Immediately after giving Cassandra her last dose, people began talking
loudly outside the door. At 6 minutes we heard a huge crash. Five minutes later she said, I feel very loved.
“That’s a nice feeling.” Yes, warm. She looked sad and tapped the fingers of her right hand against the bed. I’m feeling a lot.
There was a horrible sound outside the door, someone drilling in screws. I thought about how incredible it was that our volunteers could disregard all the chaos of a hospital ward and still have such profound experiences.
Cassandra lifted the eyeshades but kept her eyes closed. Then she opened her eyes half-mast, gazing straight ahead. She looked up at the ceiling and began crying again.
“What are you feeling?” Everything will be okay. I don’t need to worry about all my doubts. Things like “Where will I go? What will I do?” It’s reassuring.
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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“What do you mean?” Everything about life. It’s not very empowering. You aren’t taught to focus on yourself. To realize the strength you have in yourself. Life throws you into the victim role. I know that’s a trite expression, but I think it’s true. Things do happen when you’re out of control with your life. These DMT experiences are like the height of meditation, accessing inner power and inner strength. You know that question in your rating scale about “higher power or God”? Well, I’m uncomfortable with that idea because it implies outside, but I do contact something deeper and more inside. This session was more combined, in terms of the presences joining me and me being the focus of it more. The first trip was just me, and the second trip was more the presences; this was a combination.
“How do you feel about the fourth dose coming up?” It’ll be the best, it’ll be even better. I am going deeper and deeper through these layers.
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“What do you hold on to?”
The pain.
“What pain?”
/ guess all the pain.
She began crying.
/ guess all the pain I ever felt.
“There’s a lot there?”
Yeah.
She began crying more heavily.
“It’s okay to feel it, and cry, and to let it go, too.”
That’s the good part, to let go of it.
At 15 minutes she sighed,
I feel like I have a new body. It’s so much more aware.
“It is yours.”
She laughed dryly, then began crying more deeply.
These aren’t sad tears, they are tears of enlightenment.
“It doesn’t matter.”
I felt her bristle as she said,
Yes it does.
Reflecting back to her even more closely, I offered, “I guess they are a cleansing sort of tears.”
Yes. I’ll be a guru after this morning. You know how everyone’s quest is to find the meaning or the purpose of life? Well, it’s to feel this way. Life doesn’t cut it normally.
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“How do you feel about the third dose?” You should patent it. I guess it’s too late for that. If I could only hold onto this feeling. If everybody did this every day the world would be a much better place. Life would be a lot better. The potential for good is so great. Feeling good within yourself. I guess meditation is supposed to get you to the same place.
“I’m not sure that’s possible.” Me neither. Ten minutes into her third dose, Cassandra started smiling. Just then, there also was a horrible coughing out in the hall. / can still feel it. I hold all this stuff, the shit, in the left side of my abdomen. I got the message this time to let go of all that. I can still feel the relaxation. It’s warm and tingly.
This seemed like an opening. If she retreated or attacked in response to my next few comments, I’d leave well enough alone. However, she seemed to be asking for some help.
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She answered, “It’s hard to do all at once. I’ve been out of touch with my body for so long, in a fight with it, I figure it will be a gradual process.” It turned out that this first double-blind tolerance day was active drug. We could tell at the 2-minute point, when Cassandra’s heart rate and blood pressure jumped dramatically.
She didn’t say much about her first dose that morning. She seemed to be getting her bearings, keeping her cards close to her chest. As she finished answering the first of the four rating scales, she said,
/ thought a lot about my new friend. That was good, but this next one I want to be all my trip.
Once she was able to talk after her second dose:
It’s funny. I let go more this time. This was no problem at all. It was all about feeling good. There was no revelation, no meaningful overtones. The body is a real hindrance, isn’t it? I definitely felt the presence of others. They were kind to me, nice and caring. They seemed small, as if they could enter my body and mind in that space. There was a total sense of losing my body, but the little presences know how to enter it somehow.
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She said, “It’s impossible to make sense of it. I’d rather do it again, to see what it’s like. It’s refreshing to get a change of perspective, to see how insignificant my everyday problems are. I felt peaceful this afternoon. There was a brief moment of wanting it to be over because it was so intense, but I remembered to breathe and settled back into it. It’s so weird, impossible to prepare for, to know what to expect. I’d rather not introspect too much.” She agreed to participate in the tolerance study.
Cassandra was in a good mood when we met in Room 531 a month later. She began, “I quit my job at the local restaurant where I’ve been working. I’m not sure what’s next in my life now. I met a woman whom I really like; I think about her a lot.”
I asked, “What are you thinking about the study today?”
“Coming down last month from the big dose, I really felt in my body for the first time in my life. I usually live in my head. I remember that feeling. It was therapeutic. I liked the feeling of being in my body.” “Can you carry it with you?”
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Cassandra’s screening low dose of DMT was mild and pleasant. We met the next day for her non-blind, 0.4 mg/kg high dose.
As she began coming down, she said, Something took my hand and yanked me. It seemed to say, “Let’s go!” Then I started flying through an intense circus-like environment. I’ve never been that out-of-body before. First there was an itchy feeling where the drug went in. We went through a maze at an incredibly fast pace. I say “we” because it seemed like I was accompanied.
It was cool. There was a crazy circus sideshow—just extravagant. It’s hard to describe. They looked like Jokers. They were almost performing for me. They were funny looking, bells on their hats, big noses. However, I had the feeling they could turn on me, a little less than completely friendly.
/ want to do it again. I want to see if I can slow it down.
I called Cassandra the next day.
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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However, the beings’ primary effect was to make her feel loved and happy, and the mystical resolution to her conflicts came only after a painful psychological process. Cassandra’s sessions were, like many of the ones I will present, hybrids of more than one type.
In addition, it felt as if I were doing psychotherapy with Cassandra, rather than spiritual counseling or interpreting “transdimensional” phenomena. So placement into the feeling-thinking, personal category of experiences relates to the type of response her session evoked in me as much as in her.
She had few stated expectations of her participation in our studies: “I want to see what DMT feels like.” Also, she requested we not ask her a lot of questions, “so I could simply enjoy the effects.”
We were not so offhanded in considering Cassandra’s ability to managehigh doses of DMT. We knew she could be volatile, and that it was important to be especially careful to avoid making her feel we were forcing anything on her. We didn’t want to replay any rape themes in Room 531.
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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After this, she developed symptoms of a post-traumatic stress disorder, experiencing flashbacks of the rape during sexual relations in her first long-term relationship. When she was twenty, she decided that she never wanted to have children and had a tubal ligation.
Cassandra had been in and out of many short-term therapeutic and romantic relationships. At first she would idealize and romanticize the therapist or lover. Then she experienced disappointment and contempt in his or her inability to provide the empathy she needed so badly. She was friends with one of our male volunteers, and they became sexually involved after they completed the tolerance study. Soon after that she left the country, leaving no forwarding address.
I include Cassandra’s story here although it could also belong in the entity contact or mystical experience chapters. Her sessions did include interactions with the “clowns” and led to a deep serene peace she had never previously known.
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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Cassandra was twenty-two years old, the next-to-youngest volunteer, when she signed on for the DMT project. Her manner and appearance brought out conflicting feelings in most people she met, and I was no exception. She dressed and carried herself in a somewhat masculine way, and she was bisexual. Both men and women found her pleasing face and lithe, androgynous body type attractive. Her studiously casual attitude toward appearance and self-care made her seem somewhat waiflike, and it was easy to feel caring and maternal toward her—the older nurses on the research ward wanted to feed her and give her a bath. She also possessed sharp intelligence, laconic humor, and a direct manner. Cassandra was a complicated young woman, and it took some effort to see with whom you were really dealing.
Cassandra suffered in relationships. Her parents divorced before she was a year old, and her mother raised her neglectfully. This came to a head at the age of sixteen, when her mother left her alone with her stepfather for a week. He raped her repeatedly during that time, and this cemented her stark ambivalence toward men and women: distrusting and hating them on one hand, but needing their love and protection at the same time.
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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