Scientists to study strange hallucinations of drug users

‘Machine elves’ and slinky toys Its users have described crossing into another world and seeing “machine elves,” aliens or cartoon cats. One woman reported being swarmed by apparently alive Slinky toys.

Now scientists at a prestigious U.S. university are launching a study of some of the stranger hallucinogenic effects of the drug Dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, termed the “spirit molecule” by another researcher.

Investigators from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., are asking volunteers to complete an online survey if they have “had encounters with seemingly autonomous beings or entities after taking DMT.”

The Hopkins team is headed by Roland Griffiths, a behavioural biologist with a history of studying psychedelic substances that produce “mystical-type and near-death experiences.” They call their latest project important research that could be personally worthwhile to the subjects, with the goal to better characterize the DMT experience.

DMT is a “tryptamine” molecule that occurs naturally in many plants and animals, but has been synthesized since the 1930s.

IT FELT LIKE I WAS WITH DECEASED, AMAZING AND REALLY IMPORTANT PEOPLE.

Users often smoke the substance, and report almost immediate hallucinogenic effects.

Within a minute of taking a first drag of DMT, psychedelic aficionado Terence McKenna said he felt like he was bursting into a space whose walls were “crawling with geometric hallucinations.”

“What arrests my attention is the fact that this space is inhabited,” McKenna said. “You break into this space and are immediately swarmed by squeaking, self-transforming elfmachines ... made of light and grammar and sound that come chirping and squealing and tumbling toward you.”

As a University of New Mexico psychiatry professor, Richard Strassman administered nearly 400 doses of DMT to 60 volunteers for a groundbreaking study of psychedelics in the early 1990s.

Many of them described deep interactions with nonhuman beings, describing them as “jokers,” clowns, aliens or “helpers,” he reported in the book DMT: The spirit molecule.

Neuroscientist Michelle Ross described another variation of the DMT trip in an interview on the reset.me YouTube channel.

“There were little cartoon cats going around, and ice cream cones,” she recalled about her first time smoking the drug.

And then, “it felt like I was with deceased, amazing and really important people. I was surrounded by people who were influential, but cared about me and wanted me to be there and be safe. It was an oddly emotional feeling. It was very abstract.”

Other users have also shared their DMT-entity experiences online.

“There was this creature that was, like, dancing around me and it looked like the thing from the Nightmare before Christmas,” said one man. “As it danced around it would shape shift and spit out these colours.”

Strassman theorized that DMT is made naturally in the pineal gland and that its presence in the human body could explain similar phenomena that occur without taking drugs, such as neardeath experiences or even so-called alien abductions.

Meanwhile, researchers are finding increasing evidence that, when carefully administered and monitored, psychedelic drugs could help in treating conditions such as PTSD and anxiety.