Hancock stopped using the plant, explaining that it felt as if a monkey was lifted off his back, leading to a mental clarity that improved nearly every aspect of his life.

But Hancock also points out that there are other entities in the DMT realm that don’t have our best intentions in mind. He mentions negative entities that want to hoodwink us, much like an archetypal demon. He says he met many of these entities when he was shown his death, describing them like something out of a Hieronymus Bosh painting.

That Ayahuasca Mother Hancock so endearingly references, often shows itself in the form of animals as well. A snake is a common entity taken by Mother Ayahuasca, and in his book, The Cosmic Serpent, Jeremy Narby asserts that the DNA double helix was shown to humans through the serpentine entities of Ayahuasca.

The serpent has been represented throughout various cultural symbols, such as the caduceus, kundalini life force, the Mayan god Quetzalcoatl, and the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

Jaguars are another DMT entity often experienced through Ayahuasca. In fact, shamans are said to be able to physically turn into a jaguar at will, something attained through becoming one with this entity over the course of many ceremonies.

Daniel Pinchbeck’s DMT Demons

With many psychedelic experiences, users are often confronted with bottled-up emotions, forcing them to deal with issues that may not be pleasant – the death of the ego, as it were. These feelings, buried under layers of emotional scar tissue, can be difficult to deal with and can manifest in the form of ostensibly physical demons.

This can be incredibly frightening during the trip, but users often report a sense of accomplishment or closure for dealing with them after the fact. The term ‘confronting your demons’ can become very literal on psychotropic compounds.

But with DMT, this isn’t always the case. Rather than entities born from individual emotion, people describe meeting entirely autonomous entities, so bizarre and alien that one can’t possibly imagine having created them with their mind. Hence, the reason Dr. Griffiths is so intrigued.

In his book, Breaking Open the Head, Daniel Pinchbeck describes meeting negative autonomous entities that continued to haunt him for weeks after his trip with a DMT molecular variant called DPT.

Similar to some accounts of DMT entities, Pinchbeck said the beings he encountered expressed disdain or pity for his presence as a mere human. Others have said they experienced indifference from DMT entities or messages saying, “Ok, you’ve seen it, now leave.”

But with DPT, Pinchbeck was subjected to a terrifying world of gothic insects, lizards and winged creatures, describing it as a postmodern demonic MTV psychedelic. He realized in retrospect that taking a drug of that magnitude without the shamanic ceremonial aspect was disrespectful and maybe a factor in his frightening experience.

In the weeks following, Pinchbeck had strange synchronicities, bizarre dreams, and what he describes as a poltergeist in his apartment. Mirrors fell off the wall in the night, strange foreign bugs appeared, and unusual physical sensations plagued him. He confirmed the presence of negative energy with others and held an exorcism to rid himself of them.

In the end, a Buddhist meditation helped purge him of the demon, bringing his life back to normal. To Pinchbeck, the entities met on this DMT analogue couldn’t have been more real or more autonomous.

It’s hard to tell whether Dr. Griffiths and his colleagues will be able to uncover just what or who exactly these DMT entities are based solely on stories from strangers on the internet. Dr. Rick Strassman conducted a more in-depth experiment with his work creating the book and documentary, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, though Griffiths comes from a different filed of expertise.

Are these entities really autonomous beings living in a parallel dimension not too far from our own, and will probing deeper give us a better understanding of how they may relate to reality as we know it?