What It’s Like to Trip on DMT

What It’s Like to Trip on DMT, When Jonathan Bell first tried DMT, he was already well-acquainted with psychedelics—at 34, he had taken acid and used mushrooms on dozens of occasions. Even so, he was staggered by the intensity of his first DMT trip. 

“It’s such a bungee jump into a new realm that it can be quite disorienting,” said Bell, now 44, who lives in Denver. Since that first trip, he estimates that he’s used DMT hundreds of times. 
As he thought about what it’s like to take the drug, he made a motorboat sound with his lips. “It is a completely immersive experience of seeing and feeling,” he finally said. “Within the space of a breath, you go from regular waking consciousness to something wholly different.”
Describing what any drug “is like” can be difficult. But users say the profundity and variety of the DMT trip makes it especially difficult to put into words. The late biochemist Alexander Shulgin was an early drugs-as-therapy pioneer. In a 1997 book that he wrote with his wife and collaborator, Ann Shulgin, he described one of his personal experiences with inhaled N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. What It’s Like to Trip on DMT.

“I was being destroyed—all that was familiar, all reference points, all identity—all viciously shattered in a few seconds,” he wrote. “I couldn’t even mourn the loss—there was no one left to do the mourning. Up, up, out, out, eyes closed, I am at the speed of light, expanding, expanding, expanding, faster and faster until I have become so large that I no longer exist.”

Shulgin’s account touches on several hallmark features of the DMT experience, including the rapid onset and the overwhelming sense of one’s self and identity evaporating into something grander and more intimately enmeshed in the fabric of the universe.

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While DMT is less well-known than other hallucinogens, some consider it the ur-psychedelic—the alpha and omega in any true psychonaut’s arsenal of mind-expanding substances. It’s often referred to as an “entheogen,” or a substance that can facilitate divine or spiritual experiences. It’s the main psychedelic (significantly diluted) in Ayahuasca brews. Some refer to it as the “god molecule.”

“It’s sometimes described as literally being shot off into DMT space,” said Roland Griffiths, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University. Griffiths is the founding director of his university’s Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research who has published research on DMT. He said the drug produces “a profound shift in conscious experience.” Not long ago, this may have sounded like loopy hippie hyperbole, but Griffiths is one of the world’s leading experts on the use of psychedelics as medicine, and he said the neurological research on DMT suggests that it could provide real psychological benefits among people with conditions such as depression and anxiety—a view that some recent clinical trial data support.

And then there’s the fact that DMT has been found to occur naturally in the human brain. No one can say with certainty what it’s doing there, but some researchers have speculated that it may underlie some of neuroscience’s more inexplicable phenomena—including some aspects of near-death experiences.  

So what does this mean for you, a layperson who’s curious about DMT or possibly even curious about trying DMT? Here’s what we know for sure about this relatively mysterious, but definitely intense psychedelic.