storkshead 09/13/07 (Tue) 06:13:52 #64762349
Dimethyltryptamine, or DMT for short, is one of the strongest hallucinogens in the world. Being a Schedule I drug in the US, it's fairly hard to come by— but God, are some people desperate to get their hands on it.
Why? Many people say that when you smoke or inject it, it's like being thrown into an alternate reality. Intense visual and auditory hallucinations combined with an altered sense of space and time that lasts for only about five minutes, but for its users can stretch on for entire lifetimes. For some it's like a near-death experience.
But back when I was in high school, my brother died while on it. He was in a van with some of his dumb stoner friends, smoking the rumored 'magic drug' as they drove along. They ended up crashing that night, and the paramedics said they weren't sure what killed him first — the impact or the fire afterwards.
They also mentioned the drug— mostly due to the fact the cops were getting involved and they planned on interrogating the survivors— and that small note led to my extensive research of DMT. I just wanted to know how he felt when he died, but little did I know I'd opened up a rabbit hole beyond my understanding.
In the early '70s, Terence McKenna and his brother set off to the Amazon basin to research hallucinogens. The shamans there used a medicine called ayahuasca as a means to emotionally heal, speak with the dead, and see the future for hundreds of years.
While the effects of the DMT you normally buy in the States only last for a short time, ayahuasca is brewed from the leaves of plants containing the drug, and a single brew can result in up to fourteen hours of hallucinations. The brothers, intrigued by this, dosed up on ayahuasca for a whole eleven days.
At the end of their binge, they claimed to have come into contact with a "raging universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien." They named these otherworldly beings "self-transforming machine elves."
They seem to be a common link in all DMT hallucinations. In fact, Terence spoke of the elves in one of their lectures:
"I sank to the floor. I [experienced] this hallucination of tumbling forward into these fractal geometric spaces made of light and then I found myself in the equivalent of the Pope’s private chapel and there were insect elf machines proffering strange little tablets with strange writing on them, and I was aghast, completely appalled, because [in] a matter of seconds… my entire expectation of the nature of the world was just being shredded in front of me. I’ve never actually gotten over it. These self-transforming machine elf creatures were speaking in a colored language which condensed into rotating machines that were like Fabergé eggs but crafted out of luminescent superconducting ceramics and liquid crystal gels. All this stuff was just so weird and so alien and so un-English-able that it was a complete shock — I mean, the literal turning inside out of [my] intellectual universe!
This went on for two or three minutes, this situation of [discontinuous] orthogonal dimensions to reality just engulfing me. As I came out of it and the room reassembled itself, I said, ‘I can’t believe it, it’s impossible.’ To call that a drug is ridiculous; that just means that you just don’t have a word for it and so you putter around and you come upon this sloppy concept [that] something goes into your body and there’s a change. It’s not like that; it’s like being struck by noetic lightning."
Notably, all those who have encountered these beings claim they traveled to an alternate dimension. But the most interesting part overall?
Researchers speculate that DMT is not only found as a natural chemical in certain plants, though.
Some believe our brains release it when we're dreaming.
storkshead 09/13/07 (Tue) 06:18:24 #64765342
I've been investigating into DMT and these machine elves myself. Firstly, I tried to take a drug that is said to increase the chances of you remembering your dreams, Huperzine A. Was damn expensive (twenty bucks a bottle), but at least not illegal like DMT.
No luck, though. It was interesting, but I wasn't able to recall anything special. I even ended up having a lucid dream with this handy trick where you look at a clock twice. Shouted into the sky 'I want to see the machine elves!'
Nothing responded.
At this point, I was getting a bit… Frustrated, to say the least, so against my better judgment, I got into contact with one of my old marijuana-dealer pals, who managed to find a guy selling DMT.
It cost me a lot of money— he said it was in high demand— so I pawned my phone off. No use in having one if there's a computer at home anyways.
I went home afterwards and injected the drug into my shoulder. The effects were pretty much immediate— I was thrust into a world of cascading colors and symmetrical shapes— it's impossible to describe with words. It truly was otherworldly.
Then, I saw it, a machine elf looming above me with long, spiraling horns. "What are you?" I asked.
It replied in a ruby Fabergé egg-looking object, which floated down and phased through me. "I don't understand. Can you… speak English? What are you doing here?"
Nothing. I could feel a strange fragileness in my heart as I screamed:
"Answer me!"
A blast of scarlet eggs shot out towards me as its two symmetrical arms raised up slowly. And for a moment, through all the strange collapsing sounds and spiraling shapes and colors and synthesia… I could hear a single, quiet whisper:
"Wake up."
My eyes shot open to our dull world in a cold sweat as I looked over to my clock. Only a minute had passed.
Nothing, nothing, nothing. I had learned almost nothing of worth. If anything, it just gave me more questions, driving me deeper into the rabbit hole of this magical drug.
Had they cast me out for a reason? I had no way to know. The DMT I had bought was the last of it the dealer had. I tried to find some more, I really did. Everyone known for selling it was either out of stock or rotting in prison. I needed to know. For some odd reason, I just had to. Had the elf done something to me? I'm not sure.
But shortly after this, I came across another interesting piece of data:
Not only is DMT produced when we are dreaming, but also during birth and death.
storkshead 09/13/07 (Tue) 06:26:41 #64766461
We're all familiar with dreams. There's no way to describe them overall— they can be intense dystopias to mundane little adventures. But how are they connected to these strange DMT trips?
It's simple, really. When humans are under the influence of DMT, they're able to see the inner workings of the world— the machine elves. They keep the world together and write our destinies. Everything that happens is because of them.
But when we dream, we no longer exist in this world. Our brains create a new, temporary universe to exist within. Or, in other words, we become like those machine elves. We construct our own world— however, that is never remembered— and we place ourselves into it. This can be further proved by the concept of lucid dreaming, where we can consciously control what happens.
However, DMT also appears in our brains during birth and death. Why? Because when we are born, a new conscience is formed and inserted into the world. And when we die, that conscience is freed. We're able to create our own universe. Our own Earth.
Can you imagine what that would be like? The power you could have? The life you could create for yourself? It would be perfect.
I just have to experience it for myself. But how? There's still so much to learn, so much to do, so much to think about…
Could it be that this world is but a dream, an illusion?
That we're the same beings as those elves— albeit on a lower level of power?
That we're going to die, only to find that we created the universe we had been living in for such a long time? I'm not sure. Of course, nobody can be sure.
But… when I look back on my experiences— when I had met the machine elf who struck me down, demanding that I wake up, I heard something else in its voice. I heard it clear, clearer than anything else I've ever heard in my entire life. The elf's voice…
It was that of my brother's.
Well, there's only one way to answer all of my burning questions.
I hope that you're all real. But I have to figure it out, I have to know if I can meet him again. Do with the above information whatever you will, but my curiosity has been chipping away at my sanity ever since my brother took his final dose of DMT so many years ago. Nothing else matters.
Goodbye, Parawatch. You won't be seeing from me again.
