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years ago. ages or events happening around me. After 45 minutes to 1 hour the symptoms disappeared, and Iwas able to describe what had happened. WHAT DMT Is « 45 powerful LSD falling into Communist hands, and they turned down his request. Undaunted, he looked up recent papers describing DMT's pres- ence in psychedelic Amazonian snuffs. He then synthesized some DMT in his Budapest laboratory in 1955. Szara swallowed ever-increasing doses of DMT, but felt nothing. He tried taking up to one full gram, hundreds of thousands of times more than an active dose of LSD. He wondered whether something in his gastrointes- tinal system was preventing oral DMT from working. Maybe it needed to be injected. His hunch predated the later discovery that there is a mecha- nism in the gut that breaks down oral DMT as quickly as it is swallowed—a mechanism South American natives found a way to bypass thousands of In the spirit of "who goes first," Szara gave himself an intramuscular, or IM, injection of DMT in 1956. In this case, he used about half of what we now know to be a "full" dose: In three orfour minutes I started to experience visual sensations that were very similar to what I had read in descriptions by Hofmann [about LSD] and Huxley [about mescaline]. . . . I got very, very excited. It was obvious this was the secret.‘ After later doubling the dose, he had this to say: [Physical] symptoms appeared, such as a tingling sensation, trembling, slight nausea, [widening of the pupils], elevation ofthe blood pressure and increase of the pulse rate. At the same time, eidetic phenomena [after-im- "trails" of visually perceived objects], optical illusions, pseudo-hallucinations, and later real hallucinations appeared. The hallu- cinations consisted ofmoving, brilliantly colored oriental motifs, and later Isaw wonderful scenes altering very rapidly. Thefaces ofthe people seemed to be masks. My emotional state was elevated sometimes up to euphoria. My consciousness was completely filled by hallucinations, and my atten- tion was firmly bound to them; therefore I could not give an account ofthe