Notes on a Weekend with Terence McKenna
A First Encounter with DMT

Why Terence preaches DMT.
This is the intent of DeMenT.
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Imagine that an alien spacecraft suddenly landed outside your door.

The hatch opens and a lyrical voice calls out in a language you've never heard but somehow understand:

"Climb aboard for a trip to another dimension and meet the aliens that make it their home. You'll be back in five minutes with no trace but a memory, but you must leave reality back here on the couch."

Now what if this spacecraft were an opaque orange crystal and a glass pipe and lighter represent your front door. Do you leave reality and your body behind for a dubious foray into the unknown? And if you decline this crystalline invitation, how will you ever forgive yourself? This is the dilemma of dimethyl tryptamine, the fastest-acting psychedelic drug.

I first heard about DMT two years ago as the drug that made acid look like milk. The common experience among DMT users is that they claim to travel to another dimension where they meet and interact with intelligent beings. Found in many plants, including acacia trees and the deadly oleander, pure DMT has been chemically isolated, much as mescaline has been culled from peyote. DMT is also produced by the pineal gland and is rapidly metabolized by other chemicals in the brain. The actual trip is said to last only three to five minutes, during which time the subject enters an R.E.M. sleep-like state. Fifteen minutes after smoking, it's out of your system and not even the D.E.A.'s best lab techs can trace it.

But dimethyl tryptamine, a schedule one drug, also has its dark side. It comes in crystal form and is smoked like crack cocaine. Lab monkeys will self-administer it to the exclusion of food. But by far the worst thing about dimethyl tryptamine is that it's nearly impossible to find. Ask your local dealer to score you a gram and you'll likely have to describe it for them, wait far too long, then pay through the nose. I abandoned my DMT search long ago and for two years settled for second hand stories. Besides, a friend who'd once tried it had warned me, "Don't take DMT, it changes you."

On the weekend of March 8 through 10 of this year I attended a workshop at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur held by ethnopharmachologist, author, psychonaut, and self-described alchemist, Terence McKenna. The conference was alternately titled, "Countdown to Complexity," "A Primer for a Descent into Novelty," and "Weekend with Terence McKenna." My reasons for attending were both vague and specific. One, I wanted McKenna's advice on publishing a novel of mine concerning a young biologist's coming of age through psychedelics, and two, I hoped to find reassurance that the future of Western culture and technology would be something other than ecological holocaust. However, while the conference gave me advice on both counts, the most fascinating subject covered that weekend was the consummate weirdness of dimethyl tryptamine.

Listening to McKenna describe the DMT experience is a bit like being entranced by a leprechaun. In a hypnotic, nasal singsong voice, he describes entering an underground, hyperdimensional "hive" and of encountering "self-transforming elf machines ... creatures made out of syntax driving light."

"It is not subtle," he explains to the skeptics. "These things mob you like badly trained rottweilers." According to McKenna, the intent of these beings, who he alternately describes as "self-dribbling jeweled basketballs," is to teach us their three dimensional language of sound; everything encountered in their dimension is, to our concept of the word, "Unspeakable. Unspeakable."

And for those who say, "bullshit" to these language lessons in hyperspace? They can load up a pipe and take three big booyas.

"The great thing about DMT," says McKenna, "is it doesn't require belief, a quality ... belonging to the truth. The truth requires no belief, it is the truth."

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