In February 1966, a 19 year old Terence McKenna was sitting in a house in Berkeley when someone handed him a glass pipe containing something that looked like orange mothballs. He asked what it was. DMT, came the answer. He asked how long it would last. Ten minutes, he was told.

McKenna took it. Within seconds, the world he thought he understood disappeared. He described falling into an intensely geometric realm populated by strange entities he would later famously call “self transforming machine elves,” apparently intelligent beings communicating through a kind of visible, colored language.

According to cultural anthropologist Graham St John, author of a biography on McKenna, he entered that evening as a fairly conventional materialist and came out of it convinced that our ordinary model of reality was radically incomplete. That single ten minute experience became one of the defining events of his life. He did not conclude that DMT simply caused vivid hallucinations. He believed it showed that reality could present itself in forms the ordinary human mind cannot even conceive of. As he put it later, “the world is a way that you can’t think it is.”

He spent the following three decades turning that conviction into a kind of philosophical project. He called DMT the “ultimate deconditioning agent,” arguing that culture hands us fixed categories for interpreting everything, real versus imaginary, self versus other, possible versus impossible, and that DMT seemed capable of collapsing those categories within seconds. Through lectures, workshops, recordings, and eventually the early internet, he helped turn DMT from an obscure underground substance into one of the great open questions of psychedelic culture, and he was equally drawn to the finding that DMT occurs naturally in mammalian biology, which fed into the popular but scientifically unproven idea that the pineal gland releases a flood of it at birth, death, or near death experiences.

We came across a post retelling this story that had pulled in 175 comments, and that number alone told us something was going on. So we went through the thread to understand what exactly people were responding to, and what it says about how an ambiguous, decades old story still gets under people’s skin.

Roughly one in five comments were people sharing their own experience as a kind of confirmation. Ayahuasca, mushrooms, salvia, a near death experience, and notably, quite a few without any substance at all. One woman described standing in a forest at age thirteen and feeling an overwhelming, almost alive presence in the trees, with no drugs involved. Another simply wrote that they saw the same kind of beings as a child, no substance needed. The pattern repeats itself over and over: one person’s story gives everyone else permission to share an experience they normally keep to themselves, and every confirming reply reinforces for the group that the experience is real and shared, regardless of whether there is any evidence behind it.

About another 15 percent filled in the gaps of McKenna’s account with their own spiritual or alternative framework. Souls, other dimensions, angels, demons, Jungian archetypes, entire private cosmologies about ego splitting or beings that “hold reality together.” An ambiguous, unexplained phenomenon functions as a kind of projection screen, and everyone reads their own worldview into it. Worth noting, the pineal gland and DMT at death claim came up multiple times in the thread stated as settled fact, which is a good example of how an unproven idea gains credibility simply through repetition.

A similarly sized group responded with genuine open questions rather than a ready made belief. What do people born blind see on DMT. How can multiple people describe the exact same obscure hallucination independently. This is the segment that is the most curious and the least already convinced, and arguably the most persuadable in either direction, mystical or scientific.

By far the largest single category, close to three in ten comments, was pure humor and absurdity. Jokes, wordplay, one word non sequiturs. This matters because it is easy to mistake for the same thing as the confirmation group, when it is actually something else entirely. A large share of the engagement on a story like this is entertainment, not a position on the underlying question.

The rest split between direct criticism of McKenna himself, a smaller but clearly present group calling him “someone whose brain got fried” chasing one experience for the rest of his life, plain skepticism along the lines of “it’s called hallucinating for a reason,” and outright fandom, people who saw him speak in person or recommend his books to others.

What stands out across all of it is that this topic pulls in reactions because it does three things at once. It invites people to share a personal experience they rarely say out loud. It is vague enough that anyone can project their own worldview onto it. And it is strange enough to be genuinely fun to joke about. That combination is why a ten minute experience from 1966 can still get 175 people typing almost sixty years later.

Maybe that is the actual takeaway here, independent of what anyone thinks about DMT itself. A striking number of people in that thread, without touching any substance, recognized something of that same sense of awe, connection, or a temporary loosening of ordinary reality. That is exactly the territory breathwork operates in, not the promise of machine elves, but the recognition that non ordinary states of consciousness are more accessible than most people assume.

A different explanation: the machine elves as phosphenes

One comment in that original thread deserves more attention than it got. It came from Jan Keppel Hesselink, who pointed out that McKenna never seriously considered a simpler and, we would argue, better explanation than an independent hyperspace populated by autonomous beings: phosphenes.

Phosphenes are the light patterns the visual system generates on its own, without any external light source, and they are well documented in deep meditation, sensory deprivation, and pressure on the eyeball, long before anyone brings a psychedelic into the picture. Research into meditation induced phosphenes describes them as following a fairly consistent progression rather than appearing as random noise: simple flickers give way to geometric forms, then to moving, evolving structures, then to symbolic and entity like imagery, then to pure radiant light, and in the deepest states to a dissolution of form altogether. In other words, the same visual system that produces a flicker in front of closed eyes is, at its far end, entirely capable of producing something that looks and feels like an encounter with an intelligent being made of light and geometry.

That reframes what McKenna experienced. The geometric, self transforming, communicative quality of the “machine elves” fits neatly into the later stages of this phosphene hierarchy, the same stages long term meditators describe reaching without any substance at all. DMT does not need to open a door to an external hyperspace to produce that experience. It plausibly just pushes the visual system very quickly and very intensely through a sequence that meditation reaches more slowly. This is sometimes described as an “ultrasubjective hyperspace,” a space that is neither purely internal noise nor an objectively external realm, but a structured, meaningful layer of experience the brain is capable of generating on its own.

We think this explanation holds up better than McKenna’s own than an independent reality populated by intelligent entities, because it accounts for the same reports of geometric machine elf like beings turning up in meditators, in people with no drug history at all, and even in some of the comments on the original post itself, without requiring anything to exist outside the brain generating the experience. It also fits directly with what breathwork is built on: intense, controlled changes in physiology and attention can move someone through the same phosphene progression that deep meditators and, apparently, DMT users report, using nothing but the breath.

Source: Hierarchies of Light: A Taxonomy and Phenomenology of Meditation-Induced Phosphenes