Episode #2 - DMT 101 (solo episode)
In this episode of keepingGOING, I look at DMT — something that first came onto my radar through working with highly capable people and the questions that can remain when conventional measures of success have stopped being the problem.
We’ll cover the basics of DMT and phenomenology, the extraordinary strangeness of what people report, and why it matters in psychedelic integration. More importantly, I want to ask why an experience this consistently strange has so little place in the wider public conversation.
This is the primer for a series of deeper dives into the phenomenology, neuroscience, psychology and philosophy of the DMT experience.
About the Topic - DMT
DMT — N,N-Dimethyltryptamine — is a naturally occurring psychedelic compound found in a number of plants and also produced in trace amounts in the human body. It is chemically related to serotonin and belongs to the same broad family of compounds as psilocybin. Yet the experience it can produce is unlike almost anything else in ordinary human consciousness.
What makes DMT particularly interesting is the phenomenology. At sufficient doses, the transition can be extraordinarily rapid, with ordinary awareness giving way to an immersive environment that can appear vividly real, highly structured and populated by apparently autonomous beings. People commonly report geometric spaces, altered senses of self and time, encounters with entities and an overwhelming sense of entering somewhere rather than simply experiencing a change in mood or perception.
The striking thing is not that everyone reports exactly the same experience — they don't — but how often certain features recur across people and cultures. The experience can be intensely meaningful, beautiful, terrifying, absurd or all four at once, while remaining notoriously difficult to describe in ordinary language.
For anyone working with psychedelics, that creates an unusual problem. Integration isn't simply about asking whether an experience was “real”. It is about taking seriously what happened to someone, what they made of it, and how an experience this strange might alter their understanding of themselves and the world.
This episode is DMT 101: a grounding in the substance, the phenomenology and the questions it raises before we go considerably deeper.