When we think about the idea of a sensed presence within the context of psychedelics, we might immediately jump to encounters with DMT entities, or perhaps sensing some idea of God and possibly the idea of an ultimate reality via this presence of something external to ourselves.
I’ve personally never been able to consume enough DMT to have a breakthrough experience into hyperspace, but my limited forays into this realm have still very much had an overall positive impact on my state of being. Around 10 years ago, I smoked some changa made by a friend and lay down on my bed. I hadn’t smoked enough to break through, but I closed my eyes and opened myself up to whatever the experience was going to provide. Despite only smoking a small amount, I could very much feel the physical effects of the DMT and started to experience some closed-eye visuals.
One aspect of these visuals caught my attention in particular – it was clearly a face, which looked like it was either wearing a bee-inspired mask, or was some kind of alien-type figure that naturally looked like this. I was very aware of its presence, almost as if it were the only thing that could have garnered any attention. I became aware that it was trying to teach me something, and it was quickly explained to me that what I was going through now was, in fact, the death experience.
I was strangely met with apologetic energy, as if this entity was so sorry that we’ve thought of death as a bad thing and can’t see how it’s simply the next chapter in our wider story. There was a real sense of euphoria, and I was told that this nice feeling is the death experience, and that I shouldn’t worry. (There might have been some connection to my own relationship with death, where I lost my mum at a young age and several family members in a short space of time. I’ve often struggled with grief, and psychedelics have certainly been a powerful guide for working through this.)
I was then told quite sternly to remember this and bring a message back to everyone else. When I responded with “OK”, it was almost like I was their pet, in which I sensed a feeling of being told “good boy” and then found myself in a blissful state where I felt like I was receiving some kind of cosmic belly rub.
This was a real feeling of not being alone in my experience, almost like something knew I had smoked DMT and was waiting to talk to me. During experiences with relatively high doses of Psilocybe semilanceata, I experienced a similar thing. After a dose of around 4g of dried liberty caps, the mushrooms themselves once “welcomed me back” to the right frequency. I was told that I’d tuned back in, almost like they were radio presenters who were so happy to see me. This was after I’d had what felt like a very healing and cathartic time with the mushrooms, where I was able to explore what was going on for me in great detail. But then I got a strong message which said: “Right then, you’ve had the healing – now is the time for the lesson”. These insights felt very much like a download, as if they existed outside my personal story and were more related to the collective story of humanity and our planet.
Within both the DMT and mushroom experience, I wasn’t seeing anything, but very much feeling that something was there with me. In some cases, this has very much been the sense of another kind of intelligence or two-way conversation, and during other mushroom experiences I’ve often had the sensation of there being arms either side of me, waving me to encourage further exploration. I’ve also had occasions of closed-eye visuals after consuming semilanceata, where something has shown me where they were from (what looked like a big alien beehive). I could only interpret this as an external presence (possibly extraterrestrial) that wanted to share some information unrelated to my story.
This phenomenon has been studied outside of psychedelics in Parkinson’s research, where the concept of ‘presence hallucinations’ is used to describe the sensation of someone being nearby when no one is in the room. This kind of sensation could allow for more of a foundational exploration of what we mean when we talk about presence in this context.
What is a Sensed Presence?
Within a psychedelic experience, we might have a sense of something near us that has agency, or perhaps just certain objects around us. The more interesting phenomenon is when we perceive an agent without perceiving an object, such as feeling like another entity might be near us. This feeling of someone being near us without any clear sensory evidence has been shown in cases of paranoia, psychosis, and sleep paralysis, often ranging from benevolent to distressing, and ambiguous to personified.
Despite not being seen, heard, or touched, this sensed presence might feel intensely real. One of the forefathers of psychology, William James, noted in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, published in 1902, that a sensed presence might encompass “a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call ‘something there,’ more deep and more general than any of the special and particular ‘senses.’” James saw this feeling as being key to spiritual experiences, but also one that was coupled with a foreboding and possibly sinister air.
My previous experiences with magic mushrooms have mostly involved positive feelings of a sensed presence; however, there have been times when this sensed presence has provided some challenges – perhaps when the set and setting weren’t conducive to a positive psychedelic experience. In my early 20s, I travelled to Amsterdam for the first time with a couple of friends. One other friend and I decided it would be a good idea to consume some psychedelic truffles. Having previously had experience with both truffles and mushrooms, I thought I’d be ok tripping in a place I’d never been to before…and boy was I wrong! Amsterdam just didn’t seem like a good place to be wandering around after consuming some truffles. Everything just seemed so busy and difficult to navigate. The amount of people on bicycles was just confusing me, and I wasn’t really sure where I was supposed to walk. I thought to myself, “Calm down, you’ve had many experiences with mushrooms, and you can handle this”
I then felt a sensed presence of the truffles – like an intelligence responding to me, thinking I could handle this. It was a resounding, mocking tone, to the tune of “Ohh ‘Mr Psychedelic’ thinks he’s so special that he can just consume us in a totally new environment.” This mocking tone was then transformed into an image of my ego represented as an army, going up against the truffle army…which was far greater in size than mine.
At this point I realised I was having a challenging psychedelic experience, which wasn’t necessarily “bad” but just an experience where I realised I’d lost some kind of battle and needed to just be more humble in the presence of these powerful truffles. I retreated to my hotel room and waited for the experience to calm down, which it eventually did, before I went out and explored the Amsterdam nightlife once I felt more comfortable.
But is a sensed presence just limited to psychedelic experiences? Psychedelics can induce hallucinations, and this may lead us to think that there’s nothing ‘real’ about a sensed presence. The feeling of a sensed presence may occur in instances involving sleep paralysis, as well as neurological conditions, times of bereavement, or psychological conditions such as psychosis. These might have some similarity with psychedelic experiences, where we begin to feel a disconnect between our own body and agency, which then creates space for the possibility of sensing some kind of external presence. Psychedelics as non-specific amplifiers could have the potential to change the nature of this sensed presence, more so in a way which gives it a sense of intentionality, rather than just being benign.
Do Psychedelics Give Presence an Identity?
I’ve had experiences of sensing patterns or geometric objects that might have caught my attention as being out of the ordinary, or perhaps having some kind of deeper meaning. I’ve had a few experiences on high doses of LSD where I’ve seen some kind of language, which has been seemingly embedded underneath the veneer of everyday reality. The feeling was that I had stumbled upon some kind of code which was very much being shown to me – but not necessarily by something or any kind of entity, just simply being revealed by the LSD itself. Although LSD might not produce the same kind of mystical or God-like experiences compared to other plants or fungi, we might find ourselves tapped into the sensed presence of certain patterns or frequencies that could change how we engage with our reality.
But what happens when this sensed presence essentially takes on a life of its own and becomes an agent within our own experience? Is there an intentionality that differentiates an entity from something like a hallucinated geometric object? There might be a phenomenological path we can trace – from a vague presence to sensing an intelligence with autonomous agency.
Our experience of a presence changes the very nature of our psychedelic experience to feeling that something else is there, where perhaps this presence has an intelligence and knows something. Not every encounter of a sensed presence during a psychedelic experience is the same. But there has been some research to suggest that a sensed higher presence might be experienced through consumption of different substances such as DMT, LSD, and psilocybin mushrooms. Consumption of DMT, however, results in higher levels of sensory and communication features related to a sensed presence, which suggests there might be something about this substance that leans towards more clearly identifiable instances of a sensed presence.
DMT and Autonomous Intelligence
A 2020 survey of entity encounters after inhaling NN-DMT reported that most of these encounters were primarily visual and extrasensory (e.g. telepathic), often being described in terms of ‘being’, ‘alien’, ‘guide’, and ‘helper’. Although 41% of participants experienced some degree of fear during the experience, the majority of the experiences attributed the characteristics of love, joy, and kindness to the entities encountered. Most people involved in the survey also subscribed to the notion of the entities they encountered being conscious or intelligent, and existing within some other layer of reality where they continued to exist after the encounter. 69% of respondents reported receiving messages, with 19% receiving predictions about the future, and the majority pointing to this experience as the most spiritually and psychologically meaningful one of their entire lives.
The conversation surrounding how real these entities are has been around for a while, but seems to be garnering more traction, with a pushback against the idea that these entities are merely endogenous hallucinations. Despite no definitive proof regarding the ontology of these encounters, it’s interesting to explore the idea that these entities often feel autonomous, with consumers of DMT reporting that they’re being provided with information that wasn’t consciously generated by them, as well as being surprised by the encounter with the entity.
Depending on the cultural perspective, consumers of DMT might report encountering a wide variety of different entities such as elves, aliens, ancestors, or parts of themselves. One interpretation from a neuro-computational angle suggests that the brain might ascribe agency when sensory input is ambiguous, much in the same way that an infant has faculties for perceiving faces and biological motion. This doesn’t necessarily mean that entities encountered in this state are objectively unreal, but rather that encounters with entities might be a result of subjective experience.
The DMTx protocol being spearheaded by Dr Andrew Gallimore is attempting to map consciousness through the DMT space, where trained scientists and other experts are being sent into this space for long periods of time to make precise observations and conduct experiments. The intention of this protocol is seemingly to map the architecture of consciousness, and there might be something in the consistency of entity encounters that could allow us to map this in greater detail. There is also ongoing research surveying the consistency of people’s encounters with mantis entities, which seems to be a theme across experiences with psychedelics such as DMT, but also associated with alien abduction experiences, experiences of deep meditation, dream states, out-of-body states, shamanic trance states, and sleep paralysis states.
The consistency of these kinds of encounters with a presence can also be coupled with a sense of familiarity, where we feel as though we’ve returned to a space that we’ve been to before. This has even been reported with people consuming DMT for the first time, which can be a puzzling phenomenon, as some people feel a strong sense of familiarity about places, things, or entities that are decidedly not a part of waking life.
Where is This Presence Located?
I’ve had consistent experiences with different types of mushrooms where I’ve sensed some kind of communication – this has been more present and clear during experiences with Psilocybe semilanceata. But other kinds of magic mushrooms have also presented themselves in a way where there is a feeling that they are here to assist. This isn’t to say that I’ve spoken to any mushroom spirits, but more so that during my mushroom experiences there has been a sense of feeling prompted to respond in a way or explore parts of myself. It doesn’t just feel like a one-way street of consuming some fungi and waiting for something to happen – there’s a dynamic element in which we’re engaging with the intelligence of the mushroom to hopefully find some guidance through what we’re dealing with in our lives.
This isn’t the same as an entity encounter with DMT, but more so a direct encounter with the intelligence of the mushroom. One survey, which explores how psychedelic experiences can impact beliefs which attribute consciousness to living and non-living entities, found that there were large increases in attribution of consciousness to various entities. These include non-human primates (63–83%), quadrupeds (59–79%), insects (33–57%), fungi (21–56%), plants (26–61%), inanimate natural objects (8–26%), and inanimate manmade objects (3–15%).
This way of understanding consciousness might lend itself more towards animistic beliefs, where we can look towards cultures that have a strong interpersonal relationship with plants or fungi. One example in particular is Mazatec shamanism, where mushrooms are seen as living deities within a ceremonial setting, rather than objects to be consumed or drugs which alter your mind. Known as Ndí Xijtho or “little things that sprout from the ground” in the Mazatec language, the mushrooms allow communication between the people and the Creator-being, who gave life to humanity and cures for evil and pain.
When we think about fungi or plants within this context, could there be some kind of sensed presence which recurs? Whether that be something intrinsic about the organisms themselves or something which is induced via ritual, could this repetition provide more space for an intentional interrelationship with psychedelics?
We might interpret the experience of a sensed presence in a psychological way, where changes in our brain under the influences of psychedelics can alter our perception of reality. This could have an impact on sensory prediction, agency, self-other boundaries, attention, salience, and social cognition, which could create the experience of an autonomous agent. While it could be that the autonomous agent is simply generated internally (much in the same way that we process emotions during dreaming), they would still have a very real psychological impact, which can move us away from possibly getting lost in a debate about whether or not these entities are real or fake.
Some people might interpret this experience literally, where ontologically their encounter of a sensed presence or entity is very real and exists outside of human consciousness. I spoke to Dr Andrew Gallimore about this a few years ago, and he does seem to genuinely think there is a possibility that these entities exist in some space where our consciousness doesn’t ordinarily inhabit. I’m paraphrasing, but in one of his talks he questioned why we think that we can only find consciousness within the squishy, gelatinous realms of our brains.
Experiences with powerful substances such as DMT can certainly alter our metaphysical beliefs concerning consciousness or the reality of entities, but this doesn’t mean the catalyst for the shift in beliefs is factually true. Whether this is relevant or not becomes a whole other conversation, and perhaps this creates some useful malleability within the Western mindset when it comes to our beliefs about the world.
We Don’t Have to Decide Who Was There
What could be most interesting about a sensed presence is where it sits between imagination and interpretation – whether it be an elf, alien, mushroom spirit, or just the feeling of someone or something being there. We can explore these instances utilising science to see what’s going on, and perhaps we might eventually come to some understanding about the nature of what it means to encounter a sensed presence. Maybe there is some important information to receive from entities in the DMT realm, or downloads from the extraterrestrials via the mushroom messengers. Or perhaps these encounters open up more questions about the nature of reality itself.
Whether or not the beings we encounter exist from an ontological perspective, these encounters seem to be happening, and I’m sure the scientists and philosophers who are attempting to map this space come to some kind of definitive conclusions. Rather than trying to answer some kind of metaphysical question or decide whether or not entities within spaces like the DMT realm are real, we can become better at explaining why a presence might feel real under the influence of psychedelics without having to explain what reality is.