My near death experience on DMT
I smoked pure DMT which is the strongest psychedelic known to man according to the internet.
The yellow DMT powder smells and tastes pleasantly floral and smokes much smother than tobacco or weed. DMT is a potent hallucinogen that produces intense visual and auditory hallucinations, as well as euphoria. It is known for its rapid onset, which lasts only a few minutes, and its intensity is much greater than Ayahuasca.
I was lying on a sofa bed in a barn overlooking the countryside in a sleeping bag, looking out across the field. The sofa’s wide armrest gave me a table to rest the pipe on. The rapid onset of fewer than 10 seconds left me little time to move and get comfy after inhaling.
(If you want to skip the preamble, feel free to skip ahead to the 60mg)
With the help of precision scales the dose can be titrated rather accurately and I started with 0.015g which is just above the threshold according to my research.
15 mg
My vapourisation technique was uncalibrated on my first attempt. I started inhaling too early and only got half a hit. This resulted in pleasantly warm bodily sensations like a cannabis puff that lasted 2–3 minutes. I was surprised at how un-residual the experience was 10 minutes later.
20 mg
I had a sense of being sucked into a spiral of pixelated geometry that enveloped my field of vision.
The bed I was sitting on shot out into the field in front of me. However, it was still framed by the garage door surrounding the view and felt like the outside was rushing towards me while euphoria ignited every atom of my being.
It was the weirdest optical illusion with my visual perception melting into pixely 80’s video game graphics which did not allow detailed perception but gave everything a caleidescopic merging along sharp outlines.
I looked up into the exposed wood roof rafters above me and was struck by how beautiful the back lit, neon coloured, ever repeating alignment seemed. I blinked. Suddenly, the colours reversed and I saw a second and third neon blazing roof structure overlaid on top of the first.
I thought to myself, “This is so weird!” as I saw the field’s plants emitting spirals of energy and thistles grow larger and more prickly. After 3–5 min I was back.
30 mg
This is where the magic happens according to my research, a break-thought dose, where a sense of losing yourself in the experience is meant to occur.
On exhalation, my vision turned dark and I felt myself tilting backwards and sideways and was momentarily stuck in that position. I felt some confusing unease and checking myself I realised that I had no air in my lungs because I had forgotten to inhale again!
A vision came to me of speeding through a dark tunnel, and the movement of my body caused the geometry of my horizon to change. I tilted my head to the right when a white light rectangle appeared under me and grew upwards.
I saw a white flaming cube outline tilt in sync with my body as I rushed along the dark highway.
While this was going on I could sense my mother shouting into my head; “What the heck, crazy shit are you doing now boy!” I also sensed my best mate from growing up chiming in a deadpan “Yeah that is super reckless what you’re doing.”
I opened my eyes and was back in the weird low-fi visual scape with the field’s colours oversaturated as previously.
Then I noticed my dog lift her head next to my legs to look out over the field. I saw blue gas flame energy burst emitting from the swirls of her fur. The gentle DMT haze dissipated after approx 7–10 min.
I decided to call it a day after getting told off by my mum. They say you meet the mother with Ayahuasca but I was surprised to meet my own mum on pure DMT!
Reporting to a mate I likened it to cliff jumping where from the bottom you think to yourself; ‘yeah, doable’ but once you glimpse the void you think; ‘Yikes! I will take this one as slow as feels comfortable.’
Mother’s Day
Two weeks later I got a couple of hours to myself and I decided to have another go where I left off.
On the first attempts that day, I struggled to get my equipment to work. It consisted of a small bong with a special bowl for the powder which had filled up with brown sludge from my previous attempts. I noticed the sludge became viscous after heating and cleaned off easily which improved the efficacy. My triple Bunsen burner cigar lighter also required some tweaking.
Initially, I loaded 35mg and then 45mg, but I couldn’t get over the weird kaleidoscopic visuals I had experienced before.
60mg
Feeling impatient from my previous attempts but with properly calibrated equipment the pipe started to fill with thick smoke.
While drawing on it I could feel a large swell building up inside me.
I closed my eyes, leaned back with a sense of foreboding and felt like I was being grabbed by the pineal gland in the centre of my brain and sucked into a black hole and time stopped.
In the next instant, I found myself in a state of extremely alarmed confusion with a thousand thoughts and images rushing into my mind. I was paralysed and immersed in a hallucination with geometrically framed images spinning around my inner eye in opposing directions.
My first clear thought was 3 simultaneous thoughts:
I just stopped time.
Something broke — like I created a tear in the universe and
Something very, very serious just happened.
Then I got a sense of my mum by my side speaking firmly into my ear “Niels can you hear me… Niels, NIELS!!!
Something felt very, very wrong. I thought; ‘You’ve finally done it, this time you managed to blow your brains.’
Still sensing my mother’s terrified distress I opened my eyes to find myself lying on the pavement, on my chest, next to the entrance door of our home in Berlin. The first clear thing I saw was the word ‘FEUERWEHR’ written in fat black letters over the back of one of the paramedic’s jackets. In the space between us, I saw tubes coming from first aid machinery.
I also sensed the presence of my brother and sister-in-law who were clutching each other in the doorway, extremely agitated and concerned. I didn’t actually see them but rather I experienced the situation through their soul’s emotional distress as I drifted away and above the scene.
My next thought hit me like a brick: “I am dying… WOW… this is me passing on.” I could sense the fear of the people around me and wondered; ‘Is this real, is this actually happening?’ I felt groggy and noticed the urge to wipe my mouth which seemed like it was full of liquid. I felt some spit on my chin which made the illusion so much more real and I just couldn’t make sense of what was happening to me.
But then the realisation struck; ‘I can move! I am not dying …thank god… I am reanimating!’
I relaxed and drifted off into a different hallucination finding myself floating through complex roof beams but the memory of what had just occurred had not fully worn off. I still felt my people’s deep fear for my life and their love for me instantly turning into bitter sorrow for losing me.
The experience dissipated after a couple of minutes and as I came back to the room I found myself grateful, euphoric and appreciating the ayauascaesque afterglow as it got calmer and the effects vanished.
It felt like waking up from a bad dream and sensing a deep relief that it was not real.
After 10–15 min I was back to normal but still felt rather shell shocked.
That afternoon, I went for a long walk with the warm spring sun on my face and marvelled at the beauty of life and laughed out loud several times, incredulous at what I had experienced and how good it felt to be alive!
With a couple of days altitude since my trip, I am starting to rationalise this monumentally significant event.
In bygone ayahuasca ceremonies, I remember other participants describing the feeling that they were dying but nothing prepares you for the visceral experience of a near-death experience which I now believe I had, albeit a simulated one.
DMT is present in trace amounts in many different organisms (or all?) and there is a new school of thought believing it might be a neurotransmitter but for what, no one knows. The going theory it that the purpose of the DMT held in our pineal gland is to flood the brain at our time of death and I feel blessed to have had that illusion without paying the ultimate price.
I think the spinning images at the onset were my life flashing in front of my inner eye and I interpret the thought of me having stopped time through the souls of the people who know me and their shock from learning of my passing.
This would also make sense of the feeling of having broken something, like a thread in the fabric of the universe becoming irrevokably to an end.
The occurrence of my mother showing up in both potent experiences can be seen through the lens that DMT surfaces emotion at a profoundly deep level and the most primordial emotion being a mother’s love for her child.
Epilogue:
In case you are wondering:
Is Niels okay? — I can assure you that I feel fine now even though it took me a couple of days to make room in my mental space for the most terrifying 5 minutes of my life.
Was it a bad trip? — Yes. I have had a bad trip before on mushrooms and the feeling of having gone too far, of having broken something within me and the helpless paralysis to do anything about it felt very similar.
Would I do anything differently if I could wind back time? — Maybe. The first attempt made me feel a bit too cocky and I pretty much skipped any mental preparation in the week running up to the second experience and in hindsight, that feels like a schoolboy error.
Also, effectively going from 30 to 60 mg was unnecessary and I missed out on the full effect of the medium dose range.
Do I regret doing it? — No. The days after the experience felt like a gift and a bonus and I hope this feeling never wears off!
I write this a bit more than a year later and the magnitude of the experience has definitely changed me. For the better.
I still have flashbacks to details of the experience but there is an odd sense of having cheated death, what surprised me most about the expereince was the irreverance which my passing stired in me, it was scary but the thought of dying didnt
Most importantly, it opened the door for me to have more psychedelic experiences and pick up the positive work I had begun with Ayahuasca and I can honestly it alleviated my depression.
