My First DMT Experience and the Mystery of Stillness

Grant Cameron

When I began putting my first DMT experience into words, my questions kept returning to the colour, the complexity of the patterns, and the stunning stillness that accompanied it. Where did the light come from? Why did the patterns keep changing? And what was that stillness doing in an experience that could contain so much visual activity?

Those questions led me back to the accounts I have spent years studying: UFO encounters, near-death experiences, and other events in which people describe a reality that does not fit comfortably into everyday explanations. I wanted to know whether other people had described something close to what I was trying to express. Before deciding what it meant, I wanted to hear their words.

Where does the light come from

The first difficulty is hidden in a word we use without thinking: light. Ordinarily, a lamp or the sun illuminates something, and light reaches our eyes. But when someone describes a brilliant inner scene, what exactly is being illuminated? Where is the brightness experienced? What does it mean to see colour when the scene has no identifiable lamp, window, or sun?

There is a necessary distinction between physical light and the experience of brightness. Seeing an illuminated scene does not establish that photons are travelling through the space it appears to occupy. Yet saying that does not make the experienced brightness disappear. The person still has something to report, and the report still calls for an explanation.

During the discussion that followed my experience, dreams were offered as an analogy. We can see a brightly coloured world in a dream, the explanation went, even while our eyes are closed. My objection was simple: that gives me another example of the mystery. Why should there be color, brightness, time, and space in a dream? Saying that they occur does not explain how an experienced world comes into being.

I am interested in what brain research can establish. A change in the visual system may help explain when a particular image appears or how its geometry develops. But there is another question underneath that work. Why should any physical process have an experienced appearance? How does a description of activity become an explanation of what it is like to see? A complete account has to address both the organization of the experience and the fact that it is experienced at all.

 Patterns that change and forms that recur

The elaborate patterns raise a related question. Why should the visual field become so richly structured? Why should the designs vary while retaining a recognizable family resemblance?

Researchers have studied this seriously. Heinrich Klüver grouped recurring psychedelic imagery into what became known as form constants: lattices, webs, tunnels, and spirals. Later, Paul Bressloff, Jack Cowan, and their colleagues developed mathematical models in which patterns of activity in the visual cortex, transformed through its mapping of the visual field, could produce these geometries. Their 2001 paper offers a specific proposal for why certain shapes recur.[1]

A system does not need a separate stored picture for every pattern it produces. A kaleidoscope illustrates the principle: a small set of constraints permits many arrangements. That helps me understand how novelty and repetition might coexist. It does not demonstrate that any particular model reproduces the entirety of a DMT experience, including its colour, meaning, and felt depth.

There is also a temptation to call every intricate psychedelic design a fractal. I would use that word carefully. A pattern can look extraordinarily detailed without its mathematical structure having been established. The immediate observation is the complexity itself. Describing it accurately comes before deciding what mathematics, or what view of reality, explains it.

The stunning stillness

The feature that drew my attention most strongly in our discussion was the stillness. That was the word I used: stunning. It deserves to remain in the account alongside the colours and patterns.

Stillness can mean several things. It can describe an absence of sound in the surroundings. It can describe a quieting of thought. It can also describe a sense of presence that seems undisturbed by whatever appears within experience. Those meanings may overlap, but a researcher should ask which one a witness intends.

One anonymous DMT writer offered a striking comparison. Describing a first experience on the DMT-Nexus forum, the person wrote:

“It felt like the vibration of the universe stopped and everything was completely still.”[2]

The same account describes an altered sense of identity and an interval that seemed vastly longer than ordinary clock time. This is an unverified personal report, but it supplies something valuable: another person independently reaching for the language of complete stillness. It gives me a description to compare with my own, without requiring me to adopt the writer’s explanation of the universe.

The question becomes more interesting when similar language appears outside psychedelic accounts.

Stillness in near death accounts

A woman identified as Tina R. submitted an account to the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation describing experiences during a life-threatening infection in August 2008. Asked about time, she described:

“Absolutely an altered space of stillness - present moment.”

Asked about hearing, she wrote:

“It felt like I could hear the silence - complete attention.”[3]

She also reported a sharply defined visual image surrounded by white light. What interests me is the conjunction of visual clarity, attention, and stillness. Her description gives the silence a felt quality. It appears to have been part of the experience itself. The published account is her testimony; it does not independently establish everything that occurred medically or explain the source of what she perceived.

Mellen-Thomas Benedict used even more explicit language in his published NDE narrative. After describing passage into another light, he wrote:

“I found myself in a profound stillness, beyond all silence.”[4]

Elsewhere in that account he compared aspects of his imagery with fractal geometry. He interpreted what followed in expansive terms involving consciousness and creation. I can consider those interpretations while keeping the immediate description in view: an encounter with light and an extraordinary stillness. That combination is directly relevant to the questions I brought away from DMT.

The similarities have also attracted experimental attention. In 2018, Christopher Timmermann and colleagues gave DMT and placebo to thirteen healthy volunteers and assessed their experiences using an established NDE questionnaire. DMT produced substantially greater NDE-related scores than placebo, with overlap involving mystical experience and changes in the sense of self.[5]

This small study supports a comparison between reported experiences. It does not establish that DMT causes naturally occurring NDEs, or that the two states are identical. What it does establish is that their resemblance can be investigated systematically. We do not have to leave the comparison at the level of a striking anecdote.

When the UFO scene becomes still

The UFO material introduces another version of the question. In Philip Mantle’s account of Rosalind Reynolds’s reported September 1982 encounter, Reynolds and her boyfriend were travelling through East Anglia when a configuration of coloured lights approached and passed low over their car. Mantle records that she became aware of silence and stillness surrounding them. A blue flash then changed the appearance of the scene.[6]

That is relevant, but I want to preserve what the account actually says. It describes the surroundings becoming still. It does not clearly establish the profound inner condition described by Tina or Benedict. Nor does the absence of a craft’s engine noise, by itself, establish either kind of stillness.

For an interviewer, these distinctions suggest useful questions. Did the witness continue hearing traffic or wind? Did other people notice the change? Did thoughts become quiet? Did movement appear to stop, or did the witness feel unusually calm while movement continued? Was the change noticed before the object appeared, while it was present, or only in later reflection?

Those details could help us discover whether several experiences have been compressed into one word. They could also reveal a more specific recurring feature. A report of the whole environment becoming strangely quiet is already interesting. An account of heightened awareness accompanied by an unfamiliar stillness adds a different question about the experiencer’s state.

 The experience of another intelligence 

Another bridge between DMT and UFO accounts concerns the impression of encountering an intelligence with its own intentions. Those accounts extend the comparison beyond patterns and stillness to the feeling that another presence is participating in the experience.

In a 2020 survey, Alan Davis and colleagues studied 2,561 people who reported an entity encounter after inhaling DMT. Respondents often regarded the beings as conscious and intelligent, and many described communication. Sixty-nine percent reported receiving a message, task, mission, purpose, or insight. Many considered the encounter more real than ordinary consciousness.[7]

The selection of participants matters. These were people reporting entity encounters, so the survey cannot tell us what proportion of all DMT users encounter beings. It documents the character of those reports and their impact. For UFO research, it provides a substantial body of testimony against which accounts of apparently autonomous presences and communication might be compared.

Experiences can share features for different reasons. Human perceptual capacities may contribute. Expectations and cultural language may contribute. Some experiencers interpret the encounter as access to an independently existing reality. The comparison is worth making while those possibilities remain open. A powerful feeling of reality belongs in the record; independently verifying the source is a further task.

Keeping the question open

My first DMT experience has given me a set of questions to carry into the other material. I want to hear how witnesses describe brightness when they cannot identify a light source. I want to understand how a scene can possess apparent depth and space, and how patterns can keep changing while awareness is accompanied by stillness.

There is room here for competing explanations. A model in which the brain generates the experience must account for its qualities and structure. A model in which the brain filters or mediates a wider consciousness must explain what evidence would distinguish that proposal from internally generated experience. Neither earns its conclusion simply by naming the process.

For the moment, I can preserve what prompted the inquiry. There were the complex colour patterns. There was the question of light. And there was the stunning stillness. Other people, writing about DMT, near-death experiences, and UFO encounters, have used language that deserves to be placed alongside it.

I do not need to force those accounts into one explanation to recognize the importance of the comparison. The next step is to listen closely enough that the similarities become precise and the differences remain visible. Whatever the eventual answer, I will be exploring the DMT world where I am sure there are many answers to be found. Stay tuned, and share if this has opened up some answers for you.

Source notes

1. P. C. Bressloff, J. D. Cowan, M. Golubitsky, P. J. Thomas, and M. C. Wiener, “Geometric visual hallucinations, Euclidean symmetry and the functional architecture of striate cortex,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 356 (2001), 299–330. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11316482/

2. “first DMT experience,” DMT-Nexus forum. Anonymous first-person account; quotations describe the writer’s experience and interpretation. https://forum.dmt-nexus.me/threads/first-dmt-experience.351608/

3. “Tina R NDE 3746,” Near-Death Experience Research Foundation. Reported experience dates August 24 and 25, 2008. https://www.nderf.org/Experiences/1tina_r_nde.html

4. Mellen-Thomas Benedict, first-person NDE narrative hosted by NDERF. The narrative’s cosmological and medical claims are not independently established by its publication. https://www.nderf.org/_borders/mellen_thomas_nde.htm

5. Christopher Timmermann et al., “DMT Models the Near-Death Experience,” Frontiers in Psychology 9 (2018), article 1424. Fixed-order, single-blind, placebo-controlled study, thirteen participants. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01424 

6. Philip Mantle, “Going Public with Your Close Encounter: Interview with Rosalind Reynolds—Part II,” The Alien Jigsaw. The stillness passage is Mantle’s narrative summary of Reynolds’s report, rather than a verbatim quotation from her. https://www.alienjigsaw.com/reviews-op-eds-interviews/Mantle-Interview-with-Rosalind-Reynolds.html

7. Alan K. Davis et al., “Survey of entity encounter experiences occasioned by inhaled N,N-dimethyltryptamine: Phenomenology, interpretation, and enduring effects,” Journal of Psychopharmacology 34, no. 9 (2020), 1008–1020. Retrospective online survey of people reporting an entity encounter. https://doi.org/10.1177/0269881120916143