Banned from the DMT Playground

 

Experiment Eleven: Banned

Experiment eleven was the first of my DMT experiences that I would describe as a bad trip. At least, that was how I understood it immediately afterward. Later, I began to wonder whether it had been as important as the extraordinary experience that preceded it.

To understand that contrast, it helps to know something about experiment ten. That experience had been overwhelming in the most positive sense. “Road to Damascus” is the closest expression I can find for its impact. It felt as though I had been taken into a higher realm, something beyond anything I could adequately describe. Whatever its ultimate explanation, it had the emotional force of a revelation.

Then I came back the next day, looking for more.

For experiment eleven, I wore my usual blindfold, but I added something new: a noise-reducing headset. There was nothing playing through it. My thinking was that blocking sound as well as light might remove more of the outside world and allow me to become more absorbed in the experience. Whether that change contributed to what followed, I do not know.

The most important thing to understand is that, for almost the entire experience, I did not know I was Grant Cameron. I did not remember taking DMT. I was not sitting there thinking, “This is a strange drug experience.” The ordinary background knowledge that would have explained my situation was missing.

I was simply in it.

My memory begins with something like a car parked beside a curb at night. Someone was getting into the car, or perhaps I was helping someone get in. My grandson seemed to be involved, but I cannot confidently identify who was there or exactly what was happening. Everything was dark, foggy, and difficult to grasp.

There was a brief action, perhaps two seconds long. Then it happened again.

And again.

Looking back, I can describe it as a loop. While it was happening, however, I did not recognize it as one. That distinction matters. I was not watching a scene repeat and becoming annoyed because I knew I had already seen it. Each repetition seemed to occupy the whole of my awareness. Whatever would have allowed me to compare it with the previous repetition was unavailable.

I kept trying to complete the action. Someone was getting into something. Something was supposed to happen next. But it never seemed to arrive at completion.

Meanwhile, a feeling began building in my stomach.

The closest comparison is the feeling you might have if your football team reached the Super Bowl. You have followed the team, built up your hopes, and spent the whole game wanting them to win. Then, at the very end, they lose. There is that sinking sensation in the pit of your stomach.

That was the feeling, except it kept growing.

Consciously, I did not understand what was wrong. Yet my body seemed to register that something was unresolved. The scene kept happening, and the discomfort kept increasing. It felt as though my nervous system knew something that the part of me caught in the scene could not recognize.

Eventually, there was a break. Some awareness returned that I was doing DMT. But even then, I did not immediately understand that the strange little scene had been the experience itself. I treated it almost as an irrelevant thought or dream that had interrupted what I was trying to do.

What was that stupid thing? Let’s get on with it.

I thought perhaps only a few seconds had passed. I lifted the blindfold, found the vaporizer, and inhaled again. At the time, I assumed that perhaps I had not properly entered the experience. In hindsight, that decision shows how incomplete my understanding still was: I had recovered enough awareness to act, but not enough to make sense of what had just happened.

When I lowered the blindfold, I entered another loop.

This one seemed to involve the front entrance of a house at night. It was not my house, although even the identification of it as a doorway is uncertain. There was a light, an entrance, and the impression that I was helping someone up a step.

Again, my grandson seemed somehow to be involved. It resembled the familiar action of helping a small child into a house: you lift or pull a little, and the child jumps up over the step.

Except the movement never finished.

We approached the entrance. There was the lifting movement. Then we were back at the beginning. Approach, lift, doorway. Approach, lift, doorway. Whatever was supposed to bring us inside never happened.

Once again, I did not know who I was. I did not remember taking DMT, and I did not understand that I was repeating an action. There was only the attempt, followed by another attempt, with no arrival.

The feeling in my stomach returned and built as the repetition continued.

Afterward, I thought about accounts of hell in which someone is trapped in an endlessly repeated situation. I am describing an association that occurred to me, rather than claiming that I had visited hell. What disturbed me was the possibility of being caught in something without possessing the awareness needed to recognize the trap. There was no clear thought that I could step back from it or wait for it to end.

Eventually, I came out far enough to understand that I had taken DMT and that this had been an unpleasant experience. This was not what I had wanted.

Usually, my sessions ended in a remarkable state of peace. The imagery would disappear, the voice in my head would become quiet, and I would remain in a feeling of complete well-being. This time, I could still sit calmly, but the calm existed alongside a sick, disappointed sensation in my stomach.

That was an unexpected combination. I was outwardly still, yet something inside me remained unsettled. The session felt unfinished and unsuccessful.

It was only later that my interpretation changed.

That afternoon, I had been listening to Columbia University chemist Dalibor Sames discuss ibogaine. I was interested because someone from the Vancouver group had offered to accompany me to a clinic in Mexico. Before experiment eleven, I had been imagining a much larger writing project, bringing together my experiences and research involving DMT and other psychedelics. The title I had in mind was God’s Medicine.

What caught my attention in Sames’s account was the possibility of instruction. As I remember the interview, he described seeing molecular structures and receiving ideas about changes to them during his ibogaine experience. Because he had spent years studying the chemistry, the structures had a significance for him that they would not have had for most people.

I need to check his exact wording and the details of that account. But what stayed with me was the image of a chemist encountering something that appeared to teach him through the very subject he understood best.

I began thinking about psychedelic compounds as possible forms of biological technology. Could their effects express some kind of purpose? Could the experience involve instruction? And if these compounds were gifts, what would receiving such a gift require of us?

Those questions connected with a book Destiny and I had been working on called The Gifts. In that project, I ask whether certain developments in human history might be understood as gifts, rather than simply accidents or isolated discoveries.

They also connected with an idea I have explored in UFO research: that an apparent gift might draw us into a problem we cannot solve using our existing assumptions. In that interpretation, receiving an object would be only the beginning. Understanding it might require a change in how we think about consciousness and reality. That remains a hypothesis, and the claims about recovered craft and stalled reverse engineering require their own examination.

But the pattern interested me: something is offered, we become fascinated by it, and then we discover a limit. We have work to do before we can proceed.

Later, as I was leaving the house to get coffee, that idea suddenly changed how I understood experiment eleven.

I had been trying to get someone into a car. Then I had been trying to get someone through a doorway. Neither action could be completed.

The thought came to me: I had been banned.

That was the word that captured the feeling. Entry denied. I could approach, but I could not get through.

No being had appeared and told me this. There had been no explicit announcement that I was unwelcome. The interpretation came afterward, when I considered the repeated failure to enter alongside the extraordinary experience of the previous day.

Experiment ten had given me something I regarded as profound. Then I had returned almost immediately, asking for another experience before I had done much with the one I already had.

Was experiment eleven, in some sense, telling me to stop coming back for more and work with what I had received?

I had encountered accounts of people who interpreted psychedelic experiences as a refusal: a sense that they had already been shown something and needed to integrate it before returning. Those stories gave me a possible language for what had happened. They did not establish its cause, but they helped me formulate the question.

Perhaps I had begun approaching the experience as an endless source of revelation. Each session could be followed by another, and another, without any point at which I stopped to ask what I was doing with the material.

The lesson I drew was uncomfortable because it applied directly to me. I wanted answers about the field, consciousness, and whether intelligence might exist beyond our ordinary awareness. When I had an experience that felt like an answer, I was still not satisfied. I wanted to go back.

That does not mean the loops prove an outside intelligence prevented my entry. Repetition, disrupted memory, and loss of identity could also belong to the altered state itself. My later interpretation cannot erase that uncertainty. What I can describe confidently is the experience, the discomfort, and the significance it acquired for me afterward.

It also changed my earlier thinking about difficult trips. Until then, my own positive experiences had made it easy to underestimate how disorienting DMT could become. In experiment eleven, I could not simply remind myself to relax, because for much of it I did not remember the situation I needed to relax into. The part of me that could have supplied that reassurance was missing.

Yet I eventually found value in what had happened. The unpleasantness remained real, but it no longer seemed to be the whole story.

Experiment ten had left me overwhelmed by what seemed possible. Experiment eleven brought me back to the question of responsibility: what was I going to do with what I had already experienced?

I came to understand “banned” as a demand to pause. Whether that demand came from an intelligence beyond me or emerged through my own mind, it directed my attention toward the same unfinished work. I needed to remember, write, examine, and integrate.

I had been asking what else I could be shown.

Now I had another question to answer: what had I done with what I had already been given?