Metamorphosis

By /

Content warning: dangerous activities described, PLEASE do not repeat

Author: Andromeda ✨
First written: 2023-08-12
Last nontrivial update: 2023-09-11

Context

Demographic information:

Age: 26
Sex: Male
Ethnicity: European descent
Weight: ~70kg
Height: 5’9

Substances consumed (estimated):

T+ 0:00 2g Syrian rue (peganum harmala) seeds, grounded up and steeped in 100°C water for 8 minutes.
T+ 1:25 12mg N-N-DMT (vaporized)
T+ 1:50 15mg N-N-DMT (vaporized)
T+ 2:35 30mg Cannabis (vaporized)
T+ 3:15 25mg N-N-DMT (vaporized)

Equipment:

N-N-DMT: DIY Emesh vaporizer

Components
– GeekVape 80W Aegis Mini
– Cthulhu Ceto RDA (Silver)
– Vandy Vape Mesh Wire – SS316L, Size: 200
– Armerah Pipe Stem XL 810 Drip Tip

Settings
– Mode: TC-TCR
– Temperature: 193°C
– Coil: 0.26 (locked)
– Maximum wattage: 25.0
– TCR: 168

Cannabis: Storz & Bickel MIGHTY convection vaporizer (@180°C)

Set and setting:

Environment: In my room with the lights off with some sunset lamps shining on the walls for mood lighting.

Mindset: Felt relaxed and well-rested. Confident that I was ready to go deeper into the DMT state space, and intellectually curious about the differences in its phenomenology in conjunction with MAOIs.

Music: J Dilla Instrumentals Mix (part 1)

Past experiences:

10 N-N-DMT experiences in the previous two weeks, mostly around the magic eye / waiting room level. Two of these experiences were combined with small amounts of weed, which increased my sense of immersion in the experience & prolonged its effects, and one was with a low dose of ketamine. All of these experiences were positive, with a deep sense of loving comfort and playfulness – concerning both the overall vibe of the spaces that I inhabited, and the particular vibes of the entities that I encountered.

Prior to this, I’ve had the following N-N-DMT experiences:

  • A mild dose of ayahuasca; no visuals, but low frequency somatic vibrations & expanded awareness (~8 years ago)
  • A moderate dose of changa; to the lower ‘Magic Eye’ level (~3 years ago)
  • ~14mg vaporized N-N-DMT; to the upper ‘Magic Eye’ level (1 year ago)
  • Several 5-10mg vaporized N-N-DMT experiences within the space of 45 minutes, each immediately followed by 16g nitrous oxide (in addition to various other substances which I had taken that night: psilocybin, 2C-B, cannabis, etc.).

I’ve also had one notable high-dose 5-MeO-DMT experience (~30mg).

Lots of experience with conventional psychedelics, including:

  • LSD (40+)
  • Mescaline (3)
  • Psilocybin (20+)
  • 2C-B (30+)

Lots of experience with other psychoactive compounds, including:

  • Cannabis (200+)
  • Ketamine (40)
  • MDMA (9)
  • Nitrous oxide (~300)

I tend to do higher doses of psychedelics, and lower doses of non-psychedelics, than most recreational drug users, with regular breaks to maintain a low physiological tolerance to any given substance. I semi-regularly combine substances, occasionally at very high doses (a few times a year), to observe their synergistic properties and better understand their individual phenomenological profiles (by noticing what components are ‘added’ and ‘subtracted’). As a general rule, if there is a physical risk then I will proceed with more caution than most (which includes reduced frequency / complete abstinence from certain substances), but if the risk is psychological then I will throw caution to the wind.1 I’ve never had a ‘bad trip’, though I have occasionally had difficult / uncomfortable psychedelic experiences. The experience documented in this report is the closest that I have come to having a ‘bad trip’, and I now have a phenomenological reference point for this.2 I have a fairly high hedonic set-point and very low levels of neuroticism (I would place myself in the 90th and 99th percentile, respectively, for these psychological traits).

Report

Lead up:

I’ve recently found myself in a position in my life where I can freely experiment with N-N-DMT (hereafter, ‘DMT’). While I had very limited personal experience with this substance (relative to other psychedelics), I’d spent many hours reading about its phenomenology on Erowid and on various blogs which I follow3, in addition to numerous conversations with people who either have considerable experience vaporizing DMT or using DMT in the context of ayahuasca ceremonies. I therefore had a fairly robust cognitive model of the phenomenology of DMT experiences (both with and without MAOI interactions), but like Mary my experiential frame of reference for its phenomenology was underdeveloped. For the two weeks leading up to the experience documented in this report I used DMT on most evenings after coming home from work (between 20:00 – 23:00, up to ~1hr before sleeping), sharing it on two separate occasions with close friends who were curious about its phenomenology. All of these experiments were successful (i.e., they produced positively valanced / insightful / meaningful states of consciousness).

On the evening of this experience I returned home from work fairly early. While I had no explicit intention to consume DMT, something triggered the memory that I possessed Syrian rue seeds, and I decided that tonight would be a good night to experiment with the interaction between these two compounds. This meant delaying my dinner, carefully considering whether any foods I had ingested within the past 48 hours contained high levels of tyramine4, and drinking a small cup of Syrian rue tea (~2g, roughly a small teaspoon’s worth of ground material) on an empty stomach.5 After waiting for 80 minutes – what I estimated would be sufficient for the MAOI to kick in – I loaded up my Emesh vaporizer, prepared a J Dilla instrumental mixtape, and blasted off.

The experience was less intense than I had expected, with a remarkably different phenomenal character than DMT on its own. For example, the regular onset of DMT can feel explosive, characterized by rapid phase transitions between different levels, or stages, of psychedelic experience. Rather, this experience felt like a frictionless diffusion or seeping into a liquid state of awareness – warm and slick, but also light and airy, as if I was seamlessly traversing through an aerated pool. The visuals resembled gentle flowing streams of awareness without clear boundaries, rather than the crystalline geometric structures of DMT, making it more difficult to conceptually analyse. However, the overall sense of immersion within the experience was stronger and it felt more emotional; there existed fewer things, but more vibes.

The peak of the experience lasted for approximately 15 minutes, during which I experienced a very deep sense of relaxation that permeated every observable aspect of my experience. Notably, my somatosensory awareness had softened, and while rolling around on my bed in a playful ape-like state I found myself capable of bending and flexing my (usually stiff) muscles as if they were made of rubber. This felt so good that after coming down sufficiently to load up the vaporizer with a second dose, I blasted off a second time, having a very similar experience.

Approximately 30 minutes after this second dose I left my room to prepare some cannabis, and would estimate there being 10-15% of residual phenomenology. 20 minutes later (50 minutes after the second dose) I ceased to notice any lingering effects – though I was also high on cannabis, which might have affected my judgement. I ate some leftovers (one serving of healthy homemade vege spaghetti) while watching an episode of Steins;Gate, and spontaneously decided to do a third DMT trip to observe (a) whether there would be a difference in the strength of the MAOIs ~3 hours after ingestion, and (b) what effects the cannabis might have on DMT + MAOI phenomenology. I expected the experience to be roughly 80% less intense than it was: to account for this discrepancy, I assume that both of these considerations were valid (i.e., the MAOIs were stronger, and the stacking effect of the cannabis was significant).6

Peak:

I have no memories of the come up. I remember inhaling most of the vaporized DMT in a single breath, expecting to go in for a second breath, but within seconds becoming rapidly disconnected from any sense of ‘being in’ the world. Like pulling a loose thread from a piece of woven fabric, discernible patterns of sensation (usually realized via different sensory modalities such as vision, sound, touch, etc.) unravelled and melted together into a boiling soup of raw sensation. Within this state, the field of my experience appeared to have boundaries preventing a given point from travelling continuously through the space in a linear direction (i.e., without altering its trajectory). Though it would be impossible for me to describe its exact topology, it appeared vaguely spherical, but irregular and unstable.

There was no ‘I’ locatable within this space, but unlike previous ‘centre-less’ states that I have inhabited (e.g., 5-MeO-DMT), there could have been a locatable ‘I’. This is because (1) the space had a finite volume, and (2) appeared to retain a sense of intentionality (though greatly reduced in its strength and sharpness). Here I am referring to the capacity for my awareness to be directed toward or about some fixed point of reference (e.g., an individual quale or a cluster of qualia, whether or not they were locally bound to an object), without necessarily there being some reason for fixation, such as thought. The relevant difference was that the structure of the experience was too unstable to sustain even the most rudimentary patterns of thought – I suspect because of its sheer intensity, or temperature. Without this sense-making capacity, I had no sense of the passing of time; I could not ‘look around the corner’ of my experience to see that it had an ending, or even a progression from one state to another, and so my awareness was stuck within each moment for what seemed like an eternity.

The information content of the experience was low to moderate relative to regular DMT. Here I am referring to relative differences between qualia that gave rise to perceptual gestalts – objects with a (seeming) finite volume and spatially extensive membranes drawing their boundaries and specifying their location within the experience. Throughout the peak of the experience these objects had a curved tubular shape, woven together in a dense having mass, and forcing their way into every fold of my awareness until there was no remaining empty space between them. Their composition was of a single energetic substance, with variable degrees of intensity which determined their behaviour. For example, the highly-energized objects was stiff and punchy – beams of plasma cleaving through the center of the field of my awareness, somewhat resembling coronal mass ejections from the sun – fracturing my being (my pre-theoretical sense of existing) into countless fragments.7 The less-energized (but still blindingly intense) objects resembled the probing tentacles of a hungry cephalopod that ‘hooked onto’ and absorbed these fragments.

The half-life of these objects was considerably shorter than that of regular DMT objects, emerging for only a half-second or less before collapsing into another form. This constant state of flux made it difficult to pinpoint exactly where each object began / ended, and I suspect that they were not really objects with a non-continuous topology, but rather, energetic permutations of the field of my experience as a whole. There was a definite sense of being consumed, or digested, by the rawness of the experience, as if I was drowning in the belly of some unfathomable eldritch abomination. Moreover, I felt like I was being fucked by all of these objects simultaneously, probing and penetrating their way into the very deepest fissures of my being, but in the ontological (rather than sexual) sense of having all of my priors forcefully untethered from my awareness. The resulting state was one of complete vulnerability: the shell of sensibility that ordinarily gave my experience a structure had become unsheathed and, like a slug on hot concrete, I lay helpless; a fetus in the womb, a swallowed bug, an unformed pupa.8

While my awareness lacked any capacities to make sensible its phenomenology within a given moment, some part of it sensed that resistance was dangerous.9 The only viable path that didn’t entail destruction required complete submission – perceiving each sensation with a sense of openness and equanimity, like a swimming pool attempting to stabilize the perfect standing wave amidst a minefield of chaotic attractors. Or to use a more poetic analogy, my awareness was a ship navigating inside the eye of a storm: among the endless possible navigational outcomes, only one guaranteed survival. It is difficult to convey in writing the sheer difficulty of this task – every ounce of mustered strength was thrown at keeping the fluctuations of my experience locked in a stable consistent pattern. My awareness was, in a sense, ‘waiting it out’, but without any rigid conception of ‘it’ nor it’s temporal signature / progression.

But progress it did! At long last, the existence-shattering thrust of the experience lost some of its ‘oomph’, and my cognitive / mental faculties began powering up again. This was noticed as spatially localizable patterns of sensation began to emerge and unfurl within the field of my awareness. But unlike other patterns of sensation within my awareness that I would classify as ‘random’ or ‘dynamical’, these were more ‘ordered’ or ‘mechanical’, as if they were syntactic patterns generated by a formal system. Moreover, these patterns appeared to be constructed via some cognitive algorithm that was attempting to compress information about other parts of my phenomenology.10 I would therefore classify them as ‘representational’: their structure encoded information about the experience, but only at a certain level of abstraction and across a given slice. In a sense these local regions mirrored the global regions, so there was some isomorphism, but it was incomplete, like a 2D representation of a 3D object (e.g., a still life drawing).

The information these patterns encoded was very basic, starting out as simple observations about the qualitative differences between qualia located at different spatial regions / clusters of my awareness in a given moment. But as they developed, the encoded information became more complex, including the recognition of objects with a finite volume and a temporal signature (i.e., a continuous identity across different morphological states at t1, t2, t3, etc.). At a certain stage of complexity, these patterns ‘fused together’ becoming models – conglomerates of patterns with logical relationships between them (e.g., ‘a’ abstracts from ‘b’ abstracts from ‘c’), and coalescing into a nested structure that made predictions about these objects’ (and other qualia’s) future behavior. Then these models became self-referential, encoding conceptual / semantic representations (e.g., ‘I had taken a drug’, ‘my eyes are closed’, ‘I am lying on my bed in my room’).

While I have experienced this ‘mind-offline to mind-online’ process hundreds of times before (e.g., when combining nitrous oxide with various psychedelics), this experience stands out because of its length (MAOIs & cannabis) and clarity (DMT). At a basic level, the fabrication of each individual pattern was an unfolding process with a beginning, middle, and end. While each pattern did not contain a set of discrete symbols, their structural isomorphism to the rest of the experience gave them meaning. The progression from unstructured to structured awareness looked something like ‘formless soupy qualia’ to ‘representational patterns of sensation’ to ‘structured thought’ to ‘self-awareness’, and was gradual (rather than binary) with various in-between stages.

I have so far provided a detailed account of what this overall process was like, but there were specific aspects relating to the effects of the cannabis that I have not yet described. As the reader is perhaps aware, cannabis can cause short-term amnesia whereby your mind gets ‘distracted’ by some sensory impulse and you lose your train of thought (e.g., while speaking, thinking). This leads to many brilliant insights, or funny one-liners, being lost to our past light cone – a tragedy on the scale of stoner culture, but otherwise not very significant.11 However, you can usually remember the fact that you forgot something, and with enough experience, you can develop a sensitivity to the ‘what it is like-ness’ of cannabis-induced amnesia.

In this case, the early transition from the ‘formless soupy qualia’ to ‘basic representational patterns of sensation’ stages required multiple incomplete cycles (25-30) before my awareness could fabricate a complete pattern (I suspect) due to the amnesiac effects of the cannabis. The first few cycles that I remember encoded the equivalent of only a few bits of information, and then because my awareness could not retain much information about these ‘bits’, in the process of unfolding itself that pattern would ‘freeze’ and reboot. However, due to ongoing changes to my phenomenology, the initial state and evolving structure of each pattern would shift for each attempted cycle (depending on the starting conditions / parameters within that moment), attempting to construct a low-information representation of whatever aspect of the experience that pattern happened to ‘hook onto’. As the reader might infer, as I was slowly ‘coming down’, each attempted cycle had progressively more ‘memory’ or ‘information retaining capacity’ than the last (i.e., it could encode information equivalent to ‘more bits’ before freezing) and had a longer half-life.

Concluding remarks:

Coming out of the experience I was in a state of shock for several minutes. I then briefly opened my eyes so that I could navigate my phone to start a voice recording and spent the next half hour recounting in as much detail the phenomenology of the experience (which helped a lot in writing this report). This occurred ~25 minutes after I inhaled the DMT vapor: I would estimate that the peak lasted for 12 minutes, and the come down lasted for 8 minutes. The residual effects lasted for up to an hour after inhaling the vapor – considerably longer than either of the previous two occasions. Once I had calmed down, I took 0.3mg of melatonin, watched a second episode of Steins;Gate, and fell asleep fairly easily.

Thinking back on the phenomenology of the peak I feel a sense of disorientation, which makes it very challenging to write about.12 I seriously regret my music choice which, during the peak, played a repeating instrumental piano loop with mildly dissonant undertones – I could have prepared something more pleasant.13 When I listen back to it now, I get a mild sense of confinement / entrapment.

While I’m glad to have had this experience on the whole, I have no interest in returning to this state-space anytime in the near to medium term future, nor do I see any reason for doing so. For one, the overall valence of the experience was mixed and could have easily turned net-negative – to the plausible extent of becoming a traumatic experience – disqualifying any prudential value (well-being) based reasons for repeating the experiment. Second, by writing this report I’ve already extracted most of the epistemic value from this state space – perhaps 60%, with no guarantee of capturing much of the remainder upon re-entry.

In particular, the come down phase has given me a visceral sense of not only the complexity, but also the emptiness (or, frame-dependence), of mind. I have long considered thoughts to be structured patterns that occur within a spatial region of awareness, but I have never observed the cyclical process of their fabrication with such a high level of detail. Noticing such patterns emerge, unfold, and crumble away was like watching a real-time pantomime of a significant portion of the philosophy that I’ve been reading for the past year. Also of note was the sheer amount of variation within the structure of these patterns, both prior to and following from the first ‘complete fabricated pattern’. Each iteration had the same broad function of ‘making sense of the phenomenology’, but were structurally dissimilar – analogous, but not homologous.14

In relating this experience to friends I’ve been met with bewilderment about how little of an impact this experience seems to have had on my everyday life. For example, the following day (a Sunday) I voluntarily went into work and attended a hobby meet up later in the evening. I could have taken the day off, but I didn’t. To me, the transition back into everyday experience was strange only when I stopped to think about the intensity of the experience. But it wasn’t weighing on my mind – I could just choose not to think about it in non-relevant contexts.

  1. “A ship in the harbour is safe – but that is not what ships are built for.” – John A. Shedd, 1928. ↩︎
  2. I loosely follow the rainbow god aesthetic and consider some negative experiences to have an instrumental value for myself (to the extent that they enrich my understanding of the state-space of possible valanced experiences). Though for ethical reasons I strongly discourage this kind of behavior in others. ↩︎
  3. For example, the following posts:
    – How to use DMT without going insane
    – The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences: Symmetries, Sheets, and Saddled Scenes
    – 5-MeO-DMT vs. N,N-DMT: The 9 Lenses ↩︎
  4. Using the following helpful dietary guide developed by Ken Gilman from Psychotropical Research:
    – Monoamine oxidase inhibitors: A review concerning dietary tyramine and drug interactions ↩︎
  5. I intended to swallow the seed mush sitting at the bottom of the cup but was physically incapable of doing so because of the foul taste, which was ~0.75 times as bad as the taste of liquified San Pedro (the worst flavour profile of anything I have ever consumed – including ayahuasca). Next time I will mix the grounded seeds with some peanut butter (or equivalent spread) on toast, or transfer the powder into non-gelatine capsules. ↩︎
  6. I should have expected (a) because my previous high-dose psilohuasca trip contained two peaks: first for the mushroom onset (1 hour in), and second for the MAOI onset (3 hours in). Note that I consumed both substances at the same time. ↩︎
  7. While I am agnostic about which physical mechanisms produced this experience, I would not be surprised to learn if they were similar (see EM-field theories of consciousness). ↩︎
  8. I suspect this resulted from the DMT phenomenology, which in my experience tends to be more intimate and existential than other psychedelics (including psilocybin + MAOIs). ↩︎
  9. During the come-down I noted that had my awareness contracted away from these objects, the experience could have become traumatic. ↩︎
  10. Note that despite their structural differences, their substance was identical (i.e., they were fabricated from the same qualia varieties). ↩︎
  11. Novel insights & jokes are fairly common in cannabis-induced states of consciousness. ↩︎
  12. Cognitively – not emotionally – challenging. The state itself was very emotional, but allowing myself to feel emotional in recollecting & writing this report would not be very productive for the sake of conveying information about its phenomenology (see ‘Guide to Writing Rigorous Reports of Exotic States of Consciousness’). ↩︎
  13. I began at ~56:00 of this mix (one of my favorite Dilla beats) without knowing what beat came next (the piano loop begins at ~58:00). ↩︎
  14. I haven’t seen this written about in any other trip reports, but it seems (to me) an important and nontrivial insight. ↩︎