DMT (Changa)

Age: 24

Weight: 125 lbs

Dosage: 1 bowl, smoked

Setting: My house

Preface: I tried DMT several times, though none of the experiences were particularly noteworthy. Just a mild psychedelia, visuals begin to creep in, it builds like a plane ready for takeoff, just for a minute, then- the engines sputter, it brakes on the runway and rolls to a stop, everything’s faded back to baseline. I mostly attribute this to user error in consumption/a baseline tolerance. I’ve tried it sandwiched in bowls of cannabis, in lightbulb vaporizers, digital vaporizers, dab rigs, a homemade “machine”, all of which yielded subpar results. Well I had come across Changa (DMT infused MAOI-containing plant matter (Typically B. caapi but can be others) which can be smoked from a bowl with regular smoking technique, fairly idiot-proof.

            The setting was sitting on my bed in total darkness and silence, save for ambient city noise. I did not keep rigorous timestamps for this experience. It followed a narrative with a fairly uniform intensity throughout.

            When I was ready, I lit the bowl- the plant material smoldered but was quickly smothered by the DMT, bubbling and sizzling as it melted. I held each hit in for 10-30 seconds, but the smoke was harsh and it was difficult not to cough it out. First hit, felt nothing, second hit, felt nothing, third hit (a big one), I began to feel a little different, flashes in the darkness beyond my usual HPPD, a sense of lightheadedness and unease, the tension, the energy, it all built up. There was now a little nest built, a crystalline cherry encrusted with embers of plant material. Each hit felt like it was making my body lighter, a stimulating shot of helium through my veins, I perked up as it crept up on me, my extremities tingling with excitement. It felt like rain falling on my face, taking me apart bit by bit. The bowl was finished and the ambient sounds around me had coalesced to a flanging buzzing, steadily increasing in pitch and frequency. I lied down on the bed as the visuals coalesced into a great radiant form, pulsing with concentric striations. I closed my eyes and prepared for what was to come.

            There was no plunge, not so much of a rush as a gentle stream, continuing at a consistent intensity for what I would gauge was about 3 or 4 minutes. I began to worry again that it would not be enough, that I was undershooting again, I was wishing that I had more substance to undisputedly push me over the edge. Fiending and fiending, it will never die. I had been gently passing through a tunnel, ringed by tessellated rhombic forms, all flowing and pulsing with stripes. The visuals were nonetheless dim and indistinct, their details muddled in darkness.

            I began to worry that my worry about not achieving an intense experience would interfere with me truly surrendering to the experience- what a contradiction! I must live in the moment, I must surrender to it, I am not trying to take it, it is trying to take me.

As my mind wandered, the stripes radiated faster, my heart pounded faster, my extremities crept numb. It felt like my veins were pulsing and throbbing, twitching under my skin, especially in my skull. The rushes of blood in my temples were pelting my neurons with shockwaves. My muscles tensed and I felt as though I was vibrating too fast to be contained in my body. As the stimulation and numbness build, I get a distinct sense of disintegrating, my body starting to vibrate away bit by bit.

            The radiating forms became more distinct, larger, pointier, faster, more aggressive, the colors becoming more vibrant, the energy seizing through this, more and more of myself being sheared apart by this grand acceleration-

            My room began to shrink around me, a strange 2-dimensional abstraction uselessly and annoying floating in my field of vision. I felt like I could see it with my eyes closed.

            And then- this divine wind, so furiously taking apart everything, began to dismantle my head. It felt like the back of it had exploded into the wall behind me, which suddenly gave way to a great inky blue void, an abyssal cavity dotted with multicolored constellations. My brain was a tornado spinning deeper and deeper into the abyss, all I could do was lie there and feel the pieces orbit in a great tunnel before coming apart and disintegrating into the void.

I feel like I could see my room from every possible angle at once as it shrunk down to a little island floating in space, meaningless and frail, just like me, shrinking away and leaving oozing tracers behind it as it faded.

            My consciousness, freed from my skull, drifted into the space along with all the rubble of the rest of my mind, asteroids orbiting a mysterious light in the distance that I was slowly being drawn to.

            Upon my arrival I was greeted with a complex of floating orbiting islands, all of them overlaid with shiny chrome and gold. Temples with gleaming coiled columns, sweeping marbled surfaces, and swift dances of light across their graces. Silver gildings dripped from their interstices like honey from a beehive. Their garden was overcome with sprites of phasing whistling and whooping noises, contorting themselves into my ears, constructed from the ambient sounds around me

            My field of ‘vision’ is suddenly taken again by radiating forms choking in from the edges, ringed with a white aura. The visuals turn into great 3-dimensional polygons like snowflakes crusted in pyramids, great and green and reminiscent of goat heads- Suddenly a flash.

            A large glyph appears right in the center of my vision, remaining dead center no matter where my eyes track, it is roughly in the shape of Polynesian tribal designs with sweeping tangled forms and sharp edges. Four chains of smaller similar patterns extend outwards in the four cardinal directions. It is stark plain white but is ringed in a colorful aura that is always changing shades. It is constantly self-transforming. It is surrounded by pixelated images of sky and clouds.

            There is a sudden sense of presence. The glyph is flashing and transforming directly in response to my sentience, signaling, flaring, transmitting- it is not language or speech, it is thoughts and essences planted directly into my head accompanied by a persistent sense of scratching and warbling. Voices spoken from broken entanglements. It greeted me, let me know through cryptic terms that it would be my liaison in this realm. It planted thoughts to that essence.

            I still felt like I was zooming through a tunnel, my head disintegrating behind me. The sense of motion was persistent.  Beautiful images blossomed as I sunk deeper and deeper into a glassy still pool with flower petals floating upon it, radiant red crystals and flourishing fronds tipped with iridescent dewdrops, rushing through the glory of this glowing garden, my thoughts were chaining freely into one another, touched by flower buds, dancing gracefully like a figure skater. For my sake the glyph generated an image of a beautiful forest painted in brush strokes with a frozen pond where my thoughts could wander and glide and gracefully dance with one another, entirely uninhibited.

            Then, unexpectedly, it offered me the ability to generate images- to hand me the controls for a second. This was a shock, we had hardly met. In hallucinatory explorations, I have always held controlled image generation as a lofty goal, and perhaps it read my thoughts, but I was stunned and honored to receive the offer any way. I meditated to try and clear my mind, brush all the forms and colors out of the way, until eventually I had a blank black canvas.

            I tried to think of a coherent image, but I couldn't, I didn’t even know where to begin to what to make, this was all so exciting. My sight lines generated showers of sparks and bursts of color everywhere they landed. This all feels like a dream, I wonder if I’ll remember it, I’m having trouble piecing together a coherent form.

This all feels like a dream.

Will I remember any of this?

            I suddenly snap back, I am not in the same place. It appears I’ve become distracted, that I’ve exited out of this generational program. I felt so honored to have been given the reins but it appears I have failed. The glyph matter-of-factly transmits to me that I failed because I got distracted. That I have to focus, while surrendering myself to the experience. It leaves me alone to ruminate more.

            I begin to think of the report I want to write about this and realized I am becoming concerned with remembering and recording this experience, to the point where it’s interfering with the present live experience itself. I feel like I am trying to watch more memories while my arms are already completely full of memories. I envision myself inside a palace, armfuls of stones, trying to pick up another. It felt like trying to catch a waterfall with a butterfly net. A brief admonition: “Just surrender yourself, keep moving”.
And so I do- I feel what’s left of my physical body dissolve and come apart bit by bit, I surrender my head to the soundwaves generated by nothing and everything, they chew me apart, sparks and light are shooting off into infinity.

            I begin to wonder about the glyph appearing to me so vividly, and in my deep thinking about it, it appears. I begin to wonder, are we friends? Are we on speaking terms? Or does it feel like I summoned it? It seems to be asking me why it is there, impatient, irritated. I indeed appear to have summoned it, but I have nothing to talk to or present to it, I made it come out here to gawk at it.

I sheepishly transmit the confession that I merely wished to witness it.

It seemed incensed at this frivolity.

            The background turned a swirling flow of red and orange, the glyph turned to metal and rapidly exploded a series of arms outwards into an disc bearing down on me, composed of angular spiral arms in thorns, the shape reminiscent of a sonnenrad. White glowing teeth appeared at its epicenter, bearing the full terror of their form and gums at me. I felt spinning wheels of spikes trace across my existence, cutting up everything raging and flashing.

I seem to have angered it.

            But it felt unreal, it didn't feel true, it felt like a façade. I transmitted to it that it SEEMED angry but didn't FEEL angry. Suddenly, its fury died, its energy faded. It admitted that it had just been messing with me, testing me? Did I display some sort of special sensitivity? It quickly bristled with spines again to humble me before dismissing itself. Here was floating alone again in a void, confused, manipulated, a forest of pillars covered in glyphs, with grand radiant canopies stretched between them.

            This was a gentle place, serene like water dripping in a sunbeam in an abandoned building. It was a garden, graced with fountains and ivy climbing over the pillars, with flowers in bloom everywhere I looked. Memories cascaded like snow or pollen, coming to rest gently on and around me- memories of places I had grown up in, of my first psychedelic experiences as a teenager, of my childhood home, they all came back in stunning, pure nostalgia, like revisiting the places on a warm summer night. All of these places and memories were uninhabited, with placeholder phantoms standing in the place of the people who were otherwise present in those memories like wispy psychedelic mannequins. I began to experience a deep sentimentality, I began to think of my family, my parents, of being raised as a child.

            I was stricken with worry about their fate amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. I began to project how I would feel if they were to pass from it, to empathize with that potential future trauma.

            But I also quickly reminded myself that that wasn't real, that I can't predict the future, that there is no use to needlessly worry and feel afraid, and so I returned to the experience.

            By now it had begun to feel like a movie, where even if I like it I still kinda wanted it to end soon. I felt that I had overstayed perhaps? Where had my liaison run off to? I was adrift, sitting in the backyard of the party while the lights and music muttered nearby. I opened my eyes, my room had a dense cloud of smoke hanging in it, tracing out beams of light from the windows. This does nothing to lessen the intensity, the distinct sense of rush and motion in my veins and nerves. There are a lot of triangles and spiky forms running across my vision leaving tracers like a glitching computer. I lie back and let out a long sigh. It feels like a cold breeze is gently blowing across my face, I feel like I am in the dappled light of a forest floor and like I am surrounded by a muted and luxuriously soft grass.

            I look at the time- it is now about 30 minutes from when I began smoking. I put on music, it musters up a bit of synesthesia, playing out in residual colors, tracers, streams of neon polygons. I get up to open my window to let out the thick smoke and turn my lights back on. The glyph never even stopped in to say goodbye.

            The next two hours of so in the night were an excited stimulation, I still felt energy pouring into my limbs and light visuals still danced in the corner of my eye. I felt blissful to come back into my comfortable room, to have had such an exhilarating experience.

The night faded into the same as any other night, the chemical receded from my neurons,

I missed it dearly, and I hope to visit again soon, there is still much that I need to learn.