05/28/2026
DMT users consistently report encounters with apparently autonomous, intelligent non-human entities in elaborate alternate worlds. Neuroscience calls this hallucination, but a new preprint by researchersAndrew Gallimore, Donald Hoffman, and Niffe Hermansson says not so fast.
Building on Donald Hoffman's conscious realism framework, in which reality consists entirely of interacting conscious agents and our perception is a fitness-optimised interface rather than a window onto truth, the paper asks: what if most conscious agents are simply outside our perceptual reach, not because they're hidden, but because our interface was never built to receive them?
DMT, they propose, perturbs that interface sufficiently to render traces of normally imperceptible agents as stable, coherent experience.
The mathematics predicts exactly what users report: hyperdimensional geometry, beings of bewildering complexity, and genuinely autonomous behaviour.
When the brain hallucinates freely (in dreams, psychosis), it generates humans and familiar animals. DMT encounters are less than 5% human. That anomaly needs explaining.
The paper proposes concrete experiments using extended-state DMT infusion to test whether entity encounters are constrained by external variables or show intersubjective correlation across isolated subjects.
