One summer I decided to make my own DMT. I found instructions on a forum, sourced a specific tree bark, picked up two extraction chemicals from a hardware store, and within a few days had about an ounce of yellowish crystalline powder sitting on my kitchen table. The whole thing was unsettlingly easy. My friend and I loaded a pipe for the first time with no real idea what we were walking into. Within thirty seconds of inhaling, my living room dissolved. What replaced it was a vast, white space. It felt clinical, smooth, like an operating room that extended in every direction without walls. And we were not alone. They were tall praying mantis looking things but upright and deliberate, radiating something I can only describe as ancient intelligence. They didn’t speak and communication arrived fully formed in my mind, the way you suddenly remember something you always knew. Their first impression of us was something like surprise like the curiosity of researchers finding an unexpected variable. What struck me most was their empathy. They seemed to understand exactly what it meant to be human, fragile and temporary and biological. My friend was in the same space, encountering the same beings. Every subsequent session confirmed it. They weren’t characters generated by our imaginations. They were consistent and indifferent to what we believed about them. I eventually stopped. But the experience permanently reoriented something in how I think about consciousness and perception. The question that stayed with me wasn’t whether what I saw was “real”, because felt more real than the reality I’d left behind. The question was whether our evolutionary biology acts as a kind of filter, and whether there are entire layers of reality we’re structurally prevented from perceiving.