An adventure in space and time
So, let me set the scene…
I’m in a large chamber in the basement of a hospital sat next to an enormous MRI scanner. I have five people fussing over me attaching all sorts of devices to me: an EEG cap measuring my brainwaves, a cannula in my arm for intravenous administration of the drug, ECG electrodes on my chest to measure my heart function, a device on my finger measuring my pulse and oxygen levels, a strap around my chest to make sure I’m still breathing, and finally, to top it all off, sound isolating headphones and a face mask for total sensory deprivation
At last they are ready. They press an emergency stop button into my hand. I tuck it into my pocket as they explain how I’m to use it in case of an emergency. I wonder what that emergency would be.
They lower the blindfold and get me to lie back carefully on the scanner so that my head rests in a special cradle. I feel four hands holding my head in place and some sort of padding is inflated around my skull so that I can’t move an inch.
People continue to fuss over me. They slide bulky electromagnetically shielded equipment between my legs. But then this pushes my legs too far apart on the scanner bed so they fasten some straps around my legs to hold them in place.
I sense another section of the cradle being lowered over my face. Someone pushes down hard and I hear it clicking into place millimetres from my nose. Then they cover me in blankets and tuck them under my body.
I am unable to move, unable to see, unable to hear.
I sense movement above me. “Are you okay?” someone calls out, the sound barely audible. I say “yes” but I’m not really sure I am. I’m as relaxed as one could expect really, the experimenters had done their best to make me feel comfortable, but I can feel my heart racing so fast with excitement I’d have been worried about having a heart attack if I didn’t already have an ECG attached to my chest and a medic on standby.
I feel the scanner bed lift up and I am slid backwards, headfirst, into the narrow MRI scanning tunnel. Trussed up and bound, I feel like a mummy in a sarcophagus. The scanner starts up and a deafening noise begins, so loud even the headphones don’t help much. I feel the sound reverberating through my entire body.
A voice speaks into my ear through the headphones, the line crackles and it feels as if the voice is inside my head. I am reminded to keep completely still with my facial muscles as relaxed as possible (so as not to affect the EEG). For the hundredth time I wonder what I have signed up for. I swallow nervously. And then I immediately chastise myself for tensing my jaw and mouth.
I realise this isn’t going to be easy.
And this is all before they’ve injected me with the drugs!
So why was I here? Why were they doing this to me?
Well, I had volunteered for an experiment of course! A crazy, fantastic and terrifying experiment! I was turning 40 later that month, what better way to commemorate the occasion than a legally sanctioned journey into the depths of my mind? The mental equivalent of a bungee jump I bravely told my friends. My wife, perhaps more objectively, described it as a minor mid-life crisis.
I had been following the recent renaissance in psychedelic research for a few years now. Universities around the world have have been driving forward a program of experiments into mind-altering drugs and how they can be used to positive effect in society. Studies into ketamine and psilocybin have shown very promising results as a treatment for depression. And the same goes for MDMA and post-traumatic stress disorder. A friend happened to forward me a request for volunteers for a new study into DMT and I bravely (or perhaps foolishly) decided to put myself forward.
DMT, or N,N-Dimethyltryptamine as it is known in chemistry circles, is a naturally-occurring psychoactive drug present in many species of plant. It is renowned for being one of the world’s most powerful psychedelic drugs. But usually it has no effect on humans when ingested as we have an enzyme in our body that breaks it down within minutes.
This means there are only two ways to trip on DMT. One way is to take it with a chemical that inhibits the enzyme — and this is the basis of Ayahuasca, a psychedelic brew first concocted hundreds of years ago by the indigenous tribes of South America — and the other way is to take it in such a high dose that the enzyme doesn’t have a chance to break it down before it floods your brain.
And so this is why I ended up lying in that scanner with a medic about to inject me with 20mg of the world’s strongest hallucinogen.
I had been in the scanner for around 10 minutes before the infusion began. I was already excited and could feel my heart thumping in my chest. I was focusing on my breathing to keep calm. Then I felt a brush at my leg, I knew it was likely to be the medic picking up the cannula attachment to begin the infusion and this gave me a powerful adrenaline rush. Within seconds I heard the crackling voice in my headphones announce that the experiment was about to begin.
I began to feel a burning sensation in my arm, spreading through my veins. But my nervousness faded and a sense of calm washed over me as I began to see patterns in the darkness. I relaxed in the knowledge that my trip was finally starting and that I was safe and looked after in this strange metal contraption.
The hallucinations first appeared in black and white. They were shifting concentric Arabesque patterns, but fairly opaque. I wondered whether this was it. It seemed very gentle. Was this really what it felt like to trip on one of the world’s strongest hallucinogen? As it turns out, I was a little premature in this thinking…
Very quickly, the visuals became stronger in colour. A maelstrom of movement, too difficult for my mind to follow. Suddenly, somehow, and without even noticing the transition, I found myself popping out into a completely alien and yet strangely recognisable space…
The space around me was all-encompassing and incredibly detailed and vibrant. It was a cavernous architectural space that seemed both other-worldly and familiar. Somehow I felt as if I had been there before. Everything was in bright pastel colours — lots of pinks and greens — and there was a metallic or plastic sheen to everything. It felt almost kitsch.
The surfaces were ornate but in a futuristic style, covered in iconography that I was unable to recognise or interpret. There were checkerboard patterns on many of the surfaces and other decorative features. If you had asked me to describe the theme I would say it was “extra-terrestrial spaceship meets M C Escher” (interior decorators, take note!).
But this certainly wasn’t a still scene from a painting. Far from it. Everything was fluctuating and changing at a rapid rate. In fact this constant fluctuation was the most breathtaking aspect — wherever I looked the dimensional structure of the architectural space seemed to be changing. Shapes and structures were twisting and flipping in on themselves — turning inside out and outside in. Alcoves and ledges were expanding to become rooms and spaces in themselves. But in these newly formed spaces, the concepts of up and down and in and out were shifting in direction. The scene before me was like an incredibly complex unfolding optical illusion — Schröder’s Stairs in cinematic technicolour.
I felt myself being pulled away and zooming into other architectural spaces all with this similar style and dimensional transience. In these spaces were objects, some of them floating, some of them embedded in the surfaces of the space. These objects were also constantly changing. Flipping, re-constructing and folding in on themselves in new dimensions. The objects were brightly coloured, plastic-like but hyper-real and sharply defined — like the whole space around them, everything was incredibly clear, my vision seemed sharper than it had been in years.
Near the beginning of the trip I could still feel the sensations in my body. They felt familiar to me, comforting even. At first I felt like I had become very light, lifted up, as if my being had been shifted to another plane. Then as the trip progressed I had the sensation that my body and the scanner were separated from me — still there, but somewhere else and just faintly connected. I didn’t feel like I was physically in this space that my mind occupied. I was just a disembodied being, with no way to interact with the environment.
I felt a mixture of emotions… I felt relaxed and comfortable, as if I had been there many times before. There was a sensation that I was not alone, that there was a guide showing these sights to me, educating me. Looking around I couldn’t see anything that seemed to have personality or agency but still the visions were so breathtakingly complex and ordered that I felt there was no way this vision had come from within the depths of my own mind (I felt this with such certainty both during the intense peak of the trip and afterwards as I lay there in scanner processing what I had seen).
The visual experiences began to change so quickly that it became a sensory onslaught. The transitions and fluctuations sped up until at some point all my senses seemed to fold into one seething mass of synesthesia — the incredible visual feast that I was within, the sound of the scanner, which had become a form of music, the sensations of my body, the scanner bed and the straps, the cannula in my arm and the burn of the DMT, my awareness of the experiment and the world outside the scanning chamber, they all became one.
I was carried away in awe and ecstasy. The synesthesic mass split into multiple dimensions and as it fell away it revealed a sense of something crystalline below. Underneath it all lay exposed the fractal nature of this dimensional multiplicity.
Despite this chaos, I was just able to keep in my mind the purpose and the context of the trip. I felt like an intrepid explorer entering an alternate reality in the name of science. The massive noisy scanner around me was a comforting presence and I felt a connection back to the team in the lab. I felt like I was in a psychonautic bathysphere exploring uncharted depths. A slim connection extending all the way back to the lab in the form of the vague synesthesic awareness of my body and awareness of the context of my trip.
Gradually the sensations began to weaken and I found myself hallucinating in a much more gentle way. I was still being shown breathtaking visuals but these were now two dimensional and more organic in nature. They were beginning to fade in vibrancy and decay before me even as I watched. My synesthesia had waned and in contrast to the intensity of the earlier part of the experience, these latter hallucinations felt almost mundane. But I wasn’t disappointed. I was in a profound state of post-euphoric bliss.
I slowly became able to think more clearly about the real-world. I began to ponder how I could explain this experience to others in words. But I didn’t yet feel the need to engage in the world or the reality of my distinct bodily sensations or the noise of the scanner. I just lay there completely relaxed in a puddle of exulted bliss observing the slowly fading visuals.
When the scanner was shut down, just twenty minutes later, and I was slowly pulled out, it was strange to find myself back so soon in the real-world, carefully being unstrapped and detached from all the medical devices. But I felt like a new person, refreshed and reborn. Ready to re-engage. Re-invigorated by one of the most powerful and significant experiences I have ever had. The psychonautic explorer was back!
