history (St John 2015a).
Familiarity with effect amounts to intimacy with the experience of DMT
“hyperspace,” as popularized by Terence McKenna via a deluge of oral pre-
sentations that now circulate virally on YouTube.
Known to produce profound changes in sensory perception, mood, and
thought, DMT is commonly smoked using crystal vaporizing methods or
blended with other herbs, as in “changa” (St John 2017a). While dependent
on broad variables commonly recognized as “set” (i.e., the mood, expecta-
tions, and attentions affecting the individual’s state of being) and “setting”
(i.e., social and environmental context; see Leary, Litwin, and Metzner 1963),
as well as source (i.e., botanical or synthetic), technique of administration,
and dose, DMT’s action—the DMT trance—typically involves the rapid onset
of an out-of-body experience of brief duration (i.e. its effects typically last
about fifteen minutes), with a sensation of transit common to the experience.
Whether explained as travails through parallel universes, odysseys in other
dimensions, or journeys to the psychic antipodes, the vicissitudes of travel are
implicit to DMT hyperspace, the passage to which is often embraced as a
breakthrough experience. Like returned travelers, those “psychonauts” famil-
iarized with the DMT trance report passing into a “space” that may be thor-
oughly alien or uncannily familiar yet is commonly reported as veridical and
authentic. While the experience is relatively brief, a perception that time has
been prolonged is common. While distortions in space and time, complex
the breakthrough experience 59

geometric patterns, energetic light-sources, and encounters with disincarnate

entities are reported features of this visionary space, the experience possesses
phenomenological diversity. For experients, the DMT trance may be dis-
turbing or it may be exhilarating, give cause for alarm, induce a state of grace,
challenge one’s belief system, inspire re-evaluation of one’s motives, or incite
a sense of responsibility. As a virtual passage event, the “breakthrough” experi-
ence is commonly received as a form of initiation, with users often behaving
like initiates. Returnees share stories with fellow travelers in private gatherings
or personal camping spaces at dance and lifestyle festivals or through retellings
of the adventures of “SWIM” (Someone Who Isn’t Me) on webfora. Some-
times they will elect to be tattooed with designs of DMT’s molecular struc-
ture, geometric shapes, or representations of beings encountered. But if DMT
users behave like initiates, they do so in ways different to conventional initia-
tion rituals. As I explore in this article, the DMT breakthrough experience is
a quintessentially liminal event. That is, while journey makers may “return”
with visions that form the basis for art, music, novel designs, and even life re-
evaluations, the experience appears marked by its liminality (in-betweenness)
more than the operationalization of a postliminal outcome. This is likely the
result of the absence of traditional ritual and ceremonial use-practices—as
with ayahuasca shamanism. With DMT, a liminal aesthetic is embraced and
augmented by users, as I will discuss with attention to experiential (“tripping”)
reports, including those archived on the internet in a vast catacomb of web-
sites, such as Erowid and the DMT-Nexus.1 These archives, along with
numerous literary and artistic media, have informed the research that provided
the basis for this article (see St John 2015a for a fuller discussion).

&

the visionary virtuality of dmt

Alongside other tryptamines (like psilocybin, which is naturally derived from
200 species of mushroom) and psychoactive compounds deriving from plants
like Salvia divinorum (sage of the diviners), Echinopsis pachanoi (San Pedro
cactus), and Tabernanthe iboga (Iboga), DMT is commonly embraced as an
“entheogen”—substances that, by way of their visionary capacity, are said to
awaken the “divine within” (Ruck et al. 1979; Ott 1993). The term “en-
theogen,” and the verb “entheogenic,” arose from dissatisfaction with existing
terms, notably “psychedelic,” which evokes prejudice and suspicion through
the behavior of “deviant” subcultures since the 1960s. By contrast, “en-
theogen” highlighted the therapeutic and spiritually transformative potential
associated with a variety of plants and compounds as they are adopted in non-
traditional contexts and where they are typically subject to prohibition. Out-
side of research on ayahuasca, there has been very little sociocultural research
60 anthropology of consciousness 29.1

conducted on the contemporary use of psychedelics or entheogens (although

see Milhet and Reynaud-Maurupt 2011), DMT or otherwise. The private,
visionary, and illicit character of such experiences pose considerable chal-
lenges for empirical research, with reported experiences typically “the dis-
course of the unmentionable by the disreputable about the unspeakable”
(Slattery 2015, 9). While the “ritual” use of entheogens such as DMT has
been under-researched, Tramacchi’s pathfinding exploration among Australian
DMT users is insightful. As Tramacchi points out, “the actual moments before
smoking DMT and those directly following are, from the reports of most of my
informants, surprisingly free of ritual action” (Tramacchi 2006, 172). And yet
this apparent dearth of ritual “belies the ethical and phenomenological com-
plexity of DMT culture” (64). Tramacchi offers insights on the ethical and
technical components of DMT use (from harvesting to extraction and adminis-
tration) among users in Australia, where the material is often sourced from
native botanicals. Furthermore, he indicates that the disembodied visionary
experience associated with DMT use is “ritual-like,” stating that “perhaps
DMT has little conspicuous ritual associated with it because the visions them-
selves can possess an intrinsically ritual-like quality” (177). It is this ritual-like
quality to the DMT experience that I take up in this article.
As is common to user reports, the DMT user typically departs from their
ontological routine, entering an in-between state nominally referred to as “hy-
perspace” before returning to one’s mind, body, and routine state. One might
recognize in this process the phases of “separation,” “liminality,” and “reaggre-
gation” postulated by Van Gennep (1909) as native to rites de passage in which
novices pass across a symbolic threshold transiting to a new status. While tran-
sitional, the “space-time” (i.e., a non-Euclidian “hyperspace”) of the DMT
event is commonly reported by users to be above the four dimensions of space-
time. This is not the hyperspace of abstract mathematical formulae but a space
that is authentic to the user, often because it is the source of explicit informa-
tion that is “seen,” felt, or otherwise sensed. The encounter with entities is
exemplary. While about half of the volunteers in Strassman’s trials were
observed to have reported entities, in Meyer’s (n.d.) analysis of 340 DMT user
reports collected over two decades (apparently mostly from Internet sources),
sentient, independently existing entities were described in 66.5% of the reports.
A veritable “bestiarum” has been classified: from teachers to archons, elves to
mantids, and therianthropes to tree spirits, among a wide spectrum of beings
(Tramacchi 2006; : ch 6; Hanna 2012). In his study of the “DMT Umwelt,” or
“the extended sensory environment enabled by DMT ingestion,” Tramacchi
discussed the diverse “ultradimensionals” occupying this space, and that appear
to be motivated by a spectrum of purposes, from the benevolent to the sinister
(Tramacchi 2006: 26–30, 108). Near one end of the spectrum there are visita-
tions like those McKenna called the “machine elves of hyperspace,” as
the breakthrough experience 61

identified in public lectures on the subject presented throughout the 1980s and
1990s, and now available in a distributed online archive. At the other, in seem-
ingly less frequent reports, the apparent contact with malevolent entities has
prompted comparisons with alien abduction reports (see Strassman 2001). At
the same time, there exists a spectrum of explanations for entities, “from simple
hallucinations to truly autonomous sentient beings from another dimension,”
to explanations somewhere inbetween these positions—for example, that they
are complex archetypal expressions (Gallimore and Luke 2015: 301). While the
significance of such variation in entities and their explanation has been a sub-
ject of interest among researchers (Meyer 1993; Luke 2008, 2011, 2013; Strass-
man 2008), DMT entities remain an under-researched phenomenon.
DMT virtualization appears to be characterized by three—gnostic, thera-
peutic, and ludic—modalities of use that interact to frame the experience. I
will explain these here. In the first instance, DMT use is closely associated
with the deeply personal experience of gnosis, where the experient arrives at
an awareness of the intrinsic nature of reality (i.e., as it truly is), a truth-bear-
ing destination previously occulted from view. Smoking DMT at the Chan
Koh Hotel, Palenque, Mexico, gave Daniel Pinchbeck an awareness of the
realm “next door.” As he wrote in his entheography Breaking Open the Head
(Pinchbeck 2002), “Behind every billowing curtain, hidden inside the dark
matter of consciousness, now playing every night in disguised form in our
dreams. It is so close to us, adjacent or perpendicular to this reality. It is a
soft shadow, a candle flicker, away.” It was in this realm that those Pinchbeck
referred to as the “cosmic supervisors” had repeated to him: “This is it. Now
you know. This is it. Now you know” (Pinchbeck 2002, 242). DMT and other
tryptamines inaugurate transparencies not atypically involving a realization of
disconnection with, or alienation from, one’s higher self, nature, and rela-
tions. Enabling such an awakening, DMT is often approached as a sacra-
ment, and in this way it can be likened to the use of psilocybin containing
mushrooms, mescaline, or ayahuasca used in nontraditional contexts as
explained by Wouter Hanegraaff:

Entheogenic sacraments like ayahuasca are credited with the capacity of

breaking mainstream society’s spell of mental domination and restoring
us from blind and passive consumers unconsciously manipulated by “the
system” to our original state of free and autonomous spiritual beings. . .
They are seen as providing gnosis: a salvational knowledge of the true
nature of one’s self and of the universe, which liberates the individual
from domination by the cosmic system. [Hanegraaff 2011, 88]

As an integral component of ayahuasca, but also as an independent agent,

DMT carries this liberating potentiality and should be recognized within the
62 anthropology of consciousness 29.1

context of what Hanegraaff (2013) has identified as “entheogenic esotericism,”

which takes its place, previously neglected, in the history of Western esoteri-
cism (see St John, in press). Further investigation could figure the valence of
DMT entities in Western esoteric history in which a variety of “intermedi-
aries” are recognized to be transformative and empowering sources of meta-
physical knowledge (Asprem 2015).
Second, DMT is adopted as a tool with an intended therapeutic efficacy.
This mode is consistent with neoshamanic practice in which psychotechnolo-
gies are deployed with self-therapeutic outcomes. Tramacchi (2006, 29) docu-
mented practices of “self-shamanizing” where modern subjects become “their
own clients and their own healers,” seeking remedies for alienation and “soul
loss” compatible with desired liberation from dependence on biomedical solu-
tions. In such solutions, the work of healing is reckoned to be consequential
to loosening control of the mind: “letting go.” While such may be integral to
traditional forms of shamanism, surrendering control of one’s mind to another
(i.e., the shaman) is troubling within a culture where independence and self-
responsibility are vaunted. While experienced users may become skilled at
“letting go,” as is typical for the neoshaman, they become skilled and
resourceful in the interpretation of their (sometimes adverse) experiences.
Like ayahuasca neoshamanism, and therefore unlike possession trance and
cults of disassociation, the “trance” state obtained with the rapid plunge into
DMT hyperspace, is an out-of-body state (i.e., where one’s body is not typi-
cally animated). At the same time, users possess wide freedoms in the way
they interpret and express breakthrough events (e.g., animated via a variety of
artistic media). While the DMT breakthrough may provoke “cultural criti-
cism” of the kind associated with the purgative process implicit to ayahuasca
neoshamanism (Gearin 2017), next to the guided ceremony of the ayahuascan,
the DMT trance ritual is accelerated, hyper-individualized, and private.
Finally, since its adoption among small circles of users in the 1960s, DMT
has been embraced for recreational purposes, with smoking blends like
“changa” pivotal to this development. The outcomes of optimal blends are
apparent at dance festivals (especially in the psychedelic trance tradition—
see St John 2012) where, as opposed to full out-of-body states, users become
animated in dance. Such use is consistent with the “lavish” (as opposed to
“purist”) use of psilocybin containing mushrooms and other “natural hallu-
cinogenic” substances, as reported by Milhet and Reynaud-Maurupt (2011)
among participants in French dance festivals who will combine use with a
variety of drugs (including LSD, MDMA, amphetamines, cocaine, and alco-
hol). Here, DMT hyperspace may be accessed more for pleasurable effects
than for divinatory purpose and curative outcome. While this approach could
be dismissed as simply “recreational,” an amusement with trivial and inconse-
quential outcomes, it seems sanguine to follow the lead of Ott (1996, 16),
the breakthrough experience 63

who, circumscribing the modern extramedical use of DMT and other

entheogens, preferred the term ludibund and its variant ludible—deriving
from the Latin ludere meaning literally “playful, full of play.” Such terminol-
ogy recognizes that, if not strictly entheogenic, use may be no less serious,
especially given that “play” transgresses boundaries (not only that which sepa-
rates consciousness from unconsciousness, and the material from the spiri-
tual, but lawful behavior from its antithesis). In the age of prohibition in
which DMT is classified as a “dangerous drug” with abusive potential (de-
spite the absence of scientific evidence to support current legislation), play is
suffused with danger. That is, where DMT is forbidden, players are outlaws.
But as the history of countercultures attests, those who act ambiguously with
regard to the law, who play outside the rules, who test the boundaries, are
barometers of innovation, creativity, and cultural change.

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necrotogens and little deaths

While all operational modes discussed above have a shaping influence on
the DMT trance, it is the former two that are especially related to the “break-
through” event, which typically involves transit through episodes involving
shock and awe, dread and bliss, fear and love. Analogous to the initiatory
ordeals of shamans and alien abduction narratives, such an event is not
uncommonly reported to resemble a near-death experience (NDE; Strassman
2001). That intimations of immortality are vouchsafed by tryptamines, and
that DMT offers a glimpse across the yawning abyss, were ideas embraced by
Terence McKenna. Using language attributed to conversations he had with
Rupert Sheldrake, DMT was regarded—in the period just before McKenna
died prematurely from a rare form of brain cancer—as a “nectrotic sub-
stance.” Also regarded as a necrotogen, DMT is a compound that anticipates
the death-state (Bell 1999). That such a compound potentiates a mystical rev-
elatory state in which one may become reconciled to the inseparability of
death and life is figured in the emic word ontoseismic. A portmanteau of on-
tos (Greek for “being”) and seismos (earthquake, from seiein, meaning “to
shake” in Greek), the word refers to the way a breakthrough event may shat-
ter the world image and preconceptions of first time users of DMT. While
the ontoseismic state may be traumatic and overwhelming, “the cause of the
trauma is an Platonic experience of total truth, beauty and love” (Hyperspace
Lexicon). Other commentators have contributed to this discussion. As Erik
Davis (2012) has clarified, “having died, even in hallucination, one can no
longer quite live the same way.” Peter Meyer (1993) earlier clarified the per-
spective, stating that:
64 anthropology of consciousness 29.1

It now seems possible, by the use of the psychedelic tryptamines, to

venture into the death state before we die and to accustom ourselves to
that state. This is the path of the shaman and the spiritual warrior. At
death, when the transition is finally and irrevocably made, the
psychedelic explorer will enter a realm he or she knows from previous
experience, and will, hopefully, not be swept away by fear and
ignorance.

But while DMT may precipitate a NDE, the experiential parameters “near
death” are wide. Horrific or sublime, grievous or joyous, suffocating or
breathtaking, the experience is dependent on complex variables. At one
extreme, the experience may be accompanied by profound dread, not
unlike that reported by a member of The L.A.B. (“Large Animal Bioassay”)
—the group of friend-volunteers of chemist Alexander Shulgin, who self-
experimented with newly discovered molecules—after smoking 100 mg of
DMT.

As I exhaled I became terribly afraid, my heart very rapid and strong,

palms sweating. A terrible sense of dread and doom filled me—I knew
what was happening, I knew I couldn’t stop it, but it was so devastating;
I was being destroyed—all that was familiar, all reference points, all
identity—all viciously shattered in a few seconds. I couldn’t even mourn
the loss—there was no one left to do the mourning. Up, up, out, out,
eyes closed, I am at the speed of light, expanding, expanding, expanding,
faster and faster until I have become so large that I no longer exist—my
speed is so great that everything has come to a stop—here I gaze upon
the entire universe. [Shulgin and Shulgin 1997, 417]

In this epic moment, self-implosion seems to have coincided with a cen-

tripetal expansion, with the bioassayer obtaining unmitigated cosmic terror.
On the other hand, a great many more reports offer variations on a theme
eloquently expressed by underground chemist Nick Sand.

[DMT] opens the doorway to the vastness of the soul; this is at once our
own personal soul, and its intrinsic connection to the universal soul.
When the underlying unity of this fictional duality is seen and felt, one
experiences a completeness and interconnection with all things. This
experience, when we attain it, is extremely beautiful and good. It is a
song that rings and reverberates through the lens of God. Now we know
why we were born; to have this intense experience of the sacred, the
joyous, the beauty, and the blessing of just being alive in the arms of
God. [1Ayes 2001a, 56]
the breakthrough experience 65

Based on his clinical study, Strassman (2001, 221) similarly described the expe-
rience as a merger with “an indescribably loving and powerful white light
that emanates from the divine, holy, and sacred.” Not unlike those having an
NDE event, the DMT experient is “embraced by something much greater
than themselves, or anything they previously could have imagined: the
“source of all existence.” Those who attain this experience “emerge with a
greater appreciation for life, less fear of death, and a reorientation of their
priorities to less material and more spiritual pursuits.”
Whether the DMT experience qualifies as an NDE requires further investi-
gation. While the NDE status might be challenged in the case of DMT
(e.g., Potts 2012 addresses differences), as Tramacchi observes, not untypically,
“the DMT experience is constructed as an analogue of death,” with the expe-
rience reported to reduce the fear of death. Not unrelated, visions of death
and dismemberment are not uncommon to the experience, with death sym-
bolism also endogenous to many rites of passage (Tramacchi 2006, 56).
Accounts Tramacchi documented included “visions of landscapes covered in
blood, vomit, and skeletal remains; encounters with skeletal entities; encoun-
ters with tutelary spirits; and the modification of the subject’s internal organs
through surgical interventions performed by Spirits” (Tramacchi 2006, 93).

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tryptamine liminality
Regardless of the outcome, that DMT appears infused with potential is evi-
dent in the archetypically liminal symbols—such as doors, gates, tunnels,
time-holes, windows—that permeate the experience and user representations.
Sometimes depicted as spiraling wormholes, other times fabulous archways
pulsating in colors not of this world, hyperdimensional polytopes like rotating
tesseracts, or fractal checkerboard vortices imbued with countless arcane sig-
ils, thresholds are native to the DMT experience and its art. Among the most
common symbols of passage in the breakthrough experience is what many
have identified as “the chrysanthemum” effect. For McKenna, the “chrysan-
themum” appeared in the form of Chinese brocade which, with enough
DMT ingested, would dissipate before the experient. Then, as McKenna
described, “there’s a sound like a saran wrap bread wrapper being crumpled
up and thrown away. . . and then there’s a defined sense of bursting through
something, a membrane” (from Stebbing and Kim Klinke 2013). Promoting
the effects of DMT in public speaking engagements mostly in the US and
UK through the 1980s and 1990s McKenna became the lead commentator
on this threshold-popping moment, with his voice sampled more often than
any other individual in psychedelic electronica (St John 2015b). In their
66 anthropology of consciousness 29.1

stunning depiction of the transit, DMTrmx, visual media producers Stebbing

and Kim Klinke (2013) feature McKenna’s voice: “There’s an enormous
cheer that goes up as you pass through this membrane.” The “cheer” to
which McKenna gave voice belonged to the now infamous “machine elves
of hyperspace,” entities that were first encountered in Berkeley in the fall of
1965/66, and who for McKenna were the clown-like archetypes of the DMT
event, which he stated defies categories, is unlexicographical, non-Euclidian,
and grotesque (McKenna 1994).
While McKenna’s views were influential, there has been a great variation
in reported experiences among a networked community of users of DMT
and other tryptamines. Yet the passage experience remains consistent. For
example, for SFos, reporting on an episode from the early 1990s, moments
after smoking DMT there were “all sorts of frequency modulations and
crescendoed stacatto pops as the trip descended.”

This sound data was quiveringly involved with these visual architectonic
dream waters that were beginning to emerge, dripping and slipping
amongst themselves, and my being became overwhelmed by vacuous,
gravity-like suction experiences which impelled me further in. . . The
sucking experience took over for a while then, driving the morphological
acrobatics of spacelove that lay before me. There was something about it
that makes me think of a voluptuous alien seductress with big, fat lips
pulling me to her body in the weirdest feeling embrace ever. It felt like I
was being smeared sensually and lustfully around the space in some sort
of vacuum-tube funhouse. [SFos 2000]

For a great many users, the experience of transit is consummated in the sen-
sation of having gained admittance to an Ur-space of primary wisdom. While
there is great variation, such a “space” is not uncommonly revered as a
“vaulted dome,” which is received as the ultimate destination to which one
arrives following, sometimes epic, passage. Among Strassman’s volunteers,
Marsha, an African-American woman in her mid-forties, having been injected
with a high dose of DMT found herself in “a beautiful domed structure, a
virtual Taj Mahal.” “I don’t know what happened. All of a sudden, BAM!,
there I was. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen” (Strassman 2001,
163). This vaulted space seems to be regarded as much as an “inner sanc-
tum”(a sanctuary and place of worship) as it is a “control center” (complete
with scientific instrumentation and monitoring devices), or carnivalesque “elf
dome.”
Reports often conflate the spiritual, scientific, and carnivalesque aspects of
a sacred panopticon of unfathomable proportions—the point from which all
places and times, past/present/future, can be viewed. Even while returnees
the breakthrough experience 67

bemoan the futility of conveying colors, shapes, and patterns, let alone con-
tent “seen” in that realm, some make comparative reference to the interior
of the dome in the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque in Isfahan Iran, which is con-
sidered to be a work of Persian Islamic genius. Upon first setting eyes on this
marvel, art historian Robert Byron noted that the dome of Sheikh Lotfollah
is “inset with a network of lemon-shaped compartments, which decrease in
size as they ascend towards the formalised peacock at the apex” (Byron 2004,
178). Yet this description offers nothing on the machinic contours of the
space, as in the characterizations of McKenna.

You’re at the center of a mountain or something. And you’re in a room

which aficionados call ‘the dome’ and people will ask each other “did
you see the dome? Were you there?” It’s softly lit, indirectly lit, and the
walls—if such they be—are crawling with geometric hallucinations: very
brightly colored, very iridescent with deep sheens and very high reflective
surfaces. Everything is machine-like and polished and throbbing with
energy. [McKenna 1994]

The mosque and the laboratory also offer little insight on the exotic-erotic
topsy-turviness of this space.

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modes of transmission
The above discussion illustrates the liminal characteristics of the DMT trance
and its breakthrough event. I now discuss the “ritual-like” modes of transmis-
sion that the experience appears to share with rites of passage, a discussion
prompting commentary on the observations of ritual theorist Victor Turner.
As Turner had it, liminality is society’s revelatory mode and culture’s revolv-
ing doorway. In the interstices between prescribed roles and responsibilities,
from the coming of age rituals of the Ndembu of Zambia to modern stage
theatre, liminars (i.e., those in-between) access a “realm of pure possibility”
(Turner 1967). While Turner did not observe the role of psychopharmacology
in his “comparative symbology” of liminality (Turner 1969, 1982a), DMT
hyperspace is quintessentially liminal. In traditional passage rites, including
those associated with coming of age, conversion, or initiation, novitiates are
exposed, in the fashion outlined by scholar of the Greek Eleusian and
Orphic mysteries Jane Harrison (2010), to the ultimate values of a culture—
its sacra. Such is accomplished through, in Turner’s condensation, “what is
shown” in rituals of exhibition (i.e., the display of significant objects), “what
is done” in rituals of enactment (i.e., dramatic performance), and “what is
said” in rituals of instruction (i.e., oral histories; Turner 1967, 102). Through
68 anthropology of consciousness 29.1

these practices that are hedged off from ordinary life, cultural precepts, eso-
teric languages, codewords, and sacred data are transmitted and carried back
into the postliminal world.
These ritual modes by which the cultural sacra may be conveyed hold
striking resonance with the DMT experience, which may replicate, by way of
a strange virtuality, these universal “rituals” of transmission. First of all, there
are the rituals of exhibition. Many hyperspace travelers report being shown
objects of great significance. In a report published on Erowid, Binkie2000
(2010) provided an account of a visitation in a Hollywood Hills bungalow in
1991. Within a short time from smoking DMT, Binkie2000 was greeted
enthusiastically by beings that appeared to be unfolding themselves from all-
pervasive geometrical light patterns. “It was as if they pulled themselves out
of 3-dimensional envelopes that were laid flat within the walls of the now liv-
ing chamber of electric colour and light that now surrounded me.” This
experient continued to relate how these “energy creatures,”.

. . . seemed to clamber over each other towards me, each wanting

desperately to share his/her/its magical abilities with me. . . They pulled
things into existence, as if from pockets of vacuum space within
themselves, like beautifully jeweled liquid light revolving eggs, that
transformed into and out of themselves like rolling smoke infused with
layer after layer of brightly coloured electrical information. [Some of the
entities held out objects] very close in front of my eyes for me to look at.
“Check this out”’ they giggle, “Look, carefully, SEE what this is,
remember it!” “This is how it all works” they seemed to say. The objects
looking like flash drive tickets, seemed to be information storage devices,
full of infinite potential. [Binkie2000 2010]

Another telling example, also published on Erowid, conveys a spectacular

beneficience.

The female being got in my face and communicated to me (not in words)

look at whats ON the pedestal! I looked up and saw a diamond shaped
object that was made of similar stuff to the walls but infinitely more
brilliant, more dazzling, more unspeakably awesome. And as my smile
grew and total awe and amazement filled me, this female being began
flying around the object at great speed, keeping her eyes fixed on me.
She was doing flips and sharp turns and cheering as though she was
celebrating the fact that she had the chance to show me. She kept
communicating to me, Look at it! Look at it! Isn’t this awesome?! This
continued, and I kept my eyes on that unbelievable object as the scene
began to fade. [Universal shaman 2004]
the breakthrough experience 69

As for instances of enactments, of the dramaturgy of the sacra, the following

is Nick Sand’s recollection of an experience after taking DMT intramuscu-
larly (0.9 mg per kg of body weight) while seated on a Persian carpet amid
candles and incense and listening to a recording of Sharan Rani playing a
love raga on a sarod.

I was filled with overwhelming feelings of womanly love and sensuality. I

looked down and was very surprised to see myself dressed in filmy harem
pants and no shirt on. I had a beautiful copper-colored female body—
breasts and all. I had many bangles on my arms, and ankle bells on my
legs. I looked around and found that I was dancing a seductive love raga
to the two musicians facing me playing sarod and tabla. We were
performing in the courtyard of a beautiful Indian temple similar to
Bubhaneshwar Temple, famed for its erotic sculpture and soaring towers.
[1Ayes 2001b, 33]

Finally, as for rituals of instruction, users commonly report their exposure to a

language that can be “read” by multiple senses. The visibility of language was
a noted feature of the DMT trance as reported by Gracie in the mid-1980s.
The beings she encountered were “made of” an extraordinarily “visible lan-
guage” that she “saw/read/felt/heard” all at once, which is suggestive of a
synaesthetic experience (Luke and Terhune 2013). They were entreating her
to the message: “Strong, safe, strong, safe; help, ok, ok, help; safe, safe,
alright!,” which was conveyed in several simultaneous sensory modalities:
“Vision, heard speech, read language, music, song, images and pictures all
happen at once, so that the meaning is multi-dimensional” (Gracie & Zarkov
2000). The experience of a multisensual “language” would become a com-
mon occurrence for those entering these realms. Here is an exemplary report:

They were everywhere jabbering in indecipherable tongues, juggling

incandescent neon microworlds of dancing beings, and morphing with a
zen-like, diaphanous fluidity that remains a primal miracle no matter
how often you lay your all too human eyes on it. The primordial
intelligence being manifest before me was palpable, undeniable,
transcendently amazing—it shook me to my core in a more-than-real
gleeful profundity. All I could do was sit there in divine liquid awe, my
soul gaping wide open, and stare at the incalculable proportions of
bizarreness and the downright weird that lay before me. [Report # 66, in
Meyer n.d.]

How might the user absorb this torrent of information? What is the sacra
conveyed to the DMT user? A breakthrough experience is commonly
70 anthropology of consciousness 29.1

reported to be like receiving the complete encyclopedia of cosmic history,

pancultural awareness, and total biographical recall within a momentary
download, where the user understandably experiences difficulties retaining
the information. Not only is it impossible to stop the rollercoaster and report
on one’s status mid-ride, but the postride debriefing is recondite, as travelers
are exposed to the deluge. This amounted to author Graham Hancock’s
experience when first smoking DMT. “It happened unbelievably fast,” he
recounted. “One second I was outside the wall of colors, mesmerized and
menaced by it. The next second. . . BAM! I was projected through it into
some strange, pristine geometrical space on the other side of the wall” where
“vast amounts of information have been stored.” While the experience was
like a strange kind of induction where Hancock was being shown “how we
do things here,” and where enormous amounts of data were being transferred
to him, he did not have the means to interpret it (Hancock 2005, 517).
While the precise nature of what is shown, done, and said in the DMT
trance is notoriously ambiguous, as repeatedly apparent in user reports, the
transmissions hold significance to enthusiasts. In this virtual space, experients
appear to be offered a direct connection, not so much to the actual meaning
of things seen, done, and heard but to the inherent feeling of the sacred
itself, to which the virtually experienced are exposed, which is felt more than
known or is known because it is felt. This noetic sensation is consistent with
the post-DMT revelations of SFo, who was “existentially surpassed by the
quality of what I had just been a part of.” Yet, the conclusion was solid. “I
definitely felt I had been closer to the core of the real than ever before and
that this mystery is front and center to who we are as humans, who we really
are. I felt very connected to my universe, very sensitive and strong and in
touch with things” (SFos 2000). That there is a common perception that one
is without language capable of identifying the experience that is nevertheless
ontologically significant suggests that the three modes of transmission are lim-
ited in their application to experiences that test the boundaries of sensory per-
ception. In response, practitioners have invented terminology to explain what
they have encountered. For instance, the common perception that one can
“see” light with all of one’s senses is posited via the word “kinesio€optic” refer-
ring to a state where “the body can dissolve in the experience and be left
with just the sensing of light.” Another term, “kalonkinesio€optic,” prefixes “ki-
nesio€ optic” with “kalon,” a Greek term referring to the Platonic idea of tran-
scendental beauty, thereby referring to immersion in astonishing beauty
(Hyperspace Lexicon).
If the transmissions native to DMT hyperspace constitute information evok-
ing or revealing the ultimate concerns of users, the content is esoteric, parag-
nostic, and potentially subversive. In traditional passage rites, Turner knew
that ritual “enfranchises speculation,” allowing “a certain freedom to juggle
the breakthrough experience 71

with the factors of existence.” But, as he further understood, “this liberty has
fairly narrow limits” in societies like the Ndembu where there were “ax-
iomatic principles of construction, and certain basic building blocks that
make up the cosmos and into whose nature no neophyte may inquire”
(Turner 1967; 106). By contrast, in the testimonies of a great many users, pre-
senting users with a cache of possibilities, DMT offers a pneumatic drill
potentially powerful enough to crack the foundations of one’s cultural and
historical awareness. More still, to parse events, the experient is compelled to
draw on one’s own resources and interpretive methods, themselves often
shaped by frames of reference and circulating aesthetics such as McKenna’s
famed articulations on the “machine elves” or visionary artist Alex Grey’s
popular representations. Such lexigraphical and iconographical depictions
enable users to navigate their tryptamine liminality, articulated in an accumu-
lation of expressions comprising a storehouse of knowledge shared among a
virtually networked milieu. All of this suggests that, with DMT hyperspace,
we are in the terrain of a transitional experience rather removed from con-
ventional passage rites and perhaps closer to the voluntary, plural, and frag-
mentary “ritual-like” phenomena appearing in modern leisure settings that
Turner identified as “liminoid” (Turner 1982b). This designation is not with-
out fault, given that leisure practices are not isolated from the work of the
sacred associated with the “liminal” (see Rowe 2008; St John 2008), the con-
cept remains distinct and useful when identifying experimental contexts (e.g.,
the contemporary use of tryptamines) that foment social critique, subversive
behavior, and transformed understandings of consciousness.

&

conclusion
This article has shown that the virtual space commonly experienced by the
DMT user, and regarded as “hyperspace,” is informed by interrelated modali-
ties of use: gnostic, therapeutic, and recreational. I have also indicated that
the “breakthrough” experience typical to the DMT trance is characterized by
modes of transmission that are illustrative of its ritual-like characteristics.
Unlike traditional or conventional rites of passage, this ritualization is private,
internal, subversive, and yet possesses initiatory characteristics and is given
public expression by way of mostly anonymous experiential reports published
on the Internet. What can we learn of the ultimate concerns of the DMT
user by way of the content transmitted in the liminoidal visions of the trypta-
mine trance? While the content of such visions presents a problem for social
researchers, perhaps it is not the content that warrants our attention here so
much as the ontology of othering implicit to the nonordinary state. Given
appropriate conditions of use, the DMT hyperspace traveler is not untypically
72 anthropology of consciousness 29.1

exposed to encounters with beings possessing varying relationships with the

self and that transmit information of varying import, always subject to inter-
pretation. To put this otherwise, the DMT user not uncommonly encounters
the alien character of the self, a self-othering that appears integral to the
experience and is reportedly of great significance to the user. While the nat-
ure of this alien self may be disputed, that which it serves becomes clearer as
we recognize that entheogens have a function consistent with other practices,
techniques, and tools (from yoga and trance dance, to extreme sports like sky-
diving) serving the goals of the human potential movement: self-realization
and growth. The “little-death” native to DMT use, a vulnerability that it
shares in common with these other practices, appears to be elementary to
formulating a strong and independent identity (and self-responsibility), a pro-
cess reliant upon a capacity to overcome the fear of losing control. Further
research on the practice and ontology of DMT use and the negotiation of
otherness implicit to travails in tryptamine hyperspace will shed more light
on the parameters of virtual liminality and its role in the formation of identity
for growing numbers of users.

&

acknowledgments
I thank an anonymous reviewer for valuable feedback provided on an earlier
draft of this article.

&

note
1 Erowid: https://www.erowid.org/. DMT-Nexus: https://www.dmt-nexus.me/. For a
discussion of the integral role of virtual reality (cyberspace) in the rhetorical trans-
mission of DMT virtualization (i.e., hyperspace), see St John (2017b).

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