DMT is the world’s strangest and most mysterious drug, inducing one of the most remarkable and yet least understood of all states of consciousness. This common plant molecule has, from ancient times to the modern day, been used as a tool to gain access to a bizarre alien reality of inordinate complexity and unimaginable strangeness, populated by a panoply of highly advanced, intelligent, and communicative beings entirely not of this world.
In this interview I speak to Andrew Gallimore, a neurobiologist, chemist, pharmacologist, and writer interested in the relationship between psychedelic drugs, the brain, consciousness and the structure of reality. His collaboration with Dr Rick Strassman on extended state DMT pharmacokinetic model and first book “Alien Information Theory: Psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Cosmic Game” served as primary inspirations for the Noonautics Project.
Based in Tokyo, Japan, Andrew recently released his recent book Death by Astonishment: Confronting the Mystery of the World’s Strangest Drug which further explores the fascinating and bizarre relationship between psychedelics and how our brain models reality.
Q: Why do you describe DMT as the world’s strangest drug?
[Andrew Gallimore]: Yeah, when I say DMT is the world’s strangest drug, I really mean it. It forces you to confront the fact that we know almost nothing about the true nature of reality. Whatever image you have of what’s real or possible is obliterated in an instant. You’re faced with a world that isn’t just strange, but so utterly incomprehensible that it transcends imagination. It’s a place that shouldn’t exist within our consensus reality, yet there it is—undeniable. That is something we need to get to grips with, because most people just aren’t used to experiences that are completely inexplicable.
Q: Where do we construct our experience of the world?
[Andrew Gallimore]: … the world we see is always constructed by our brain. That rule always applies. We never have direct access to the world in itself; we only have access to the model our brain is constructing. It works as a sort of ‘best guess.’ The brain isn’t trying to find the absolute truth or create a perfect replica of the outside world’s structure. No, it’s trying to find a model that works—one that is adaptive and allows you to function and navigate whatever is out there.
“This applies to the normal waking state just as it does to dreaming. After all, what is a dream other than a selective simulation of the waking world? Your brain builds the dream world exactly as it does the waking world, just without access to sensory inputs. In this view, sensory inputs act like a training signal. The brain uses its internal model to predict those inputs. When it predicts correctly, it knows the model is working and essentially discards the data. But if it gets it wrong, it processes that sensory information to update the model until those ‘error signals’ drop. It’s a constant cycle of holding a model, testing it, and updating it based on errors. That is essentially how it works.
[Vikas: So how does DMT interfere with this world model?]
[Andrew Gallimore]: The world model our brain constructs is the one it evolved to build, right? It’s simply what the brain knows how to do. You begin developing this model from the moment you’re born, likely starting with a basic scaffold that allows you to structure reality.
So, it is extremely difficult to explain how, when this molecule enters the system, the brain suddenly stops constructing that normal model and switches to something else entirely. It creates this inordinately complex, highly coherent world filled with intelligent, non-human beings. The sheer complexity of it suggests to me that the brain might actually be gaining access to some other source of information.
Q: Are experiences people have on DMT of significance?
[Andrew Gallimore]: I think DMT is of immense significance. As I say in the book, I don’t just think it’s the most interesting thing on the planet—I think it might be the most important. There is remarkable consistency in the reports, particularly regarding the entities people encounter. They are nothing like standard hallucinations.
In patients with psychosis or other neuropsychological disorders, hallucinations are usually of people or animals—normal size, normal appearance. This makes sense; these are the models the brain is trained to construct every single day. But with DMT, people very rarely meet humans or animals in the normal sense. Instead, they encounter thoroughly alien, highly intelligent, otherworldly beings. And that experience seems to be consistent across cultures.
Q: Haven’t people been using DMT across thousands of years of civilisation?
[Andrew Gallimore]: While the most common way to experience DMT today is in its pure form—whether extracted or synthesised—the use of DMT-containing plants goes back millennia. These are ancient pharmacological technologies. What we’re seeing now is simply the modern manifestation of a phenomenon that goes back a long way: the interaction between humans and some kind of intelligent agent, to use a neutral term.
In the past, people might have called them spirits, gods, or deities. Today, we might call them entities, aliens, or discarnate intelligences. But I don’t think the terminology really matters. It’s likely the same thing: humans have been interacting with these normally unseen, intelligent beings for thousands of years.
Q: Why did civilisation stop having DMT (type) experiences?
[Andrew Gallimore]: I can’t give a definitive historical answer, but certainly during the Enlightenment, we began to reject anything that wasn’t amenable to direct, collective observation. We entered the scientific age and came to view the world as a clockwork, mechanical structure. We decided that the only things that were ‘real’ were things we could measure, point to, and document. Anything else was dismissed as mysticism—or what we’d now call ‘woo.’
In my opinion, we lost a lot by doing that, though we are starting to rediscover it now. There is an interesting trajectory here. Take the scientific quest to understand consciousness. We started centuries ago with the assumption that matter had primacy—that if we understood matter fully, we could derive consciousness from it. But that has been an abject failure. Nobody has successfully explained how ‘dead matter’ can develop a subjective perspective—why there can be ‘something it is like’ to be a lump of matter, to use Nagel’s terminology.
Because of this, more scientists are beginning to realize that perhaps we took the wrong fork in the road. We assumed matter was fundamental when we probably should have prioritised consciousness. If we viewed consciousness as the prima materia of reality itself, I think we’d know a lot more about these intelligences and hidden agents than we do today, had we not gone down that strict materialist path all those years ago.
Q: Should we not be encouraging almost exploration of DMT space by leading thinkers?
[Andrew Gallimore]: I work with a non-profit in Florida called Noonautics. Our vision is something we call ‘SETI of the mind.’ The goal is to treat the DMT space and other altered states as novel domains to be explored, much in the same way we treat outer space. It is a completely new frontier that we know almost nothing about, inhabited by beings that we treat as potential intelligences with whom we can establish a two-way relationship.
That is where I’m heading now. I’ve reached the point where I’ve done all I can to convince people that there is more to DMT than mere hallucination. The next step is to launch proper expeditions. This is where DMTX technology comes into play—which I developed with Rick Strassman—to extend the experience from just a few minutes to potentially several hours. This allows us to send specialists—scientists, mathematicians, linguists, engineers, and artists—into that space and hold them there. The aim is to retrieve highly specialised information and begin developing a deeper understanding of the structure of that world and its occupants.
Q: How has DMT changed you?
[Andrew Gallimore]: Anyone who takes the DMT space seriously—anyone who has been there and realised its profound significance—is forced to live a kind of parallel life. You slip back into ‘normal life mode’ and almost have to ignore the implications of what you saw.
Ultimately, though, it teaches you not to take this world too seriously. It reveals it as an illusion. I almost want to call it a ‘sham,’ though that might be too strong a word. It brings to mind the ancient Hindu concept of Maya—that everything we see is an illusion. DMT forces you to confront that fact. It shows you that this tawdry, flimsy domain we think is foundational to reality is actually nothing more than a theatre screen. Far deeper, more complex, and fascinating realms lie just beyond the threshold, and you only need a couple of lungfuls of DMT to reach them.
Q: Is there an intersection with DMT space, and quantum theories?
[Andrew Gallimore]: If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that with DMT, you’re accessing a realm completely beyond space-time. Even with quantum theory, you start to see limits; as you go smaller and smaller, the mathematics breaks down, and you realize there’s a limit to how deep we can go.
However, the DMT space seems to exist outside of normal space-time entirely. To say we are just going deep into the ‘sub-quantum’ feels too physicalist to me. I don’t think it’s that simple. I believe you are actually transcending space-time, transcending the quantum, and crossing the boundaries of reality as we conceive them. You are stepping into a domain about which we know absolutely nothing.
Q: Can DMT change our relationship with our own existence?
[Andrew Gallimore]: It depends on the level of experience, but certainly, the first time I ever used DMT, everything changed within 30 seconds of a deep lungful of vapor. I didn’t just lose my sense of self; I lost any conception of what it meant to be human. There was no memory of ever having been a human. I was simply a perspective—a point of conscious awareness observing this thoroughly alien domain.
It was only when I started to come back that my neural architecture began to piece my humanity together again. I had this fleeting idea, like a glint of a memory: ‘Oh, right, I’m a human.’ Gradually, the realization returned that I am a human and I’ve taken a molecule. But inside the space itself, there was no conception of humanity whatsoever. I was just pure awareness within a dramatically altered world.
Q: What would you be your message to sceptics?
[Andrew Gallimore]: I mean, it would be irresponsible of me to simply say ‘do DMT,’ even though that is the obvious answer. Terence McKenna always said that the only 100% effective ‘conversion protocol’ is basically to hand someone a glass pipe and let them see it for themselves. That is the only true way to convince yourself.
However, without wanting to give a shameless plug, I would suggest reading Death by Astonishment. In the book, I outline in detail why I don’t believe this is mere hallucination or simply the result of a brain perturbed by a powerful psychoactive drug. Instead, I argue that there is something far stranger, and far more difficult to explain, actually going on.