The day I was injected with DMT
By: Jon Block
Tags: Experiment, Science, Drugs, Psychedelics, Experience

The space around me was all-encompassing and incredibly detailed and vibrant. It was a cavernous architectural space that seemed both other-worldly and familiar. Somehow I felt as if I had been there before. Everything was in bright pastel colours — lots of pinks and greens — and there was a metallic or plastic sheen to everything. It felt almost kitsch.

The surfaces were ornate but in a futuristic style, covered in iconography that I was unable to recognise or interpret. There were checkerboard patterns on many of the surfaces and other decorative features. If you had asked me to describe the theme I would say it was “extra-terrestrial spaceship meets M C Escher” (interior decorators, take note!).

But this certainly wasn’t a still scene from a painting. Far from it. Everything was fluctuating and changing at a rapid rate. In fact this constant fluctuation was the most breathtaking aspect — wherever I looked the dimensional structure of the architectural space seemed to be changing. Shapes and structures were twisting and flipping in on themselves — turning inside out and outside in. Alcoves and ledges were expanding to become rooms and spaces in themselves. But in these newly formed spaces, the concepts of up and down and in and out were shifting in direction. The scene before me was like an incredibly complex unfolding optical illusion — Schröder’s Stairs in cinematic technicolour.

I felt myself being pulled away and zooming into other architectural spaces all with this similar style and dimensional transience. In these spaces were objects, some of them floating, some of them embedded in the surfaces of the space. These objects were also constantly changing. Flipping, re-constructing and folding in on themselves in new dimensions. The objects were brightly coloured, plastic-like but hyper-real and sharply defined — like the whole space around them, everything was incredibly clear, my vision seemed sharper than it had been in years.

Near the beginning of the trip I could still feel the sensations in my body. They felt familiar to me, comforting even. At first I felt like I had become very light, lifted up, as if my being had been shifted to another plane. Then as the trip progressed I had the sensation that my body and the scanner were separated from me — still there, but somewhere else and just faintly connected. I didn’t feel like I was physically in this space that my mind occupied. I was just a disembodied being, with no way to interact with the environment.

I felt a mixture of emotions… I felt relaxed and comfortable, as if I had been there many times before. There was a sensation that I was not alone, that there was a guide showing these sights to me, educating me. Looking around I couldn’t see anything that seemed to have personality or agency but still the visions were so breathtakingly complex and ordered that I felt there was no way this vision had come from within the depths of my own mind (I felt this with such certainty both during the intense peak of the trip and afterwards as I lay there in scanner processing what I had seen).

The visual experiences began to change so quickly that it became a sensory onslaught. The transitions and fluctuations sped up until at some point all my senses seemed to fold into one seething mass of synesthesia — the incredible visual feast that I was within, the sound of the scanner, which had become a form of music, the sensations of my body, the scanner bed and the straps, the cannula in my arm and the burn of the DMT, my awareness of the experiment and the world outside the scanning chamber, they all became one.

I was carried away in awe and ecstasy. The synesthesic mass split into multiple dimensions and as it fell away it revealed a sense of something crystalline below. Underneath it all lay exposed the fractal nature of this dimensional multiplicity.

A drawing that I made of some of the impossible objects when I was being debriefed by the experimenter

Despite this chaos, I was just able to keep in my mind the purpose and the context of the trip. I felt like an intrepid explorer entering an alternate reality in the name of science. The massive noisy scanner around me was a comforting presence and I felt a connection back to the team in the lab. I felt like I was in a psychonautic bathysphere exploring uncharted depths. A slim connection extending all the way back to the lab in the form of the vague synesthesic awareness of my body and awareness of the context of my trip.

Gradually the sensations began to weaken and I found myself hallucinating in a much more gentle way. I was still being shown breathtaking visuals but these were now two dimensional and more organic in nature. They were beginning to fade in vibrancy and decay before me even as I watched. My synesthesia had waned and in contrast to the intensity of the earlier part of the experience, these latter hallucinations felt almost mundane. But I wasn’t disappointed. I was in a profound state of post-euphoric bliss.

I slowly became able to think more clearly about the real-world. I began to ponder how I could explain this experience to others in words. But I didn’t yet feel the need to engage in the world or the reality of my distinct bodily sensations or the noise of the scanner. I just lay there completely relaxed in a puddle of exulted bliss observing the slowly fading visuals.

When the scanner was shut down, just twenty minutes later, and I was slowly pulled out, it was strange to find myself back so soon in the real-world, carefully being unstrapped and detached from all the medical devices. But I felt like a new person, refreshed and reborn. Ready to re-engage. Re-invigorated by one of the most powerful and significant experiences I have ever had. The psychonautic explorer was back!