If You Go Looking

Psychedelic entities

UN/2–3/E

Machine elves · DMT beings · plant teachers

Beings met in a few minutes of altered consciousness, reported with unusual consistency.

People given DMT, the active compound in ayahuasca, very often report meeting beings that seem conscious, intelligent and interested in them. Terence McKenna called them self-transforming machine elves, and Rick Strassman's clinical studies in the 1990s recorded volunteers meeting insect-like, reptilian and humanoid figures. A 2020 Johns Hopkins survey of more than two thousand people found that most described the being as benevolent and real, and that many changed their beliefs as a result. Whatever is happening, it is one of the few entity experiences that can be produced on demand and studied, which makes it unusually important for everything else in this guide.

If you go looking

Commercial ecosystem

Here the risk is in the substance, not the beings. Psychedelics can trigger lasting psychosis in people with a personal or family history of it, and ayahuasca interacts dangerously with antidepressants and some other medicines. Retreats are a large and loosely regulated industry, with deaths and abuse on record, and in most countries these substances are illegal.

Who should be careful

Reading the code

UN/2–3/E

Origin uncertain · embodiment 2 to 3 of 5, energetic or subtle to comes and goes · source: recurring reports · key

Dates

McKenna's first account: 1965

Clinical studies: 1990–1995

Large survey: 2020

Related

The insect-like figures recall the Mantids, the elves recall the fae, and the sense of being examined recalls the abduction template.

Mantids →The fae →Greys →Astral entities →

Terms used on this page

UN: origin uncertain

Origin code

Reported with some consistency but carrying no origin claim in the encounters themselves. Filing these as alien is an assumption the listener adds.

Degree of embodiment: 2 to 3, energetic or subtle to comes and goes

Scale, 1 to 5

5 is an ordinary biological body. 4 is physical but manifests oddly. 3 comes and goes. 2 is energetic or subtle. 1 is consciousness with no persistent form. Note that this tends to fall as a tradition ages.

E: recurring reports

Source code

Described by many apparently unconnected witnesses. The strongest category in the guide, and the smallest.

Ayahuasca

Amazonian practice

A brew of a vine and a DMT-containing plant, used ceremonially by Indigenous peoples of the Amazon and by newer churches in Brazil. The vine supplies compounds that let the DMT act when swallowed, which is also why it interacts with many medicines.

Terence McKenna

Writer and speaker

American writer whose talks from the 1980s onward made DMT encounters widely known. His phrase “self-transforming machine elves” became the standard shorthand.

Rick Strassman

Clinical research, 1990–1995

Psychiatrist whose University of New Mexico studies gave DMT to volunteers under medical supervision. His book DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2000) reported how many described meeting beings.

Commercial ecosystem

Documented harm

A paid economy has grown around this tradition, whether readings, courses, retreats and private sessions, or books, tours and media that keep promising more. Not automatically predatory, but it does mean some of what you will read was written to sell something, and that people in distress are a market.

Deliberate contact work

Read this first

The hazard in this subject attaches to the method, not to which name you aim it at. Ouija work, invocation, sustained channelling, induced hypnagogia, deliberate sleep deprivation and hypnotic regression are the practices associated with difficulty, and a session aimed at a benevolent civilisation is not safer than one aimed at something considered lower. What raises risk is doing it alone, doing it repeatedly, doing it while sleep-deprived, and doing it with an existing vulnerability to psychosis, mania or dissociation. People who get into trouble here overwhelmingly got there through practice, not through reading.

Who should be careful

Practice-side

Anyone with a personal or family history of psychosis, bipolar disorder or dissociative conditions, anyone in acute crisis, and anyone isolated from people who would notice a change in them. Intensive contact practice is destabilising by design (that is what it is for), and destabilisation lands hardest on people already close to an edge.

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