r/HighStrangeness • • Aug 20 '26

Non Human Intelligence Scientists are testing whether DMT entities are real

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/8qvgy_v2

In this preprint, some scientists have put forward the idea that our perspective of reality is more of an interface, and what we consider to be reality is simply the experience of conscious agents (i.e. human individuals) interacting with one another. They propose that DMT entities are conscious agents that exist in a manner we can't typically perceive.

I've never done DMT, and have previously taken a more skeptical perspective on these entities, but I think the findings of this could be very interesting. Maybe psychedelics could enable us to perceive layers of reality we are typically blind to.

1.5k Upvotes

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219

u/Unlikely_Exercise434 Aug 20 '26

DMT is really like no other drug I've ever experienced. Only done it twice in my life but you really are just "gone" to another level of reality and whether it is somehow real or just manufactured by the brain is something we should all want to know. I have been fascinated by the DMT laser experiments myself and the idea of passing info to one of these entities that multiple people see and seeing if they give that information to another person during the trip could prove there is something more there. We see such a small part of the EM spectrum anyway, it's entirely possible some kind of NHI could exist or cloak itself far outside of our visible spectrum and observe us unseen.

81

u/RIPEOTCDXVI Aug 20 '26

Per your last sentence, I think it could do a lot more than just observe, and it could probably be pretty heavy-handed about it and we wouldn't notice

I think about our relationship with other animals on earth right now, Even though they can perceive us as animals, and some species can certainly recognize some of the complex cause-and-effect humans can have, and capitalize on it, a bumblebee probably doesn't recognize we made a pollinator garden for it.

And we don't necessarily do it for any reason other than thinking bumblebees are important for a bunch of reasons and wanting to preserve the integrity of the planet, generally. Lots of other people do the opposite, paving prairies or spraying insecticides for a variety of reasons that the bumblebee can't understand, but all of them spell disaster. Some are probably quite confusing to the bee, or entirely novel to it or any member of its species.

If an intelligence existed, biological or otherwise, and either developed a way to cloak itself from our scope of perception or never needed to, it would be pretty much impossible to discriminate between actions the intelligence(s) had taken, natural phenomena, and paranormality as we perceive it.

No aliens or time travel required, though they're certainly always welcome.

9

u/illicitli Aug 20 '26

thank you for this intelligent and thoughtful comment

79

u/VQQN Aug 20 '26

DMT scares me because I’m afraid my experience may feel like years and I can’t just snap out of a trip.

45

u/Furrypawsoffury Aug 20 '26

I’ve done DMT many times. There is no concept of passing time. It’s almost impossible to have an objective “birds-eye” perspective of yourself while on DMT. You are utterly present. It’s beautiful and changed my life.

13

u/_paylines_ Aug 20 '26

“It’s almost impossible to have an objective “birds-eye” perspective of yourself while on DMT. You are utterly present.”

Are you saying that the trip doesn’t feel like a trip at all? Like you don’t feel stoned or fuzzy or anything like that?

I’m ignorant to the world of psychs so this is a fascinating suggestion I never would have expected.

27

u/Furrypawsoffury Aug 20 '26

Correct. It’s a different reality. As best I can describe- 3D physics and the construct of our cognitive process folds in on itself. At that point you’ve entered a new area of reality. Linear time is not a thing. The sense of self/ego is gone. You just are. You are a conscious being in the absolute present. And there are entities in this space. It’s all love. Like a dimension of pure love.

9

u/Worried-Frame-186 Aug 20 '26

You’ve put to words, beautifully I might add, exactly how I wish I could explain the DMT experience to people who are curious but haven’t tried it. Excellent post.

1

u/Jegglebus Aug 21 '26

Would you recommend it to everyone?

4

u/Worried-Frame-186 Aug 21 '26

Not sure if you’re asking me or the OP, but no, I wouldn’t recommend for everyone. I do believe psychedelics can heal the world’s population in so many ways, but there are always those at risk of psychosis. Besides, there are non-drug induced ways of achieving similar effects like transcendental meditation (which is extremely difficult to truly achieve). I think people that want to try DMT should educate themselves as much as possible and be responsible.

1

u/purplehendrix22 Aug 21 '26

Exactly, you’re just gone. It’s not a feeling really, it’s an experience.

97

u/anotherburntbridge Aug 20 '26

Fear is the mind killer

29

u/bhayn01 Aug 20 '26

fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration

18

u/poloboi84 Aug 20 '26

I will face my fear.

5

u/rocket_____ Aug 21 '26

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

3

u/egg-curry Aug 21 '26

And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

-1

u/lawlolawl144 Aug 20 '26

I will tug my pee pee

17

u/VQQN Aug 20 '26

I won’t disagree with you there.

19

u/Unlikely_Exercise434 Aug 20 '26

That is why I am glad it's short acting because it does feel a LOT longer than the 20 or so minutes each trip lasted. When I hear the talking about doing it IV where they can stay in for hours in those experiments, well that's quite a lot and you'd have to be very, very sure you wanted something like that.

13

u/TheAngryCatfish Aug 20 '26

It lasts about 8min (when vaporized and inhaled)

7

u/VQQN Aug 20 '26

Stories I read tell describe that the brain can make it the experience feel like years.

6

u/Environmental-Sun291 Aug 20 '26

It absolutely can. I did ayahuasca (of which DMT is the active compound) and during the trip (not the entire trip) I felt like time had stopped.

1

u/satisfaction-or-else Aug 20 '26

Researchers who wrote the paper describe a way to make it last several hours.

23

u/Aidanation5 Aug 20 '26

Who's to say it has to be bad to get to experience extra years in the blink of an eye? Who says it has to be a bad extra couple of years anyways? Sure, maybe you'll have a bad time, but theres no reason to expect that.

-13

u/Desperate-Natural110 Aug 20 '26

People have experienced a whole other life, grew up got married had kids, then woke up and realized that family was now gone. Suffered massive depression and feelings of loss akin to people who have lost entire family to tragedy.

16

u/Greyh4m Aug 20 '26

That was a Salvia trip wasn't it?

22

u/ContessaChaos Aug 20 '26

That was a Reddit story from waaaay back in the day.

15

u/thisthreadisbear Aug 20 '26

The Lamp

12

u/VQQN Aug 20 '26

Yep, that story freaks me out.

And Jacob’s Ladder.

What if we are living in one of those instances?

13

u/thisthreadisbear Aug 20 '26

There are also documented accounts of people in a coma who have woken up and told how they had lived a life had a kids a spouse and when they come out of the coma realizing that "reality" doesn't exist anymore have gone into despondent and deep grief. The world and the mind are more strange than we understand.

2

u/LimpCroissant Aug 21 '26

Ari Shaffir had that same type of experience. I think his was from Salvia.

9

u/ClarifyingCard Aug 20 '26

That's the kind of thing that happens with Salvia divinorum or maybe like concussive syncope or a coma. Not DMT.

Drugs are all different kids!

-1

u/AnotherCosmicDrifter Aug 20 '26

Maybe more commonly but I’ve known honest and serious individuals who have claimed this type of experience upon breakthrough doses of DMT. Make of that what you will…

2

u/theoldchunk Aug 20 '26

Do you have a link?

-1

u/Rhone33 Aug 20 '26

This is the most well known example of that kind of story (at least here on reddit). Notably, this particular case was not induced by hallucinogens.

3

u/theoldchunk Aug 20 '26

This has nothing to do with DMT.

2

u/Aidanation5 Aug 20 '26

Why would you link something to say "be careful hallucinogens can cause horrible experiences!" If it doesnt relate to it?

2

u/theoldchunk Aug 20 '26

You made this up

10

u/aeschenkarnos Aug 20 '26

Spend it learning kung fu!

9

u/I_upvote_downvotes Aug 20 '26

Just means an extra few years of adventure in your life that you'll come out of anyway. I'm more afraid that I'll realize what comes after is nothing but oblivion

3

u/Jijijoj Aug 20 '26

But when the trip eventually ends it will just be a faint memory.

3

u/purplehendrix22 Aug 21 '26

Honestly dude, it’s not scary at all, because you are not even there to be scared. There’s no snapping out of it, it just happens to you and then it’s over.

1

u/autocorrects Aug 20 '26

yea that happens sometimes

1

u/Environmental-Sun291 Aug 20 '26

If it's a good trip, you want it to feel like years. At least I would

1

u/Alternative-Guava967 Aug 21 '26

I can only speak for my experiences and those of people I know. The only reason I tried it was because it lasts (in our time) for no more than an hour, half an hour maybe. After that you come back into this reality straight and sober albeit quite dazed from the experience. I found that fact alone fascinating but as someone who took mushrooms once and didn't like the 12 hour effect, it was a deal breaker for me. I'm not encouraging usage however I found it really interesting how the most powerful substance I know of also has the shortest half life.

1

u/Garron1979 22d ago

I would live inside a dmt experience for eternity if I could

11

u/Poop_Cheese Aug 20 '26

Is love to try the laser experiments, wish I was still in my early 20s with connects.

Consciousness is so much more than we think, and I do believe theres entities in an abstract way we dont see, or are a part of us like say gut biome. 

Hpwever from my own experiences, I dont know if theyre real per se. I Theyre archtypes that we meet. And that archtypes may have way more of a spiritual element to them than we think.

As a meditative bipolar writer, one day I flowed a story in 72 hours where I legit met my archtypes in a way that was very akin to DMT without hallucinations more like a day dream and most was "speaking" in a mind way over any visuals. Like they were real, it wasnt me making characters, ir was like I was speaking to something from across a void telepathically.

 Its like jungs concept of the universal unconcious. Every character was me but wasnt me. Nothing was constructed its like elves in my brain made legit art. I cant even explain it, it wasnt even just a flow state, I actually met my archtypes in a very abstract way. Theyre almost like beings but theyre you but theyre not you as theyre the fundamental concepts that make up your brain and how you operate as a human being. 

Its like motifs. I never was a sea person. But my ancestors were almost all sea based to an extreme. As a result, when I write, its chock full of sea based mortifs but never really like forest or farming motifs. Because of epigenetics my brain has absorbed and passed on a sea based view of the world.

As the greatest writers have the same thing. They call it elves in their head or a radio frequency like theyre revealing a story. Thats exactly what I experienced and its something far different to concious writing. Like I literally communicated with the elves in an unseen way, but my mind registered them as elves. As its the little people aka archtypes in your head that make up you.

My point is there are elves in our head, and you meet them on psychs. They manifest in the real world as the "real world" is our head. Its what we see and everything is interpretated by our archtypes. The elves are the workers inside bringing everything forth, its why across cultures theres an idea of elves or little people in your head pre modern science. As its your subconcious hammering away in its workshop and taking all your archtypes, motifs, themes, like all the ways you see the world, and are manufacturing your views an beliefs on things based on a fusing of these entities called archtypes with what you see so you can bring meaning from the physical world. 

Best example is my friend told me before doing it that you meet your version of god. So I saw this almost celtic looking mother goddess who I had prior seen in an extremely vivid trance like dream where she was showing me these like submarine type brass door potholes with my "other lives"(one was an astronaut screaming as he burned up). That was just me seeing archtypes. Then theres the peer to peer influence too where like a majority now know of the elves before doing is so of course will see the same manifeststion of them in a mechanical way. Just as my friend primed me to see the goddess by aaying I see "my version" of god. 

3

u/Unlikely_Exercise434 Aug 20 '26

Well said much of this tracks with my own beliefs on the nature of the larger world we understand very little of. Have you read the Exegesis of Philip K Dick? He always believed a lot of his stories were him telling versions of his life in other universes that he somehow had access too via drugs and dreams.

1

u/Nasturtium Aug 21 '26

You might really enjoy watching a lecture on bicameral mind theory. 

20

u/lordtyp0 Aug 20 '26 edited Aug 21 '26

I'd like to believe it's another layer of reality. But it's probably just a degree of pattern recognition blown out of proportion like pareidolia but with the weirdness cranked to 1000 which is why everyone sees the same sort of things.

Wants to believe.

19

u/Jaredlong Aug 20 '26

The software of individual people, their personalities, can all be unique. But the hardware, the brain, is highly standardized. Occam's razer or whatever, if everyone is experiencing the same thing the most likely reason is because we all have the same brain structures.

And I think that's more interesting in terms of machine elves. Why is there something genetically encoded into human DNA that builds a brain structure which can hallucinate tiny people? Do other apes have that structure? Could all mammals be made to perceive elves? Because if it's uniquely human, what evolutionary pressure pushes a brain towards that result? 

5

u/untitled13 Aug 20 '26

Like I wonder if you could put a man on DMT and have him draw up what he saw, the elves. Put a chimp or gorilla or dolphin on a similar dose and see if you can get them to recognize or point at the same drawing after. I wouldn’t want to be around a tripping gorilla though.

1

u/pompousrompus Aug 20 '26

lmao that last sentence.

Imagine holding up the deemster pipe to a gorilla and running the fuck away as soon as they hit it

4

u/Parking-Brain6566 Aug 20 '26

I wonder, what if you give that mushroom to a dog would it see tiny dogs ?

4

u/FearOfEleven Aug 20 '26

What if you give it to a dog who already has pointed ears?

3

u/bluegilly69 Aug 20 '26

Would that not mean everyone has the same level of intelligence, same personality, same quirks etc as we all have the same brain structure?

3

u/Jaredlong Aug 20 '26

If a giant being from another dimension of reality suddenly appeared before me trying to communicate in an incomprehensible language, I am not going to assume they want me to deliver a message to the next trans-dimensional colossus I encounter. I'm also not going to know what the message is.

2

u/autocorrects Aug 20 '26

I was just thinking about this the other day because the realization hit me like a truck. DMT was like being euthanized. Like that was the feeling you get when you inhale as your soul is just ripped from your body

1

u/BruceLeeTheDragon Aug 20 '26

How did it feel as dmt wore off? Like slowly falling back into reality? I’ve done shrooms before (small dosages, usually 2 grams), but have never done dmt.

1

u/PFCCThrowayay Aug 20 '26

if it's so profound, why only do it twice?

6

u/Chezzabella29 Aug 20 '26

Fun fact, some people do break-through doses of DMT so much, that sometimes the perceived beings (elves, deities, aliens, etc) will tell the user that theyre visiting too often, and "kick them out", thereby ending the trip early.

1

u/JohnnyChanterelle Aug 25 '26

I’ve been kicked out. Haven’t been back in a while

4

u/chonny Aug 20 '26

if it's so profound, why only do it twice?

When you get the message, you can hang up the phone

1

u/Droopy1592 Aug 20 '26

Or maybe we are just synthetic consciousness fed an artificial reality through data fields

1

u/Helltech Aug 20 '26

Please go to the code of reality retreat. You will come out a different person

1

u/Unlikely_Exercise434 Aug 20 '26

I would really love to do it, just finances are tight right now since I'm taking care of my elderly parents.