I was with my friend. Neither of us had prior experience, but we've done acid and shrooms together. I used a milligram scale, an oil pipe and a torch lighter. Pure chemical, bright yellow powder. We began by doing 3 sets of wim hof breathing together and talked about what we wanted from the experience. Him: getting a break from the everyday scramble (as usual) Me: wanting to deepen my understanding of reality, becoming a clearer communicator of higher consciousness, bridging high and low, becoming better at embodiment, loving myself and healing myself. (as usual) …I actually didn't go through all of that list with him but I went through it with myself before taking off. First try. I wanted to go first so I sat down in a comfy armchair in his kitchen. We had measured up 10 milligrams as the starting dose. In the beginning I tried to inhale as soon as I lit the lighter but after a while we figured out that you can wait a while until smoke arises. I have been fantisizing about smoking DMT since I saw the spirit molecule 8 years ago or so, so it felt like a big moment. It didn't feel as romantic as I had envisioned it, I was just there in his regular kitchen with an oil pipe in my hands that made me feel like a total crack-addict or something. I was really scared and didn't know what to expect as I took my first hits. The first hits didn't affect me much, I felt a slight numbness and thought I heard a sound like from an electrical wire come on. It was almost like I could've gotten the effects from just inhaling regular air, just from holding my breath for as long as I could. It also felt a bit like nitrous oxide. I waited a while between the hits during this first round. The second and third hit felt a bit stronger but nothing huge. After that, the pipe was fairly empty and I told my friend I would wait a bit so that he could go. We filled the pipe with another 20 milligrams. He tried it out but he is not used to smoking and has very sensitive lungs, he started to cough heavily as soon as he started to inhale and couldn't retain any smoke at all. Personally I was prepared for it to feel a lot worse, it almost didn't sting my lungs at all. I said that I wanted to give it another go and he was like: "yeah you HAVE to. I want SOMETHING to happen today, you're going to have to venture into the unknown for both of us." I think most of the 20 milligrams was left in the pipe so I stuck with that and sat down in the armchair again. Since the first round gave me so light effects and no unpleasantness I was more determined now. Second try. My friend held the lighter and I held the pipe. Everytime I exhaled he immediately lit up another hit. After two hits I gave him the pipe so he could hold that as well. I recommend this to anyone trying this, it allowed me to focus more on inhaling and surrendering to my experience as I held my breath. By the end of my third hit I started to feel things coming on fairly strong. For a short while I forgot that I was sitting in a chair holding my breath. Then I exhaled and as soon as I did I was reminded of what was going on since I heard a lighter going off near my face. I was like "damn, you're really not letting me rest" and thought it was a bit funny, he couldn't tell where I was in the process. I took one breath of oxygen between each hit, and then again I filled my lungs with as much smoke as I could and held it in as long as I could. Now on this fourth hit… It started to become evident that this was something quite different from nitrous oxide. I hardly had any visuals whatsoever, all I saw when I closed my eyes was blackness. …But even as I say that, I did see things. It was like a presence appeared in front of me. Very faintly, like a shadow figure, hard to distinguish. I didn't feel scared at all, it still felt like it might as well have been my imagination. I remembered again how I was in the arm chair and I exhaled. As soon as I did so, my friend provided me with one more hit and I took it while I tried to signal to my friend that this was it for me. I eased back in the chair and retained the air and away I went. Things got psychedelic. I was in another kind of space. A multidimensional space. It felt like infinite corridors, the gateways between all dimensions perhaps, in limbo. Everything had a dark brown tint, very murky. The endless corridors moved like the arms of an octopus. On top of that, all of reality was folding in on itself continuously, in various ways, without ever losing any volume. I experienced a wave of terror that I'm very familiar with, it's like a wall of fear that I need to break through on every trip before I expand into infinite awareness / ego death. I thought to myself something along the lines of: "no, is this really happening? This is going to be challenging, I don't like this" Then, more thoughts came, and even though I perceived them just as I do with my regular thoughts, something felt very different about their quality, it was like I was in telepathic communion with the figure who I had sensed earlier, she was still present in some form although not perfectly visible. It felt like a female presence, not overly warm and loving, she was very neutral and asexual in that sense, but something still tells me it was more of a woman than anything else. She said: "yes, this is what happens. And you KNOW this, because you've been here before, and you wanted to come here again" (she was referring to various peaks on previous trips) And I was like: "Yeaah, I know…" And she continued: "And you know that you KNOW everything you NEED to know, you've got all the resources and support you need to do what you need to do, and the idea you have that you need to somehow gather strength from someplace else is just a symptom of you not trusting yourself…. And you already know that as well." And I was like: "yeah I know" (really, none of this was new to me, but super awesome reminders nonetheless) Shortly after that, I started to sense my body again, I was back in the chair in my friends kitchen. I had been away for 2-3 minutes. If somebody asked me, that's what I would have guessed. So I didn't get lost in infinite fractal patterns outside of time, it was more like the curtains were opened and I could peak in for a while and then get back. I felt like that was a perfect introduction so I left it at that. A part of me was disappointed that I got more of Terence McKennas "sense of other" and less of Martin Ball/Leo's "All is you", but I'm definitely not complaining, it was fucking cool. The greatest mindfuck was that I came back so quickly and felt fully normal, really, that's what amazes me when I think about it. Just like I heard in other accounts, I felt like it was ME going somewhere, fully alert and present, not as disorienting as my ventures with mushrooms or acid. When I think back to those experiences it's harder to distinguish exactly what happened, since the experiences are so long and affect me in so many ways, with a much longer ramp-up and come-down. Another interesting detail is that at this time, my friend was looking after somebody else's cat, and the cat was with us in the kitchen. It was a very cat-like cat, minding it's own business and not caring about us at all. But apparently, around the time of my third and fourth hit, that cat got super intrigued and came up and seriously stared at me. It felt very nice to have my friend have my back and sort of forcibly push me into the multidimensional realms. It was beautiful since he is not at all as deeply into enlightenment, spirituality, metaphysics and epistemology as I am, he's just a very open minded and real guy. But I felt like that deepened our spiritual connection in some meaningful way.
Now I have a better grasp of how this substance works and how it affects me, I'll ramp it up slightly more next time.