There’s often a threshold for how weird something can sound beyond which most people stop taking it seriously. One of the quickest ways to kill a conversation, for example, is to start telling someone about that strange dream you had. Perhaps an even more surefire way to land on the far side of that threshold is to tell them about your trip on one of the most bizarre, powerful, and under-studied psychedelic drugs: DMT, or, if you speak chemistry, N,N-dimethyltryptamine.
Tales of hyperdimensional worlds populated by various intelligent creatures — tiny machine elves eager to teach you the universe’s secrets or giant praying mantises that seem to harvest human emotions — are commonplace in DMT trip reports.
Because these trips are so bizarre, even compared to other psychedelics, DMT has largely lived on the fringes of the ongoing revival in psychedelic research and therapy. Ketamine clinics are spawning left and right. MDMA therapy teeters on the brink of government approval. Legal psilocybin centers are set to open across multiple states. But DMT, once called “the nuclear bomb of the psychedelic family” by Harvard psychologist and psychedelic hype-man Timothy Leary, has lagged pretty far behind in mainstream attention and scientific interest.
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That’s slowly starting to change. “We unashamedly think there’s value here, beyond the weird stuff,” neuroscientist Chris Timmermann, who leads the DMT Research Group at Imperial College London, told me. Like its more conventional psychedelic counterparts, DMT could play a role in psychedelic therapy, offering a new treatment for conditions ranging from depression to cluster headaches — and it could even serve as a kind of rocket fuel for the science of consciousness.
The compound naturally occurs in a variety of mammals and plants. “DMT is everywhere,” wrote chemist Alexander Shulgin, who created nearly 200 psychedelics through the late 20th century. Humans have been ingesting a slow-acting form of it for at least a few hundred, and perhaps thousands of years by boiling DMT-containing vines and leaves to make the psychoactive brew ayahuasca. But scientists didn’t figure out how to isolate, extract, and ingest pure DMT on its own until 1956, which branched the drug off from ayahuasca into its own history.
On high doses of DMT, the self does not disappear. Instead, the self feels largely intact, but transported to alternate worlds reconstructed out of the chaos.
If Timothy Leary was the “high priest of LSD” in the 1960s, the eccentric philosopher Terrence McKenna became DMT’s rhapsodic bard a generation later. “My entire expectation of the nature of the world was just being shredded in front of me,” McKenna recalled of his first trip. “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.”
Like other psychedelics,