Stan and I talked by phone a couple days later. He said, “I’m feeling fine. I felt some mild euphoria yesterday and today, probably related to the experience. I wasn’t sure about continuing with all four doses. Something finally clicked and got resolved. Maybe it was surrendering. It really put me through some changes. The first one was mixed emotions. The second and third ones were overwhelming. Just a lot of unresolved anxiety. The fourth one really did it.” I asked, “Was there any content to your sessions?”
“Very little. It’s like a roto-rooter for your nervous system. It clears some things free. It was purely energetic. There are cumulative effects. Something happened, something changed between the third and fourth doses. After the third, I just gave up.”
Stan kept his feelings at bay. Like many of our volunteers, he enjoyed psychedelics because of their emotional intensity. He could feel something on high doses of LSD—perhaps not pleasant or enjoyable feelings, but at least more than nothing. Any time we find ourselves stuck in life, it usually is because we can’t connect with the feelings that come with that situation.
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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The emotions are intense. They’re there, but I think I’m shielding myself from them to get through the divorce. It’s not entirely pleasant. That’s an understatement, I guess. The emotional intensity builds each time, but I feel most at peace now. That unresolved feeling is gone. Maybe somethings been done. Maybe 15 minutes from now I won’t be saying this.
At 10 minutes after his fourth and last injection, Stan blew through his pursed lips, then said, It’s a much nicer ride this time. It’s like three waves you catch bodysurfmg. They knock you down getting ready for the fourth, which is great. I want to do it again!
We all laughed, relieved he was feeling better. In this man who kept so much to himself, his earlier admission of anxiety must have indicated intensely powerful feelings. He spent the next several minutes lying quietly, relaxing and basking in his newly found inner peace. Stan seemed refreshed and in good spirits after the fourth dose. He ate lunch and left quickly after finishing.
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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I’m not sure it will make any different but okay, I’ll try it. If I have to vomit do you have something I can throw up into? “Yes, we have a wastebasket. It’s not pretty but it has a wide mouth and we can catch it all.” After the third dose was in he took one of Laura’s hands with his right hand and one of mine in his left.
I’m not sure about the fourth dose. I don’t know if I can do another one. “It’s only been 3 minutes. Let’s see how you feel in a little while.”
At 5 minutes he said in a humorous tone, / will do a fourth for you, Rick. The third dose seems to be the hardest.” You’re just saying that. “Not really. People look bad after the third dose and they look good after the fourth.”
I guess I have a lot of unresolved feelings. “That makes sense.”
That’s easy for you to say. “I know. I’m sorry if I sound glib. Why do you think these things are unresolved?”
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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I’m not going to throw up. Don’t worry. Maybe it’s the combination of anxiety and my sinuses. Part of my anxiety relates to my daughter’s school next year. She’s in fifth grade. I need to decide this morning. She’s having a hard time with the divorce, especially having difficulties with her mom. It’s hard on me but it’s harder on my daughter.
‘I’m sure it’s hard on your wife, too. It’s a terrible situation.” Yes. I wish it were a higher dose in a way. I could blast through it. “Blow it out of the water?” Yes, blow it out of the water.1 “How do you feel about two more doses?” He smiled.
/ have two very opposite emotions: fear and anticipation of pleasure. Perhaps lying down, Stan might feel safer to give up some control, to “throw up,” if he really needed to expel his inner emotional toxins. I asked, “Do you want your head down?”
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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Mmm. There were the usual colors. I guess I’ll do the next several doses, in spite of the anxiety. Gently teasing him, appealing to his “psychedelic machismo,” but also encouraging him to go a little deeper, I said, “I didn’t think you’d have it any other way.” He lay quietly with his eyeshades on. / like the eyeshades. “They’ve turned out to be quite helpful…. Did you have any thoughts or feelings?”
/ had some anxiety, more or less. I don’t remember that from before. I offered this suggestion: “There’s a lot more going on in your life now. I wonder if the anxiety is related to the uncertainty and loss of control in your life right now. This is a drug that causes loss of control. That might be uncomfortable.”
At 5 minutes after the third injection: There is a very slight nausea.
I’ve noticed that nausea in an altered state of consciousness often is a way for the body to distract us from anxiety and sadness. During meditation or hypnosis, or on psychedelic drugs or even marijuana, it’s somehow easier to feel sick than sad.
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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Stan went through the dose-response study successfully, but without it making a particularly deep impression on him. However, he enjoyed participating in the research and wanted to be notified when the tolerance study began.
About a year later, Stan signed on for the DMT tolerance project. A lot had happened. His wife had experienced a recurrence of her serious psychiatric illness and was filing for divorce. A very difficult child custody battle was developing, and their eight-year-old daughter was living with him.
I wondered if the DMT sessions might provide him with some emotional clarity for these trying times. While the goals of the research remained unchanged, Stan was a fellow human being undergoing a major loss, and if we could help him within the project’s context, all the better.
As it turned out, his first “double-blind” day was active drug—four consecutive high-dose DMT injections. The first two doses helped him clarify the stress under which he’d been laboring.
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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Stan’s low screening dose of DMT, 0.05 mg/kg, was uneventful. Like many others, he felt an urge to smile early on in the session.
The next day was Stan’s high-dose session. Carrying my varied assortment of needles, syringes, and disinfectant swabs, I entered his room and found Stan sitting in cross-legged position on a meditation cushion with the back of the bed raised as close to a right angle as possible. He was one of the few people who felt better sitting up than lying down.
Stan didn’t say a lot about that morning’s high-dose experience. Mostly, he was impressed with the power of the onset of effects. In fact, he thought he might even have liked a dose slightly higher than 0.4 mg/kg.
He wasn’t sure if DMT had any beneficial effects, either. It’s not as useful as LSD or psilocjbin. It’s too much too fast. You can’t really work with it. You’re totally out of control. It wasn’t a spiritual experience. There was very little emotional flavor to it at all. Regarding what he actually saw, all Stan ventured was that there were “lots of kaleidoscopic blues and purples.”
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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Stan was forty-two years old when we met and he began participating in the DMT studies. His wife of fourteen years was a respiratory therapist who worked with many medical patients at the Research Center. She thought he’d be interested in the project, and he gave me a call.
He was one of the most experienced psychedelic drug users of anyone in our studies, having taken LSD “over four hundred times.” “They don’t call it ‘acid’ for nothing,” he laughed during our first meeting. He took LSD or mushrooms every few months, using them with several close friends with whom he shared a strong belief in their beneficial effects.
Stan was married, had a young daughter, and held a highly responsible position in the local government. He was of medium height and build, good-looking and attentive to his appearance. He was rather disinclined to talk about his inner experience, and he stated his interest in the DMT studies in a typically concise manner: “To further legitimate studies and for personal exploration.”
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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I expected to see many volunteers working through emotional and psychological conflicts during these studies. Sessions of this nature might help prepare the way for psychedelic-drug-assisted psychotherapy in patients. We would note how DMT affected volunteers in potentially beneficial ways, then build those effects into any subsequent psychological treatment protocols.
The first generation of psychedelic scientists made such therapy projects the mainstay of many centers’ research activities. We would essentially be doing little more than retracing their steps in anticipation of renewing their work in a contemporary context.
I was ready for these types of sessions. I believed it was possible for the volunteers to reach some valuable insights into personal conflicts, difficulties, and psychosomatic symptoms by using psychedelics. In addition, many years of undergoing, practicing, and teaching psychoanalytic psychotherapy prepared me for dealing with the painful emotions I thought would emerge during some DMT sessions.
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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Some research subjects resolved difficult personal problems during their sessions. Afterward, they realized they had worked something through in a positive way and felt better. The basic processes of psychotherapy seemed to be at work: thinking, recollecting, feeling, connecting emotions with ideas.
For most of us, facing painful feelings is difficult, and DMT can make those feelings easier to confront. Stan’s DMT sessions, for example, helped him contact feelings too raw to touch in everyday consciousness.
Dreams are a basic tool for any personal growth and understanding, and DMT may generate highly symbolic dreamlike images. Marsha’s highdose sessions are a beautiful example of how the spirit molecule can show us what we need to know using this particular facet of its power.
For many of us, traumatic experiences set the stage for painfully blind reenactments of situations in which we face those same feelings over and over again. A high dose of DMT shares many features with physical and psychological trauma. We’ll see how it is possible to turn these aspects to good use in Cassandra’s story.
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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