0:00-37:50
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DMT entities, machine elves, and the hyperspace breakthrough: what people report meeting under N,N-dimethyltryptamine, and why the reports match. A Johns Hopkins survey of 2,561 people found that most described a conscious, intelligent being, and that more than half of the atheists in the sample stopped identifying that way afterward. This episode covers Rick Strassman's University of New Mexico research, Terence McKenna's machine elves, the Hyperspace Lexicon, and the listeners who get locked out of hyperspace entirely.
Show notes:
A Hungarian chemist injected himself with a compound he had synthesized in 1956, and the first thing he wrote down was that there were creatures there. Thirty-five years later a psychiatrist at the University of New Mexico ran the first legal psychedelic study in the United States in two decades, and half his session notes involved his volunteers meeting somebody. In 2020, Johns Hopkins surveyed 2,561 people who had encountered an autonomous entity under DMT and found that most of them believed the being was conscious, intelligent, and still out there after they left.
This episode is about the machine elves, the insectoids, the half-animal figures, and the vocabulary a forum full of strangers built to describe them. It's about why so many accounts converge when the people giving them have never spoken. And it's about the part nobody planned for, which is the travelers who show up at the door and get turned away.
Along the way I get into predictive perception, Caputo's strange-face research, Shibutani's work on rumor as improvised news, and the liminality framework that explains why an experience with gatekeepers feels like an initiation. I also come back to the Lanmaoa asiatica episode, because the little people in Yunnan complicate the tidiest explanation available.
The book behind a lot of this episode is Rick Strassman's DMT: The Spirit Molecule, and it's on The Strange Shelf along with Terence McKenna's True Hallucinations: https://www.amazon.com/shop/influencer-b7bd654b/list/1OX5UZT4WR668?ref_=aip_sf_list_spv_ons_mixed_d
The companion essay goes up this week on Substack and takes the Yunnan question further than I could take it here. Paid subscribers get ad-free listening and the full essays: https://substack.com/@psychstrangepod
Until next time, stay curious and stay strange.
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