First Trip Report: N,N Dimethyltryptamine
My first ever attempt at taking DMT was less successful than I'd hoped, but I still came away with some interesting insights.
Okay, here we go. This was my first ever attempt taking N,N DMT. I read the user guide that came with the vape pen pretty carefully but still experienced frustration getting the it to do what it was supposed to do, which is a common problem I have with vape pens. In this case, there were instructions to click the pen 5 times to turn it on and 3 times to change the heat settings. The 5 clicks appeared to turn it on but the light didn't stay on, and attempting to change the heat setting did nothing. It was supposed to change the light from blue to yellow or red, but the light stayed blue no matter what I did. So eventually, I just decided to fuck around and find out.
Preparation
“Fuck around and find out” I did, literally: One of the ways I prepared for this trip was to have an orgasm to relax first. Perhaps this contributed to the “loving” vibe I encountered. I can recommend orgasms generally.
I did a few "trial" runs in order to ensure I was getting the correct dose. Instructions on the 200mg vape pen claimed that the pen gave about 1mg/s and that a 30mg dose was in the range of a "strong psychedelic dose." Although truthfully I wanted to aim for a breakthrough, I thought the classic 3 hits and a strong psychedelic dose was a decent way to start off as someone who's never taken DMT before. So I started by using the stopwatch feature on my phone to practice just inhaling for 10 seconds, holding for 5 as according to the instructions, and pausing the timer to exhale. 45 seconds on the timer total would've gotten me where I wanted, or so I hoped.
Additionally I did some yoga before taking up my position for my trip, sitting up in bed. In hindsight, I might not have been in the best position to get full lung expansion, but it didn't feel like there were anything wrong with the hits while taking them.
Ingestion
Upon the first hit, I started to feel buzzing and vibrating accompanied by blurring/separation of the visual field. I only tasted the foulness of the DMT (which I knew about going in) during this hit. At this point I had to remind myself to be brave; felt a bit like being in a rocket ship about to take off. I allowed myself to inhale and exhale freely in between hits, which I wasn't sure whether it would affect the trip or not, but by the 2nd hit I knew almost instinctively was the wrong procedure. The buzzing intensified and it kind of started to feel like something was going to happen whether I was ready or not, so again I had to remind myself to be brave before I took the 3rd hit. I executed the 3rd hit correctly according to my plan, and at this point it seemed like there was nothing to do but wait for the effects to kick in.
The Trip
I wasn't sure whether to keep my eyes closed or open, but when I closed them, I could see geometric shapes and patterns, diamonds and circles rotating around each other, although they were faint. I could feel myself hanging onto my senses, trying to pay attention to as much of what was happening as possible, and I heard the voice of Terence McKenna echoing in my mind: "Pay attention!! Do not give in to astonishment!"
There was also a sound like clockwork, very loud and strongly rhythmic, that seemed in time with the rotation of the patterns behind my eyelids. I was watching my mind for signs of fear, panic or regret, but none quite came. In the background beneath the clockwork was some kind of buzz, ommmm, that even reminded me of a spaceship.
I could feel and sense, rather than actually seeing, the presence of trickster entities, that they were in the room with me. Their presence felt distinctly male, but not masculine in the traditional sense, more androgynous. As my mind clung onto its sense-making faculties, I felt as if the attentional centers of my consciousness were separating, and that the faint geometric patterns rotating around each other were representative of those spheres. I had the sense that my consciousness was going somewhere else, that I was being transported out of my body back to the place where those spheres or constituents of consciousness came from. I had the distinct sense that my consciousness was *more* than my body, although I was still aware of my body, and having some mildly bothersome and annoying side-effect of having just taken my best shot at vaping a psychedelic drug: I could feel some uncomfortable heaviness or swelling in the back of my throat, and heard my breath very loudly in my ears as I gasped for breath in the aftermath of the hits. It was like my awareness was trapped back there, in the space where my breath was coming in and out of my throat, and the sensations didn't quite belong to me, but I was trapped back there, not quite able to leave.
The presence of the entities throughout this was teasing, but as the effects intensified slightly, it also felt very loving. As if they knew that, no, this wasn't it, I wasn't going to breakthrough this time, and I had definitely not achieved a "strong psychedelic dose" because even the faint geometric patterns that I had seen behind my eyelids vanished when they flickered open and didn't come back after that. I was reminded repeatedly and insistently that they loved me.
Here is the thing, I can't be absolutely certain, but I do have the sense that during the peak of the trip, "I" winked out somewhere, at least for a moment. I remembered fighting and clinging on to pay attention and remember as much as possible, but then became aware of what I was doing and relaxed into the experience. My sense of time became distorted and disappeared, and I realized as I came to afterwards, that I had no idea how much time had passed, because I hadn't been watching the clock, but also my regular sense of the passage of time had been distorted.
The Aftermath
My entire body trembled and shivered unpleasantly as the buzzing continued after the peak, and although I was cold and pulled the blankets over me, I was also weirdly conscious of my body in a way that I hadn't been before the trip, particularly my groin and armpits were sweating and felt so weird and alien to me that I contemplated taking a shower after the fact.
Other post-peak insights included the thought that the real "me" that had taken the trip existed at the end of time, and was going back to check things out as a human, which was how I knew by the 2nd hit I wasn't going to break through this time. This “me” was probably who others refer to when they speak of a “higher self.” The experience of this trip was also the first time I was compelled to believe that consciousness existed non-locally, outside of the body, because of my experience of my attentional centres separating or coming apart, and the sense I was going somewhere else, although the process didn’t complete.
Bizarrely, rather than attribute my lack of breakthrough to user error, while I was coming down off the peak, I had the insight that there was something uniquely different about me that my default waking experience was just much more uncanny and psychedelic than the average human's, and that I was "locked out" of the more intense psychedelic states other people encounter. I have had this insight before on weak trips on mushrooms, that my life itself is the trip, although those too could be strongly attributable to other mitigating factors/user error. Almost impulsively, after the peak of the trip I picked my phone up and tweeted this:
The reference to the "User Guide" is literally about the pamphlet I had in my bed with me, which I picked up first thing as soon as my wits came back to me, to figure out where I'd gone wrong. However when I picked it up there was something that struck me as subtly off/funny about the red and blue lettering of the pamphlet, that my neurons had been through the cosmic wash and a meta-awareness emerged, like I was a player that had been briefly unplugged and wired back into the game (which I'd had preexisting spiritual thoughts and beliefs about, the theme of "life as infinite game") and frustratedly trying to debug the experience I'd just had. There was enough of an after-affect that I considered just taking more, but didn't.
Another strange insight: "The more you go back and read, the more you go back and read." These words echoed in my mind, giving the sense of being halfway between deeply imparted wisdom and cheeky in-joke, though I could not divine their true meaning or significance.
I made myself lay there for a while longer to make sure most of the effects had worn off before getting up and walking around and getting water etc. although I felt the urge to get up earlier, the pamphlet had imposed some fear of negative reprecussions. Again my awareness felt subtly different despite not having had a strong trip, subtly brighter and cleaner, as if it'd been "freshened up" a bit. Similar to the effect after waking up the day after a nice mushroom trip or microdose, but without the sensory processing sensitivity and tenderness or lethargy. I can tell after I take mushrooms that I need a day to let my brain heal and integrate, avoiding loud noises or other intense stimuli, otherwise I can make my sensory processing sensitivity worse, almost like having a mini-trauma. The aftermath of DMT seemed to have all of those positives and none of the negatives.
One other thing I'd noticed was that immediately after, my thoughts seemed to flow in congruous synchronicity with my experience. I have been experiencing this sense of synchronous "flow" continuously since around the start of 2023, but it leaped out at me after the trip. Someone posted a meme about DMT that showed up as soon as I opened Twitter again. I also played this song that the founder of the Qualia Research Institute, Andrés Gómez Emilsson (@algekalipso) posted on Twitter directly after, and the lyrics seemed to be about my trip:
So, in conclusion, I'm not sure if I failed to get the pen on the right heat setting, or just needed to take more, but almost certainly breathing in between hits ensured I wouldn't get past any sort of threshold of mildly psychedelic visuals and sensations. I got some pretty interesting insights nevertheless. I hope you enjoyed this trip report; I may write more like this in the future. Feel free to comment and share any thoughts or tips you might have.