Nick Fancher / Death to Stock
Why does the DMT experience feel so familiar to some people — even those who are trying the psychedelic for the first time?
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- DMT, the world's most powerful psychedelic drug, can induce a sense of profound familiarity in users, making them feel as if they have entered an alternate reality they have visited before.
- A study analyzing online reports found this sense of familiarity was not linked to prior psychedelic use.
- The phenomenon is puzzling, in part because some people feel a strong sense of familiarity about places, things, or entities that are decidedly not a part of waking life.
By Stephen Johnson
If you take a psychedelic drug that can throttle your conscious perception into an otherworldly space where people often report encountering beings that are unlike anything on Earth, the last thing you would expect to feel is the sense that this all seems pretty familiar. But that's precisely what some people report after taking the world's strongest psychedelic: DMT.
"It felt like I had been reunited with everything, like I was complete again," psychiatrist Dr. Chloe Sakal told Freethink in 2021 while describing a DMT experience she had as a participant in a study that examined the drug's effects on the brain. "I no longer knew I was in an MRI scanner. My entire reality was very different — really colorful, really vibrant. And I couldn't even remember that I was in a study. I was in a different dimension."
Online reports from the r/DMT subreddit convey similarly intense and familiar experiences. "I was beyond time and matter and had no sense of identity whatsoever," wrote one person. "I definitely felt this common thing like I was 'at home,' that I have already been there, and that I will go there again."
A familiar trip
What explains the sense of familiarity in DMT experiences? The answer does not seem to be prior experience with psychedelic drugs. That's one of the main takeaways from a study recently published in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs that aimed to shed light on the types of familiarity people sometimes experience after taking the psychedelic.
The researchers — David W. Lawrence, Alex P. DiBattista, and Christopher Timmermann — pored through several thousand firsthand reports of DMT experiences posted to Reddit, finding 227 reports in which the author mentioned experiencing some form of familiarity. Fifty-six of those reports were written by people who said they had no prior experience with DMT, suggesting that previous DMT use is not necessary to experience a feeling of familiarity. Also, none of the reports referenced a previous psychedelic experience.
The 227 reports were sorted into a 19-item questionnaire that included five broad themes.
Credit: DW Lawrence et al.,
Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 2023.
It's worth noting that this data comes from a sample of self-reported stories posted to reddit over a ten-year period, and the researchers couldn't verify the accuracy of each report. But it would have been difficult to collect this kind of data at scale in the lab — both due to regulations, which have only recently begun to relax, and practicality. The results still provide a fairly detailed overview of the types of familiar feelings people experience on DMT, with some of the notable findings including:
- Slightly more than 20% of participants said they encountered an entity with whom they perceived having some sort of prior relationship or bond. 11.5% said this entity felt like family.
- 22% said the experience felt like home or like going home.
- 25% said it felt like returning to a place, space, state, or environment that they had visited before.
The study also included excerpts from various reports in the sample:
"I'm being greeted by these beings, they're not human but they're oddly familiar. I know them as if they are family. They're telling me how happy they are to see me, and that I've found this technology to communicate with them again."
"Yesterday, I finally broke through and met a male and female entity in the place where we exist before birth, and after death. I was in complete shock about what happened, it seemed so real, and it honestly felt like a very familiar place. They were welcoming me and it felt like I was home."
"The only time I've done DMT I had the same feeling of being 'home.' The feeling that you've been here before and it's okay that I'm not here because I'll be there again. It's just such a reassuring and comforting feeling. I honestly don't think I've ever felt that sure about anything. It's like I just knew for a fact I'd be back again.
Familiarity without recollection
Familiarity is considered to be a key part of recognition memory, which is a component of long-term memory that is responsible for recognizing a previously encountered stimulus. The other part of recognition memory is recollection: the conscious retrieval of details about past experiences. The psychologist George Mandler once described the difference between the two in what's known today as the butcher-on-the-bus phenomenon...
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https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/dmt-familiarity-study/
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