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Comment by notthegov | Hacker News Reader

DMT is much different than LSD. I have never heard anyone talk about machine elves and LSD.

DMT is a legitimate mystery of science and is not a drug in the traditional sense.

I spent a good amount of time a few years ago exploring the DMT realm, and its totally, completely and inexplicably mysterious. Either consciousness is a non-local phenomena and when you smoke it you end up in some kind of parallel dimension or for whatever crazy reason evolution decided it was important to incorporate these alien beings into our subconscious mind. Those with a rigid reductionist perspective would do well to explore it a bit. IMO there's nothing more mind expanding and question inducing than DMT, and it just begs out to science: "STUDY ME!"

I have not tried DMT and to be honest i do not intend to, based on what i have read. So my insights might not be so cleaver as i think.

But here is an article that makes sense to me.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/unique-everybody-else/2...

Our brains are really not that good at letting us know what is going on in our lives. Our brains are however really good when it comes to making us believe that we know what is going on in or lives.

Just look at this list for some examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

I'm both fascinated and very scared of DMT. As I get older and my want to experiment with unfamiliar substances wanes, I'm pretty confident that I'll probably never try DMT, but I wish I had when I was younger and more brash. I've had friends who have taken too much and went down the DMT-hole, and their description of it (as best they can recollect anyways) is absolutely terrifying. One example was a friend who felt he spent years in a completely different world, with completely different laws of physics - he had to literally give up his idea of how the world worked in order to embrace what he thought at the time was his new world/being. Once he accepted it, apparently he started to come out of it.

Yeah, I can very much sympathize with your friend. One thing I've learned is that setting an intention is important, and not being reckless with it is important too. There have been a few time where I've come back home after a night out and dove right in with half drunken bravery, and yes infinite thought loops are a thing! There was one time where I quite literally thought I had died and landed in hell and in that moment of time an indescribable suffering was transmitted through my being via some kind of demon which left me in tears for about a half of an hour afterwards. But lest I drive the curious away, whenever I have gone into it with respect I've had experiences that were deeply enlightening and, while always weird, seemingly benign.

Occams razor suggests the latter, i.e. it's all in your mind. Unless you can get one of the beings to factor some huge number for you, of course.

- http://www.ayahuasca-info.com/data/articles/paralleldmt.pdf - http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the...

People always use the large number factor as an argument which pretty much assumes we and they are on similar wavelengths, so to speak. Its a strawman.

"Evolution" has "decided" to "incorporate" plenty of unimportant things, or else everything is equally important, and thus nothing is important.

It's so odd how there's a near-universal reporting of small elf- or dwarf-like creatures from that drug. Is there any proposed mechanism of action for how it works?

Priming seems likely. Most experience reports I've read describe the "entities" as ineffable, so I have to think the language used by McKenna is more a cultural staple/fallback than a consistent hallucination unique to DMT.

I'm sure that contributes to a lot of it, as well as experiences others have with harder drugs. But from my research, many people reported this experience without ever being aware that others have experienced it. I think there must be some factor unique to DMT that can create experiences like this.

My running theory is that the machine elves from Dimension 9 are actually a heavily modified perception of one's self. This is purely just based only on research done in my basement with DMT, so nothing approaching academic research, but I think those little people are actually our "mind's eye" perception of ourselves, just twisted by the DMT. Like when you imagine yourself walking through a hallway to go to lunch, as people sometimes do, you're "seeing" that image of yourself. I think this is what triggers most of the creature visions. Maybe I'm not making sense, but this is the first time I've tried to put that idea into words.

That makes sense, but were you already aware of the "DMT elf" mythology before taking the drug? If so, that could've influenced a lot of your experience.

Otherwise, I think that could be a plausible explanation. Though I've read about people actually talking to the elves, or hearing things from them, which would be weird if the elves were themselves.

The very first time I did DMT -- this is way before stuff like Erowid -- I was not aware of that, no, and I did sense what seemed to me to be some kind of otherworldly presence. In the times since, I have read all about it on Erowid but still haven't seen specifically the "machine elves" but have had similar "encounters". The presence was more aggressive and "dark" when I smoked it versus drinking ayahuasca (from a mix of B.Caapi and P.Viridis). Also sometimes I feel a similar (but different) "presence" when smoking salvia divinorum.

I dit DMT once. No elves or other creatures.

Just for clarity, someone told me that 5-MEO-DMT is sometimes mistakenly called "DMT", but it is totally different from the "machine elves" N,N-DMT version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-MeO-DMT

Same here.Extremely strange parallel dimension and some other entity, but not the sort of alien companions I hear about from other people. It might be that I'm very unsocial and a bit of mystic to begin with, my brain has always seemed to be wired quite differently from most other people.

On LSD you become the alien.

On DMT the aliens come to you...

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