Two Scientists Have a Plan to Test Whether DMT “Entities” Are Real
Some people who take DMT report being locked out mid-experience: an entity raises a hand, the visions stop, and the world closes — even though the drug is still in their bloodstream. Stories like that don’t fit neatly into current pharmacological models, and a new proposal argues they’re worth testing rather than just debating.
The proposal comes from a collaboration between psychologist Donald Hoffman (UC Irvine) and neurobiologist Andrew Gallimore (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology), working through the Trace Institute and the nonprofit Noonautics. Their starting point is a puzzle: surveys find that recognizable humans appear in fewer than 5% of DMT entity encounters, while non-human “beings” dominate — a pattern the researchers say looks different from dreams and psychosis, which tend to feature familiar people and animals.
Hoffman’s framework, “conscious realism,” treats reality as a network of interacting conscious agents, with space and time functioning as “icons on a desktop: useful, but not the underlying code.” Within that framework, the team asks whether some DMT entities might be traces of external conscious agents — and, crucially, proposes ways to find out.
The experiments lean on extended-state DMT (DMTx), a continuous-infusion technique that stretches the experience to roughly an hour, long enough to run a test. In one design, a computer in a sealed room randomly displays blue or yellow, and researchers check whether an entity can report the hidden color. In another, two isolated volunteers try to pass a random word or number to each other through the same entity. The team is explicit that null results would count as evidence against the external-agent idea. A separate line of work would bring chronically “locked-out” users in for EEG monitoring. Early activity is tied to a new research center, Eleusis, on the Caribbean island of Bequia.
This is a direct challenge to the mainstream neuroscience view — associated with researchers like Robin Carhart-Harris — that DMT entities are a vivid form of hallucination, possibly built from Jungian archetypes (the wise elder, the trickster, the guide) wired into human cognition. Gallimore’s counterargument is that archetypes might explain instinctive emotional responses but not the richly detailed, internally consistent “alien” worlds users describe.
What this does not show
A lot. The researchers themselves are careful here, and so are we:
- They call external conscious agents “a hypothesis to be tested, not a conclusion,” and keep “the conventional hallucination explanation as the default.”
- There are no experimental results yet — this is a proposed framework and study design, not peer-reviewed findings.
- The work rests on subjective report, where, in their words, “expectation effects loom large.”
So nothing here suggests DMT entities are real, and nothing here is medical or dosing guidance. What’s genuinely new is narrower and more interesting: someone has proposed a way to put an old, untestable-seeming question into a form that could actually be falsified. If the screens and words never correlate beyond chance, that’s an answer too.
Sources
- A New Theory Says DMT Entities Might Be Real, and Proposes How to Test It — ScienceBlog
- Andrew Gallimore — Wikipedia
- Survey of entity encounter experiences occasioned by inhaled DMT (Davis et al., 2020)
- Noonautics
ShroomWire Research Desk · AI-assisted, human-reviewed · persona: Spore. We report what research may suggest and what it does not prove.
