What’s interesting throughout this process is that the “artworks” or visual documentation had genuine utility within the field of science. Traditionally, the arts and science can’t be further apart. Sometimes artists will help interpret and visualize creatively what the “real science” is. What does space look like in one image, or what does the mechanisms of a cell look like. But rarely, if ever, do artworks become the focal point - and the researchers pore over the captured visual and geometric qualities of an artwork.

Complex hallucinations

But some drugs, specifically tryptamines like N, N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), cause complex hallucinations. What do those look like? Well, here we reach the bottleneck. I really can’t tell you. I can try - but the complexity of what it looks like is beyond the capacity of language. As McKenna once quipped “It’s like water off a ducks back, I mean, language just doesn’t stick”. One analogy might be: Imagine trying to describe what the city of a foreign country looks like. The complexity is just too great to capture the gestalt, or essence, of what the thing really is. Some features can be generally described but each detail that is articulated (e.g. ‘writhing stripy tentacles’) can bring up an unlimited number of interpretations. We can only imagine using Dall-E 2 to input the textual descriptions, and being able to cycle through a truly limitless number of interpretations of that one sentence.

What do DMT hallucinations look like?

While it is very difficult to articulate, we can certainly try to at least establish some descriptions to work from. The experience of DMT is like opening your third eye to another 3-dimensional space - much like your head is in the middle of a room. It’s very much like normal vision, you can kind of look around (by controlling your minds eye, not by turning your head) these rooms. The spaces often feel like a giant dome, or a palace, or a tunnel. The variety of experiences is one of the signature qualities of DMT, every experience is radically different, even for the same person.

But there is very strange geometry in there. The word hyper-dimensional feels fitting, as the imagery looks impossible. The space and objects inside seem to fractalize, distort, bend and warp visually in ways that I’ve never seen before. There are many sub-categories to vision such as the visual motion, cognitive perception, object categorisation, visual acuity - all of these areas experience novel qualities that are hard to pin down in words. One of the subtle issues is that the visual qualities of the hallucinations are also very difficult to just cognize - meaning to interpret and categorize the very thing you are seeing. Here we end up stuck at another issue being the ability of the interpreter to simply document, rather than influence the very visuals being seen. This is an extremely private event - it is ones own mind tussling with ones own mind.

The Significance

These and many more issues exist in the difficulty of documenting complex hallucinations. This makes it impossible to analyze what they are. How can we study something only you have seen and you can’t tell anyone about? While this may seem like just an interesting ontological or academic quirk in a strange field, it has prevented very simple questions from being answered:

• What is seen in the hallucination?

• Are the beings real?

• Are they in your head, or are they from somewhere else?

The significance of those answers being anything other than what traditional science will guesstimate (i.e. that it’s all in your head, it’s your imagination, the beings aren’t real) is astronomical. We just may have uncovered some seriously radical and unique ability to the human cognition and vision. So in 2010 I began a PhD at the Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation on the topic “Using 3D animation to visualise N, N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) complex visual hallucinations”.

The Moment

I spent two years full-time researching and writing about this topic - one of the most meaningful periods of my life. This felt like it had the genuine potential of being a very important breakthrough scientifically and for the creative industries (my true passion). It was a way to unify the utility and craftsmanship of technical artists to work with scientists unlocking the secrets of mind and the imagination. But at an important checkpoint I was told by a panel of professors that I couldn’t continue further as my methodologies were not scientifically valid. Despite designing a range of checks and balances, I could never prove the documenting of the hallucinations was accurate.

While this was personally a crushing moment, I agreed with their identification of a weak spot in the research. After a long discussion about pivoting to a safer topic to resolve the methodology issues, I reluctantly agreed, and worked on developing software for police agencies in the hopes of returning back to the DMT problem. But a few months in, I realized that the spark of insight I had found was generally disregarded and there was little hope in returning to that topic. So I bitterly packed my bags up and left the Institute in the middle of the night.

Progress Is Slow

However, I knew that I had identified a major breakthrough in psychedelic research - I’d first identified the bottleneck and then began the tedious work of resolving it. One of the difficult things about this is that within the academic space, the holy grail is a completeness theorem - an airtight solution that in undeniable. While the average individual may be able to intuitively grasp concepts that leap beyond where science is up to, the slow and methodical nature of scientific repeatability creates undeniable progress.

The Underground Research Continues

While I didn’t complete the PhD, I made a promise to continue the research underground. I’ve taken DMT probably about 150 times now. It’s the most important work I do. Oh how I wish, I could draw, model, animate and remember more details to better chip away at that bottleneck. But as a mere mortal, I’m only capable of what I’m capable of right now, and so I try as hard as I can to document some of the qualities and feelings in my artworks.

Here is one that is from the Exotic collection - that moment of taking DMT and it the portal opening up, with a tunnel of eyes, strange symmetry and organic beings beginning to make contact with my consciousness.