Arataki’s Guide to 5-MeO-DMT

Introduction

5-MeO-DMT (hereafter, ‘5-MeO’) is simultaneously the best and worst psychedelic that I have ever tried. I hesitate to even call it a psychedelic; its subjective effects feel totally different than your typical trip on DMT, LSD, Psilocybin, or other such 5-HT2A agonists.¹ A good trip elevates you to a realm of pure consciousness where insight is formless and frictionless, qualia are indivisible, and spiritual transcendence is inevitable. A bad trip ensnares you into a cage of trapped energy where thoughts are suffocating, knowledge is fractured and devoid of meaning, and resistance is both futile and inevitable. While there are some practical steps you can follow to optimise your chances of having a net-positive experience, which side of the valence axis you land on can be very difficult to control. As such, I would recommend exercising extra caution if you are considering experimenting with this compound, regardless of how confident you are as a psychonaut or how many experiences you have with other altered states.

The general aim of this essay is to lay out everything interesting or useful that I’ve come to learn about working with 5-MeO throughout my ~100 experiences at the QRI Sentinel Retreat. The main focus will be on valence, which I believe is the most significant aspect of consciousness to study in the 5-MeO state. However, I will also discuss generalities about its phenomenal character, in addition to effective methods of vaporising the substance (reducing one’s likelihood of having a bad experience). I’ll skip the basic advice (e.g., set & setting), so if you’re new to psychedelics this might not be the best place to start. Rather, this essay is directed toward people who are already familiar with the psychedelic experience and are considering trying 5-MeO out for themselves.²

Phenomenal Character

Classical psychedelic trips feel like you’re working out your consciousness. They’re active, dynamic experiences where rich tapestries of qualia fabricate and deconstruct with a natural ebb and flow. Rather than a static system cleanly processing sensory information to produce a well-calibrated model of my environment, one’s experience becomes like a sensory sponge ready to soak up any and all signals they happen to perceive. The resulting experience looks more fluid than fixed as local features bleed into each other, while the experience as a whole preserves the same general shape. Having a good time on a classical psychedelic feels like swimming alongside a powerful current in a vast heaving ocean, magnificent and entropic. In a word, these experiences feel alive.

5-MeO does not feel alive to me – but neither does it feel dead. Rather than amplifying perceived sensory patterns or modulating the fabrication process, 5-MeO narrows the metaphorical aperture of my nervous system while simultaneously expanding the overall scale of my conscious experience. At sufficiently high doses this results in experiences that seem to envelop the whole world and yet contain little to no information content, producing a state of profound non-separation. In this state, all of the boundaries that usually segment experiential regions from one another (symmetry breaking operations, implemented for computational purposes) have collapsed, such as the boundary between self and other, internal and external, etc. Having a good time on 5-MeO feels to me like floating still on the surface of a mountain lake, tranquil and liberating in the absence of movement on the water’s surface.³

I would model the phenomenal character of 5-MeO as gas-like (no fixed volume or shape, little sense of continuity between experiential frames). It is fairly simple, to the extent that >80% of my trips could be fairly described using the same few conceptual/analytical frames. For example, expansion and contraction was a common phenomenon in which certain modalities (e.g., perception of body, perception of space) would appear to increase and decrease in their volume. Another common phenomenon was the feeling of resistance/friction/‘trapped energy’ represented at every point within my experience simultaneously (creating a sense of fracturing/fragmentation), contrasted with the smooth texture of energy release/dissipation/equalisation (creating a sense of oneness/non-separation), associated with negative and positive experiences (respectively).

For my nervous system, 5-MeO is a decidedly high frequency psychedelic. At sufficiently high doses visual qualia appeared to oscillate at around 35hz (or more), while sound qualia often sat at around >14khz (qualitatively indistinguishable from tinnitus). A basic analysis of the ‘colour’ of 5-MeO would be a brilliant (sometimes blinding) white, or better yet, a ‘pure concentrated light’ which approximates white. Though at a deeper level of inquiry I would argue that 5-MeO’s effect on the structure of your experience makes it difficult (perhaps impossible) for colours to exist, which I think might require fragmenting one’s experience into semi-discrete portions.⁴

One of the retreat participants described 5-MeO as the ‘fabric softener’ of consciousness – I wholeheartedly agree with this metaphor. Virtually all of the phenomenal properties and gestalts that would seamlessly occur within consciousness under other conditions were absent, ‘ironed out’ of possible existence by 5-MeO’s defabricating mechanisms. On this note, it is also worth mentioning that none of my experiences on 5-MeO obviously encoded semantic content, but the same was not true for other retreat participants. This is not to say that none of my experiences on 5-MeO contained semantic content: at lower-to-medium doses (<6mg), vestigial structures from ‘sober’ consciousness persisted (e.g., the mind), but these would cease to be stable at higher doses. Rather, it was that none of the effects directly caused by 5-MeO were generative with regard to semantic information encoded by qualia.

The different stages of 5-MeO (corresponding with dosage) are noteworthy, though I won’t go into too much detail about it here (see Andres’ ‘Levels of 5-MeO-DMT’ for more discussion). It seemed to me like the mind (the analytical, chattering, ‘centralised-information-processing’ part of my experience) began to degrade past 1mg and was completely unstable by 8mg. Coherency in perceived visual stimuli was difficult between 1.5mg – 2mg (especially if you keep your eyes unfocussed), and I expect it to be close to impossible beyond 3mg.⁵ Music was generally unpleasant at doses past 3mg, barring very simple and predictable synth tracks (e.g., ‘Structures from Silence’ by Steve Roach). At doses exceeding 8mg, I would often lose awareness of music near the end of the come-up, and regain that awareness near the end of the peak/beginning of come-down.

I tried some scent experiments with perfume ingredients at <2mg doses but it only seemed to reduce the acuity of my olfactory qualia – I could still distinguish between different scents, but only if I tried hard to reify these perceived differences. Likewise with taste (candy) and tactile sensations. However, somatic perception was amplified in the sense that the size of my perception of body expanded (as a function of dose) until it had subsumed with the rest of my experience, after which every part of the experience has an existential ‘this is me’ quality. This perhaps explains why 5-MeO experiences were so consistently extreme in their valence effects: the lack of separation between self and other within experience changes how we process normative information, such that no part of the experience becomes ‘not-me’. It might also reveal something nontrivial about the ‘embodied’ nature of all sensations, whether or not they happen to belong to sensory regions we typically associate with ‘the body’.

A sizable chunk of 5-MeO’s subjective effects can be explained in terms of interference with how attention ordinarily functions within the field of your awareness. During sober consciousness – and especially while on stimulants (e.g., caffeine) – the radius of your attention in relation to the total size of your experience is very small and the concentration of awareness (i.e., intensity) within that region is fairly high, like a spotlight illuminating a small portion of a darkened environment. 5-MeO expands the radius of your attention while simultaneously ‘dialling up’ the concentration of awareness within this expanded attentional region (also as a function of dosage). This process continues up until the point that your attention has expanded to envelop the entire field of your experience (around 8+mg), after which I found it impossible to ‘attend’ to any local regions.⁶ Beyond this point the intensity continues to increase with dosage, as does the perceived size/volume of the experience, but as attentional coverage has already reached 100% that seems to remain constant.

A conceptual frame I kept returning to throughout the retreat was vector field analysis, which was so useful because of its simplicity. At high doses of 5-MeO, there are few viable modes of phenomenological analysis other than merely observing the direction and magnitude of hypothetical nodes (vectors) dotted across the field of your experience, representing the behaviour of qualia at a very basic level. This is also useful because I observed consistent trends within such analyses that were associated with valence. Negative experiences contained critical points – regions within my experience where the vector field’s magnitude is zero (e.g., sources, sinks, saddles) relative to other regions. Positive experiences contained fewer differences between experiential regions – the more ‘smooth’ and ‘simple’ its topology, the better the experience felt.⁷ Below is a representation of what one of my negative experiences felt like within my body map (comprising the experience):

Valence

Minimally, valence is an axis with two antipodal points. I also believe that it is reducible to the structure of consciousness, such that all conscious experiences have a valence. 5-MeO’s effects on valence are sufficient to write a book on the subject. I won’t attempt this (due to time and resource constraints) but I will try and summarise my main findings in this section.⁹ But before I go into too much detail, it’s worth briefly commenting on the relationship between dosage and valence.

Throughout my many experiences at the retreat I rarely had a ‘pure neutral’ valence on 5-MeO. Rather, the valence of individual ‘moments of experience’ was consistently either positive or negative, and the extent to which any of my experiences (consisting of multiple such moments) was neutral had to do with the total valence equaling zero (rather than individual constituent moments being ‘neutral’). Within a given trip I would often transition from ‘positive’ to ‘negative’ which felt like flipping a switch with relatively few ‘in-between’ frames of experience. Each of the poles was, however, sticky, so initiating this process seemed to require traversing a saddle point or crossing a threshold.¹¹

Negative

5-MeO is unique in that, for any given sensory modality, variation in the represented qualia values usually creates a feeling of resistance, which hurts on an existential level. This extends beyond the standard sensory modalities and notably includes thought – especially structured/analytical thinking (which was responsible for some of my most difficult experiences at higher doses).¹² The texture of this experience can best be described in terms of resistance, as if every quale is being simultaneously pulled in two opposing directions, cumulatively resulting in a scrambled mess. Another way to phrase it is that my experience contained a massive amount of agitated potential energy that was unable to dissipate, creating a sense of friction & fragmentation between different regions. Such experiences were negative because they were unpleasant in the moment in which they were experienced (even if they eventually turned positive).¹³

The primary reason for my experience of negative valence on 5-MeO was the sheer speed/hostility of the come-up: in one moment I would be experiencing the world in a very structured and semantically-loaded state of consciousness, and in the next there was nothing left but pure awareness. I would describe this process as ‘conceptual defabrication’, as it inevitably resulted in the collapsing of rudimentary structures and patterns within my experience usually responsible for coherently processing perceived stimuli about the world.¹⁴ I would speculate that the mechanism of this process had something to do with my attention: during a difficult come-up, my attentional sphere felt more like it was being forced open (rather than massaged outwards as with positively-valenced experiences). The rapidity of this state-change (equivalent to mere seconds of physical time), plus other factors (e.g., trepidation/nervous energy) contributed the most to this.

During these negative experiences I learned to stop whatever I was doing with my attention and just let go.¹⁵ Just let go! It sounds so easy, but as I discovered, trying to let go is a very different activity from actually letting go, which involves not trying anything whatsoever within your experience – including the action of letting go! The mental move involved in this process is so subtle that I would have to relearn it with every fresh 5-MeO session; an analogy can be drawn here with sleeping, where every night you have to relearn how to unclench that muscle which keeps us awake all the time. During difficult experiences, I would typically become aware of an unpleasant pattern (e.g., a thought process), then I would attempt to ‘unclasp’ my awareness from that pattern – including the awareness that I was even trying to let it go. Usually this would be sufficient to turn the valence from negative to positive prior to halfway through the peak. Here is a (crude) representation of the progression of such experiences:

By maintaining this state of ‘not doing anything and just being with what is’, I would by the end of the trip feel incredibly good, as if I had just bathed in a ‘lighter-than-air’ soup of nourishing sensation (which persisted for several hours afterwards – see ‘Persisting Effects’). When I was unsuccessful (i.e., unable to invert valence), rather than an afterglow I would be left with a persisting unpleasant sensation, such as a headache or tinnitus. Counterintuitively, I found that the best thing to do on such occasions was to take a short break and then do more 5-MeO until I got a net-positive experience, which would replace this unpleasantness.¹⁶

Positive

I won’t spend as much time describing 5-MeO’s acute positive effects – not only because this has been discussed extensively by other retreat participants, but also there isn’t as much for me to report on. The texture of positive valence on 5-MeO is very subdued relative to other positive experiences one might have (e.g., orgasm, MDMA), to the extent that it doesn’t feel right to use the word ‘positive’ or ‘enjoyable’. Rather, it has a lot more in common with the sensation of release & letting go, similar to deep meditative states that I have experienced (except with a much higher intrinsic intensity/energy). I remember being surprised after my first positive experiences (at low doses) thinking “this doesn’t feel good; it feels healing”, realising that the value of this state of consciousness was primarily therapeutic (rather than recreational).

As with negative experiences, most of my positive experiences on 5-MeO were correlated with dose, which is to say that for a given amount of consumed 5-MeO I would have consistent levels of positive affect. But there were a few occasions where it felt like something changed leading to a much deeper sense of release.¹⁷ The sensation of having valence invert from negative to positive was quite remarkable: a good analogy would be the phenomenon of many out-of-phase metronomes, each oscillating at a high frequency, all spontaneously falling into phase.¹⁸ Another way to describe this process is that my awareness seemed to entirely consist of pure noise (e.g., white static) and, within moments, became aligned to some holistic force to create a state of complete unity, as if my nervous system was a massive electromagnet with a sudden current passing through it.

Perhaps the most important thing to note about positive valence on 5-MeO is that it presents as a global phenomenon present at (and emergent from) every point within awareness simultaneously, rather than mere locally bound features (as with most other pleasures).¹⁹ I can usually pinpoint a particular region or modality within an experience where positive feelings emanate from; for example, eating a delicious treat is a somatic experience located in the ‘mouth’ region of my body map, while staring at a magnificent artwork is a visual spectacle with spatial dimensions. That valence on 5-MeO could not conceivably be analysed separately from the whole shape of my awareness, which makes me update my priors even further toward valence structuralism. Moreover, that the only meaningful/useful concepts to describe the phenomenal character of valence on 5-MeO (positive and negative) concern symmetry makes me update my priors even further toward the symmetry theory of valence.

Persisting Effects

5-MeO has more persisting effects than any other psychoactive substance that I have consumed. In this section I will only discuss positive persisting effects (as this is what I have the most experience with), but I acknowledge the importance of studying negative persisting effects. Like other sections, I could write much more extensively about this, though I am unable to do so due to time constraints (I’d like to revisit this topic in future works, however).

First you have the acute effects, such as the warm harmonious afterglow that lasts up to several hours after having a positive experience. During this phase movements of the body feel effortless and ‘free’ of perceived energy costs, as if there are no longer opposing physical forces that you have to push against (e.g., gravity). The process of thinking feels light and airy (less tethered to the output of conscious models of perceived stimuli), and thoughts themselves feel more like soft imprints upon awareness than solid objects/fixtures to navigate. In general, the mind becomes less of a dominating force within perception. My affective state was low arousal high valence, similar to the feeling of coming out of a deep and wholesome meditation. I remarked a few times that it felt like my well-being had been augmented, raising my hedonic setpoint from what it was before and increasing my sense of freedom within my experience. Another way to describe this phenomenon is increased equanimity: it felt like my emotions were being fed by a deep flowing well of joy and contentment, creating a stable and harmonious state of consciousness.

Then you have reactivations in the days (and sometimes weeks) following. These can be extremely powerful – to the extent of being physically debilitating for their duration (lasting up to several minutes), which is not something I have ever experienced before in my life.²⁰ They can also be subdued like a stream trickling into the larger flow of a river, a metaphor for 5-MeO’s phenomenal character seeping into the rest of experience. Most of my reactivations occurred while in a hypnagogic state of consciousness (e.g., lying in bed before sleep, or after having just woken up), decreasing in frequency the more time passed since attending the retreat and stopping entirely perhaps 6 weeks after. Some of them even occurred while I was dreaming, but these were not as profound as sober reactivations (the phenomenal character was recognisably ‘dream qualia’, having only ~30% the acuity and intensity of waking consciousness). For safety reasons, I think this should be studied more extensively – the lack of conscious control over when such reactivations occur seems potentially dangerous.²¹

Finally you have subtle but visible changes to your everyday experience, behaviour, and general disposition, lasting for many months. Some of these changes I could consciously observe, while others were noticed by close friends/flatmates (shared in conversation). Notable changes within my experience include increased bodily awareness – especially in my muscular system. Previously I had the habit of unknowingly clenching certain muscle groups while performing actions that required me to concentrate (e.g., typing at a computer, having a philosophical argument), numb to somatic signals that I would otherwise notice.²² Since the retreat I’ve become considerably more attuned to these signals & generally more ‘in touch’ with my body, which has been very beneficial to my physical health. It also makes me feel more like an embodied organism than before (a disembodied mind operating a meat-machine), which feels good.

Other changes relate to my experience and behaviour in social contexts. For example, I feel more ‘present’ when I’m with other people, as if we’re actually sharing an experience (rather than merely simulating the same physical events). Social behaviours feel more natural; maintaining eye contact feels like the lowest energy configuration state when I am relating to other humans, rather than something I have to remind myself to do. In general I feel that there has been a shift in the way I process social information, as I find myself more sensing and adapting myself to the ‘vibe’ of the other person (which I feel more than before) than attempting to cognitively predict their thoughts and beliefs.

While this is a net-positive effect (notably strengthening many of my personal relationships), some of its symptoms could be construed as negative, such as increased emotional sensitivity to the perception of suffering. This applies both conceptually (e.g., reading about terrible events in the news) and interpersonally (e.g., sensing discomfort from people and animals in my immediate environment). Notably, I found horror films & mixed martial arts fights unpleasant for the first two months following the retreat, but I am now able to watch them with similar levels of enjoyment as before. I am also mildly more sensitive to extreme sensory stimuli than before (such as loud noises), in addition to other confusing/disorienting phenomena (e.g., many human voices speaking together).

In the months following the retreat, psychoactive substances had remarkably different effects than before. To a first approximation, alcohol was ~2x as potent and felt significantly more pleasurable (like a blanket of warmth coating my body), nicotine had almost no noticeable effect (which would usually be stimulating), while cannabis became more potent and less ‘heady’ (i.e., reduced tendency to reify thought patterns). Caffeine (from coffee) felt cleaner and more potent than before (perhaps 2-2.5x), while methylphenidate & modafinil caused unpleasant patterns of muscular contraction (worsening my productivity) which mostly ceased 3-4 months post-retreat.

At a high-level, many of the changes that I have described can be explained in terms of my default mode of sensory processing shifting from discretized to holistic. For most of my waking adult life, my mind (the thinking, reasoning part of my experience) has felt like a separate entity from the rest of my experience, as if the two were running at different clock speeds.²³ Since the retreat these two modalities of experience have become noticeably more synchronised, making the fabrication of a thought and its behavioural expression a more seamless and unified process. Indeed, for about three months after the retreat most of my ADHD symptoms were cured, but >75% of these have since returned.²⁴

‘Sipping’ Technique

The first step of the ‘sipping’ vaporisation method we developed at the retreat involves gradually sipping from an emesh vaporiser set at a low wattage (7-10W) in order to stabilise the come-up. Once comfortably immersed in the state, you then need to change the vaporiser settings to a higher wattage to inhale a larger dose. Slowing down the speed of this transition (from solid/sober consciousness to a gas-like state) caused me to experience far less shock, confusion, and resistance, avoiding many of the difficulties I would otherwise encounter. A useful way to model this phenomenon is that you are giving your experience more time to acclimatise to the different stages of defabrication before going in deep, just as a mountain climber spends time at base camp acclimatising to the low-oxygen atmospheric conditions before attempting the summit.

Once comfortably immersed in the state, you then need to change the vaporiser settings to a higher wattage (17-20W) to inhale a larger dose (unless you wish to remain in lower-dose territory). This can be difficult depending on the vaporiser design, but in our case it just involved a few simple button presses. Again, here is a crude representation of the effects of this technique on valence over time:

Concluding remarks

Participating in this retreat has without a doubt been one of the best experiences of my life. There’s so much we can learn about consciousness by studying these exotic states, and the critical density of retreat participants (all with expertise in areas relevant to phenomenology) resulted in real progress being made toward modelling the subjective effects of 5-MeO. We also learned a lot about how to effectively run such a retreat (with a focus on research), for which there is little to no existing precedent. One point I will highlight is that our work wouldn’t have been possible without the people involved (both retreat participants and QRI staff) and the generous support of our sponsors. Thank you all so much!

The only ‘could be better’ point I have to add is that, for as long as this document is, I could easily write 5X this amount (to a similar standard), and 10-15X if I were to comb over much of the data I collected (which mostly consist of transcriptions of audio recordings taken during sessions in the Maloca, and conversations with other retreat participants). The reason I won’t be doing this is because I am time and resource constrained. Still, it’s important to note the sheer volume of findings that resulted from this retreat – particularly concerning valence! For future retreats of this kind, it would be a good idea to strategize on effective methods for converting findings into publishable material – at least, this is one of the key takeaways for me.

Appendix: Dosage Estimates

To estimate the frequency and quantity of my 5-MeO consumption over the course of the retreat I did a fermi estimate, using notes taken from the retreat and memories of each day’s activities.

• 5th: 2x <3mg
• 6th: 1x 6mg
• 8th: 2x <3mg
• 10th: 4x <1.5mg, 2x <2.75mg, 1x 5.5mg
• 11th day: 10x <1mg, 4x <2mg
• 11th night: 10x <1mg, 5x <3mg, 5x <5mg, 2x <7mg(?)
• 12th: 2x <10mg
• 14th: 10x <1mg, 4x <2mg, 1x 5mg
• 15th: 1x 3mg
• 16th: 10x <1.5mg, 5x <3mg, 1x 6mg
• 17th day: 6x 2.5mg, 1x 4mg, 1x 8mg
• 17th night: 1x 1mg, 3x <4mg, 3x <6mg
• 18th: 2x 6mg (according to Richard; my personal estimation would be 1x 6mg, 1x 8-10+mg)

Total doses: 2 + 1 + 2 + 7 + 14 + 22 + 2 + 15 + 1 + 16 + 8 + 7 + 22 + 1 + 2 + 7 + 14 + 22 + 2 + 15 + 1 + 16 + 8 + 7 + 2 = 99 doses

Total amount: 6 + 6 + 6 + 16.5 + 18 + 52 + 20 + 18 + 3 + 26.5 + 19 + 25 + 126 + 6 + 6 + 16.5 + 18 + 52 + 20 + 18 + 3 + 26.5 + 19 + 25 + 12 = 227.5mg or less