DMT

I’m not an organized person. Walk into my office and you’ll see an explosion of books, papers, storyboards, stuff. I usually know where everything is, but no one else would. But my head is organized when it comes to writing and my computer files make enough sense so that anyone could figure them out. So I knew we’d written about DMT before, but not in terms of its possible connection with NDEs, alien abductions, the paranormal, synchronicity.

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Between 1990 and 1995, Rick Strassman, a clinical psychiatrist, undertook the first new human studies with psychedelic drugs in the U.S. in over 20 years. His research involved DMT – N,N-dimethyltryptamine – which is produced naturally by the pineal gland in the brain.

 “One of my deepest motivations behind the DMT research was the search for a biological basis of spiritual experience,” he wrote in DMT: The Spirit Molecule.  He was led to the study of DMT through earlier research on the pineal gland as a “potential locus for spiritual experiences.” Much of what he had learned over the years made him wonder if the pineal gland produced DMT “during mystical states and other naturally occurring, psychedelic-like experiences.”

The study was conducted at the University of New Mexico, where Strassman was a professor. The 60 volunteers were administered a total of 400 doses of DMT.

This naturally occurring psychedelic compound  is widespread throughout the plant kingdom and occurs in small amounts in mammals, including humans.  Structurally, it’s analogous to the neurotransmitter serotonin, the hormone melatonin, and other psychedelic tryptamines. Indigenous Amazonian shamans ingest DMT during  ayahuasca ceremonies for healing and divination. Yet, no one really knows what DMT does or what its function is in humans.  DMT levels elevate while we’re sleeping, so perhaps dreaming is part of what DMT facilitates.

Strassman believes that elevated levels of DMT in the brain might help to usher the soul into the body at birth and out of the body at death and my be responsible for spontaneous mystical experiences and NDEs. Many of his volunteers experienced different worlds, some that were downright bizarre, others that were peaceful, and still others that were structurally different from our three-dimensional world.

These reports challenged Strassman’s worldview. “I was neither intellectually nor emotionally prepared for the frequency with which contact with beings occurred in our studies, or the often utterly bizarre nature of these experiences.”

Some volunteers reported “reptilian” beings  with “an agenda.” There were reports of a space station that held entities – “androidlike creatures  that looked like a cross between crash dummies and the Empire troops from Star Wars, except they were living beings, not robots.” Another volunteer reported beings that were like clinic researchers that probed into his mind. Others reported on intrusive procedures  these beings performed on the volunteers.

“There were sort of long fiber-optic things that they were putting into my pupils,” said one volunteer.” Another reported  being in a place that felt like an alien laboratory, where beings “activated a sexual circuit and I was  and I was flushed with an amazing orgasmic energy.” Another volunteer reported that he’d received an implant in his forearm.

These reports prompted Strassman to take a closer look at alien abductions, a topic that hadn’t interested him before. So he started with the research of Harvard psychiatrist, author and abduction researcher John Mack. Strassman apparently saw enough parallels to propose that “the alien abduction experience is made possible by excessive brain levels of DMT. This may occur spontaneously through any of the previous described conditions that activate pineal MT formation. It also might take place when DMT levels rise from taking in the drug from the outside, as in our studies.”

Taking in the drug from the outside, as in… Do the entities, beings, aliens in abduction experiences somehow inject DMT into their abductees? If so, then according to Strassman’s findings, the DMT would facilitate the abduction in that the abductee would be able to move more easily between dimensions, levels of reality.

This proposition may not be as weird as it seems. Heightened levels of DMT may account for a lot of the high strangeness in UFO/alien encounters. It’s prevalent in advanced meditation and ritualized chanting, in psychic experiences, may be prevalent in NDEs, in both birth and death, and yes, it may have a lot to do with synchronicity.