Lucid Dream Or DMT Experience?

'The Illustrated Guide to the DMT Entities' is a book written by the researcher David Jay Brown and the artist Sarah Phinn. Their objective is to map the entities with which DMT users have encountered with the help of illustrations created with the generative artificial intelligence application 'Midjourney'.

It is no wonder why DMT has been called the 'spiritual molecule' and that it is also found in religions such as Santo Daime — after all, ayahuasca (the root used to brew the tea drank during their rituals) has DMT and harmine in its composition. The curious part is that almost half of the users have experienced encounters with entities and that they repeat over the reports, to the point that it’s possible to create a 'bestiary' of them and find intersections with existing cosmologies.

In the case of the DMT users, these encounters happen after they are for at least 5 to 10 minutes under the effect of the drug, a feat hard to be achieved only through inhalation. For this reason, researchers have been trying to extend that effect by injecting the substance and thus allowing that these encounters become more frequent and longer, so there is more opportunity for interaction.

For now, most of the reports account for positive experiences in which the users are well received by the entities. However, since these encounters are quick, it is hard to establish a deeper conversation, which leads to the findings of this research that most of the time communication is unilateral (that is, only from the entity’s end). For the researcher David Jay Brown, extending these encounters can be especially important in case these entities decide to share information with us, such as blueprints on how to create advanced technologies.

Even if you don’t believe that it is really possible to contact entities through the use of DMT or if it’s just the chemical stimulating the brain to generate insights that would not pop up as easily when one is sober, this is a very interesting proposition that has been visited for decades. Maybe the best person to summarize that idea was the psychoanalysis Carl Jung with his concept of the collective unconscious and in the formulation of the archetypes.

Jung proposed in his work that all humans share the same imaginary (or unconscious) in which certain images repeat no matter where someone comes from or when they were born in time. And this goes way beyond the correlations with religion, such as it is in the case of Christianity and the inclusion of pagan entities and celebrations in its cosmology. Jung also proposed the concept of synchronicity — that is, the proposition that a same idea or concept can be prompted by different people, in different locations, even in different times, though they never had exchanged information among them.

The fact that Brown and Phinn are using a product of these universes (Midjourney) to create illustrations that map these entities encountered in DMT trips is, at least, uroboric. For future reference, we should see how the publication will be received by readers, if the curation done by Phinn in partnership with 'Midjouney' was able to portray these collective experiences.

For now, both authors believe that these entities have much to do with the Jungian archetypes which, by their turn, are a combination of different cultural references. In 'Atlas Mnemosyne', for example, Aby Warburg tried to create an imagistic encyclopedia for these archetypes that are seen throughout human culture. By taking that in consideration, 'The Illustrated Guide to the DMT Entities' could thus become a new iteration of this effort to map the images of the collective unconscious, as well as an attempt to rebrand the use of psychedelics as a magic experience.

Similarly, it could be the case that we are entering a potentially magic and technologically enhanced future when the use of chemical substances can open the doors to an imagery curated by artificial intelligence or even showcased in virtual reality, in case we want to believe that this technology could one day be rather mental than cybernetic.

David Jay Brown holds a master’s degree in psychobiology from New York University. A former neuroscience researcher at the University of Southern California, he has written for Wired, Discover, and Scientific American, and his news stories have appeared on The Huffington Post and CBS News. A frequent guest editor of the MAPS Bulletin, he is the author of several books including Mavericks of the Mind and Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse. He lives in Ben Lomond, California.

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