Let me tell you about my chemist friend, a naturally paranoid person, he’s always asked me to keep his identity secret, so I’ll just refer to him as “My chemist friend”, he’s been a chemist his whole life, and is one of the better chemist in the world, so he claims, ever since I met him back when he was a college professor we’ve had a deal, I give him weed, he make psychedelics for me, it’s a pretty sweet deal for both of us, I love growing weed, he loves synthesizing chemicals, win-win all around. He lives pretty close to me, a 20 minute drive away, so I visit him fairly often, I’ve always seen him more as a friend than a drug dealer. I’ve had a countless number of trips in his house; so many that I bought a heart rate monitor to keep on myself whenever we were trying something a little risky or untested. He prefers to stick to LSD, shrooms, and mescaline, the usual big three, paranoid as always about trying research chemicals. But I’ve always found a certain allure in having experiences that many people will never even get the opportunity to experience… But on this occasion, among many, I was nervous. I was going to go to a part of the DMT “alien data-space” as McKenna called it, that few, if any had ever even dreamed of going to before.

First a little background on DMT, if you smoke somewhere around 50-65 mgs of this stuff, you’ll be tossed into an entirely different world, but not one you see through a drug hazed stupor, you see this insane world of billions upon billions of details, colors, and shapes feeling oddly sober, DMT doesn’t bend your mind the way acid or even pot does, it’s incredible, and easy to lose yourself in amazement. But, as soon as you come down, your memories of the trip will fade almost exactly at the rate and manner of a dream, like sand slipping through your fingers. The more you trip, the more you can take back with you… But it’s virtually impossible to bring everything back, and, if you take a dose over about 100 mgs, it’s virtually impossible to bring anything back, at least as a beginner.

About 2 months ago my chemist friend and I started looking for a way around this. We decided that the best way to do it would be intravenous injection, the idea was that if we kept the brain figuratively submerged in DMT, I’d be able to take part at least a little bit of the excessive trip back with me, how much I’d take back was anyone’s guess; seeing as even after regular use for decades, I’ve still never been able to remember anything in a trip above 250 mgs, but, the idea was that if we kept the brain in the breakthrough continuously, it would be able to get a hold on the trip and slowly adapt to the strange new environment of the DMT-verse, it was a bit of a stretch, and I wasn’t even sure if it would work, but I knew it was going to be fun. Compare trying to remember a dream, and trying to remember a dream that lasted 24 hours.

(Now, as a disclaimer, I need to explain to anybody who might be reading this that they cannot try this at home. I just happen to know a very good chemist; he can make me incredibly pure DMT. Most if not all street DMT is extracted, not synthesized, and therefore, has impurities, if you inject these into yourself, you could get a nasty blood infection and die, and so if you’re curious, smoke it and I guarantee that it will be very, very insane)

Next, we needed to find an amount that I could do that wouldn’t kill me, I initially suggested 30 grams over a period of 24 hours, but after a little deliberation, we decided to cut that down to 24, about a gram an hour, we set up a system where we would inject a dose every 10 minutes, and to avoid the rapid onset of tolerance, we’d up the dose each time exponentially.

Now, of course I was worried about dying, I couldn’t find any records of anybody injecting 24 grams of DMT, and I’m sure if I did it all at once I’d probably die from a blood clot if not an overdose, so we asked a nurse, my sister in law, to monitor my vital signs, and, if she believed at any point another injection would be life threatening, we’d stop immediately.

I had some worries about the trip, dying would be an inconvenience to say the least, but I was less worried about it than I thought I’d be, I trusted my in-law and my chemist friend, but most of all, I trusted myself, and I definitely didn’t think I’d OD, I find that my tolerance to DMT goes away in about 45 minutes, and I’ve smoked as much as 2 grams in an hour before, so I was pretty sure my body would metabolize it at rate I could handle, or at least not die from. I was more worried about being trapped in a hell, for 24 hours, similar to my experience with Datura, which was not fun at all, but DMT doesn’t seem to be nearly as much of a malevolent chemical as a lot of people make it out to be. But these worries could never have possibly quelled my desire to experience something beyond the scope of myself, something beyond everything, to go further.

I arrived at my chemist friend’s house around 11 A.M. on a Saturday; we were planning on starting the trip at 1. My in-law was set to arrive at 12. I talked with my chemist friend, smoked a joint, meditated for a little bit, and then took a nap on his couch. My chemist friend awoke me around 1 P.M. I walked up stairs where my in-law was sitting; she had been smoking a cigarette out the window and listening to the Grateful Dead. Darkstar was playing. I couldn’t think of a better song to plunge into my trip with.

I lied down in his guest bed, it was soft and comfortable. My in-law set up the I.V. system they use in hospitals, and this way I wouldn’t have 144 different holes in my arms. Before this experience I had only injected DMT twice before, the first time it wasn’t as strong as smoking it, but it seemed to last longer. I distinctly remember not breaking through. The second time I broke through, but it was so similar to smoking it that I felt injecting it was just a waste of time, plus you need somebody to do it for you, and I find my favorite time to trip is in my garden around 3 A.M. on a clear night, and my wife is asleep by that time, but, I digress. I was injected with my first dose of DMT, 200 mgs. I felt the slightly cool sensation of saline going through my blood stream. I remember feeling the DMT kick in just as Jerry started singing.

The walls soon changed into geometric patterns, I realized that no matter how hard I looked at them I couldn’t even begin to concentrate on them, they were simply too complex, whenever I tried to figure them out they changed into something else. My in-law morphed and changed into a variety of figures from Winnie the Pooh to Satan, while my chemist friend melted into the celling as a cat grew wings, turned blue, and subsequently walked through a wall… Everything was normal so far. As far as DMT trips go, this was nothing, and any experienced user will back that up. I closed my eyes, ignoring the intense 3D hallucinations that seemed to circle up and around my brain. I felt nervousness deep in my stomach, aching its way up, I pushed it down, trying to almost step over it, clearing my mind, looking for the barrier. Terrence McKenna described it as almost like breaking through a tin foil barrier, I’ve always thought of it as climbing a wall, but, apples and oranges. I feel almost like my brain is moving forward, out of my body, then it hits a wall, and I slowly feel myself being lifted up and over the wall, then I reach the top and tumble over, losing all sense of self as I fall, until the sensation of falling is gone, along with my body. I didn’t open my eyes, I just didn’t have any, I was only a conscience, only an entity.

Hallucinations exploded into every corner of my being, I didn’t watch or see anything, I experienced everything, every detail rocking me to the core of my being, I saw things that were impossible, incredibly jeweled objects in four dimensions twisting and breathing, growing and shrinking. I felt my mind go to ease as I soaked in the intense geometrical patterns, observing the oddly human way they stretched and danced. I was in a place I was comfortable, I had been here many times before. I relaxed into the details of my new realm, waiting patiently for my next dose with anxiousness dancing around in the back of my mind. I tried to expel it, but to no avail.

The next dose came on gradually, I couldn’t pinpoint the exact injection time, but I slowly noticed the colors becoming even more outstanding, and the details becoming incredibly sharp. The objects and shapes began twisting and spinning faster and faster, until the colors stopped being colors and the shapes stopped being shapes, they all exploded into pure energy, shooting through me and radiating my soul, and the details sharpened up so much that they consumed every fiber of my being. All I saw was white, pure white. I felt like my consciousness was being stretched and pulled across infinite amounts of nothingness. It didn’t hurt, it didn’t feel good, I felt nothing, and I was beyond the sensation of touch. I forgot who I was. I couldn’t remember the real world; I didn’t know what I was or where I was. True ego loss came upon me; I didn’t know what I was or where I was. I forgot all language, looking back on the experience, I find it hard to describe the way I thought without words, it wasn’t with pictures, I didn’t remember color, and all I knew was white nothingness. I guess the way I though was with emotion, if that makes any sense. I felt a deep and powerful feeling of emotion that I couldn’t box into “love” or “fear”, it was all emotion, the entire spectrum of human emotion racing through my consciousness, overwhelming me, pouring in and out of my soul. I don’t know how long I was in this strange DMT limbo, time wasn’t a concept I was aware of. Then I felt something, the best way to describe it would be ice cold water being poured directly into my skull, then slowly trickling down through my neck and around my body, wherever it trickled to, my body materialized. Imagine a cigarette being smoked in reverse, with the ember being the cold water feeling. I could now look around, but, my world was still white. Slowly, the coldness gave way to a new sensation.

Warmth, it felt good, I had a body. I realized that I was on my back. I turned myself over, and tried to get up, but I didn’t know how to walk, I didn’t know anything. So I crawled forward, inching my way forward, on and on, until I hit a white wall with my head. It was taller than me, exactly how tall I couldn’t tell. I had to stand up to get over it, using the wall for support, I got on one knee, then I stood up, it was much easier than I had expected it to be, walking was a strange feeling, but it felt so natural and easy that I felt no desire to ever go back to crawling. The wall was still taller than me, but I could feel the top with my fingers if I stood on the tips of my toes. I wanted to get over this wall, away from the whiteness; I wanted something different than this limbo. I jumped, and raised my waste to the top of the wall; on the other side was a black void. I raised my right leg to the top of the wall and rolled myself onto it, sitting at the top, on my right was only blackness, and on my left only pure white. I jumped into the void.