The Shuttle to Oblivion

DMT

Citation: Mango-Z. "The Shuttle to Oblivion: An Experience with DMT (exp96521)". Erowid.org . Jun 22, 2012. erowid.org/exp/96521

DOSE:

1 hit smoked DMT (powder / crystals)

BODY WEIGHT: 165 lb

BackgroundI am a 19-year old male with a full-tuition scholarship to an SEC university where I major in Biology and Spanish. I am a Pre-medicine student with 79 completed hours and a GPA of 3.67. I was also a top-tier student in high school; I scored a 31 on the ACT, including a perfect 36 on the reading section. I had stayed away from drugs in high school, except drinking on rare occasions. I joined a fraternity my freshman year, which came with the weekly binge drinking associated with Greek life. I began to smoke weed occasionally, which is practiced less in fraternity life, but is prevalent in almost every chapter on campus. By Spring Break of my freshman year, I was smoking almost every day with my fraternity brothers. I decided I was going to try psychedelics when summer began. In the year since then, I have sampled a plethora of psychedelic drugs, including: mushrooms, morning glory seeds, mescaline, ecstasy, LSD, and DMT. I smoked DMT twice in the summer of 2011. I will describe in detail the experience I had the second time I smoked DMT.ExperienceMy friend Kaz told me he had acquired enough DMT for three people to trip. So the next day, we drove down to my roommate Warrens lake house to smoke it. Kaz split the yellow-orange crystals into three piles about the size of a nickel. Kaz and Warren had their own bowls to smoke the DMT; I did not have my own piece, so I decided I would smoke out of an old bong that Kaz had brought along. Kaz packed up all three pieces with DMT under a layer of kush, and we went outside to trip. Warren suggested that we go out on the lake in his canoe to smoke the DMT. I thought it was a good idea, but Kaz said it was too dangerous. We decided we would smoke under Warrens deck; this decision probably saved all three of our lives. We sat in lawn chairs with our pieces ready to go, and played some Pretty Lights on Warrens phone to trip to. I had smoked DMT once before, but I had not broken through, so I decided I was going to take as big of a hit as I could this time.I put the flame on the bowl and drew in slowly, to avoid torching the DMT, for as long as I could. I exhaled and took a quick glance at the bong filled with thick DMT smoke. I inhaled sharply and sucked every last bit of the smoke deep into my lungs. I held the smoke in for about 7 seconds before exhaling, and I was already tripping harder than I ever had before. Everything in my vision became so vibrant that it surpassed my understanding of what a color is. I tried to remember, but it was already too distant a memory to recall in my current state of mind.I think I closed my eyes, but I will never be sure. I felt a voice say, Come with me, and I went. I instantly lost connection with everything I had ever experienced since my birth. I could not even think in my own language or remember anything at all about my past. I broke into a state of consciousness without the perceptive lens of being myself, or a human, or even a living organism. I not only felt dissociated from my body, I was separated from my soul. I experienced an eternity in an instant. I had blasted into oblivion, free of any shred of conscious thought. I think I was in ego-death for about ten or fifteen minutes of human time.Coming back to the concept of having a body, I thought I was lying dead in the street in the presence of my mother and an ambulance crew. Then Kaz said, Guys, we just blasted the fuck off. I remembered that I had smoked DMT, and came most of the way back to reality. The rest of the five or ten minutes of the experience was just normal visuals and feelings that come from an average dose of LSD.ReflectionThe extreme intensity of this trip definitely came from the method of ingestion. Smoking the DMT out of the bong allowed me take a much bigger hit deeper into my lungs and hold the smoke in longer than is possible with a bowl. DMT tastes absolutely terrible, but I was tripping too hard before my first breath after the hit to comprehend taste. The total loss of connection with my ego shattered everything I had previously believed about the relationship of the human body and the soul. I had been a Christian and fully believed that my soul, in the sense of my personality and memories, would pass into the after-life.Upon returning from ego-death, I immediately dropped the idea that the soul remains intact after the death of the body. I now believe that what people think of as their soul is actually only their perceived separation of their consciousness from their body. I now think of everything much more objectively, rather than from the limited perspective of a human. I used to think of God as being very close to the deity described in the Bible. Now I believe that God is the everlasting and unwavering laws of the Universe, such as gravity and intermolecular forces.This DMT trip was much more intense than what I was prepared for, or even thought was possible from psychedelic drugs. Since this experience, I have had a few serious after-effects that I believe result directly from tripping so hard on DMT. Multiple times when I have gotten strong head-rushes, I feel extremely spaced out similar to the feeling of the onset of DMT, and I even taste DMT in my mouth. If I let my head hang back over the edge of a chair, my vision goes black and then immediately returns accompanied by intense hallucinations. One time I was hanging on a ladder at the top of a staircase at my frat house to loosen my back, and went into a crazy trance. The next thing I knew I was lying at the bottom of the flight of six stairs looking up at Warren standing at the top. The alarming thing was that I had not just passed out and fallen down the steps. My eyes had been open and I had actually watched as I fell all the way down the steps, I just had been tripping too hard to realize I was in a dangerous situation.I do not recommend that anyone use DMT or other extreme doses of psychedelics unless they are prepared for the possible intense mental consequences that are an inherent risk of psychedelic drug use. Although I consider my DMT trip to be the most important experience of my life, I would never even consider doing it again.