Faerie-type Entities and and the DMT Experience: An Ontological Survey

The following article appeared in the most recent special edition of the Psychedelic Press journal, entitled ‘Folklore and Psychedelics’, edited by Jack Hunter and Peter Sjöstedt Hughes. Thanks to the Psychedelic Press for allowing me to republish it here in full.

Faerie-type Entities and and the DMT Experience: An Ontological Survey

Neil Rushton

The recent study carried out by the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine surveyed 2561 people to record their experiences of contacting entities while using N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT).¹ The study used a filtered dataset of people to categorise many aspects of the DMT experience. The published paper does not give details of the subjective reports, but classifies them into typologies based on a range of determinants, and provides statistical analyses. In the table for ‘descriptive labels for entity’ 14% of respondents described their entity as elves, 8% as faeries and 5% as gnomes. But there are many other categories that are more ambivalent and, without seeing the original data, may be considered faerie-type entities. These include ‘beings’ (60%), ‘plant spirits’ (10%), and ‘animal spirits’ (7%).

This study is part of a growing literature of testimonies from people who have apparently contacted supernatural entities after taking DMT. It would seem this molecule, in particular, has the ability to alter states of consciousness to the extent that the participant is able to interact with non-natural entities in a supra-normal time and space. Many of the entities, in this study and others, bear much ontological resemblance to the faeries of both folkloric and modern descriptions. The DMT experience may provide one possible pathway into understanding what the faeries might be and how human consciousness can connect to their metaphysical existence.

DMT-initiated Faerie Encounters from Clinical Trials and Surveys

In the late 1950s, the Hungarian Stephen Szára became the first person to catalogue the experiences of people who had been injected with DMT. As detailed by Andrew Gallimore and David Luke, once he’d worked out that DMT was non-active when ingested, but instead needed to be injected intravenously: ‘He recruited 30 volunteers, mainly doctors from the hospital where he worked, the National Institute for Mental and Nervous Diseases, Budapest. All received 0.7 mg/kg DMT intramuscularly and their experiences carefully recorded.’² Unfortunately, the results were not published, but some reports do survive, and it is clear that many of the study participants encountered entities. One twenty eight-year old male described his experience thus: ‘The room is full of spirits…the images come in such profusion that I hardly know where I want to begin with them! I see an orgy of color, but in several layers one after the other… one sees curious objects, but nevertheless everything is quickly gone, as if on a roller-coaster.’ We do not have any further assessment of what the ‘spirits’ were, but several of the other surviving experience reports describe meeting ‘beings’ when under the influence of these high-dose events. Two years after the first study Szára extended his assessment to psychiatric patients in the hospital. Again, only a few reports of the patients’ experiences survive, but one, from a thirty-year old female, give a flavour of the types of entities encountered: ‘I saw such strange dreams, but at the beginning only… I saw strange creatures, dwarfs or something, they were black and moved about…’

When DMT became a scheduled substance in 1970, any possibility of further research ceased. It was not until 1990 that DMT re-emerged as a legitimate substance for experimentation within a clinical setting. Between 1990 and 1995 a clinical research study was carried out at the General Clinical Research Center of the University of New Mexico Hospital, by Dr Rick Strassman, after a lengthy application to obtain a federal licence was successful. The study found that volunteers injected with varying amounts of DMT underwent profound alterations of consciousness. Strassman published the results in 2001 as DMT: The Spirit Molecule.³

The research involved sixty volunteers, all of who had multiple sessions in a controlled environment, where they were injected with DMT within the range of 0.2, 0.3 and 0.4 mg/kg. They were monitored during the experiences, which usually lasted between twenty and forty minutes. They were then asked to recount a testimony of what had happened as soon as the effects of the drug had worn off. At all doses the experience usually involved immediate cessation of normal consciousness and transportation to a different realm of reality inhabited by a range of creatures described as elves, faeries, imps, reptiles, insects, aliens, robots, clowns, and various therianthropic entities. One woman even describes a pulsating entity that she encountered as ‘Tinkerbell-like’. The experiences represented to the participants a parallel reality that was ‘super real’, not an hallucination, not a dream, but a substantial built reality with full sensory interaction and often telepathy.

The testimony of one volunteer, Jeremiah, gives an idea of the experience, the entities encountered and how the participants’ descriptions were recorded verbatim. After hurtling through a void he found himself: ‘… in a nursery. A high-tech nursery with a single Gumby, three feet tall, attending me. I felt like an infant. Not a human infant, but an infant relative to the intelligence represented by the Gumby. It was aware of me but not particularly concerned… Then I heard two or three male voices talking. I heard one of them say “he’s arrived.” … I was in a big room… there was one big machine in the center, with round conduits, almost writhing… The machine felt as if it were rewiring me, reprogramming me… This is real. It’s totally unexpected, quite constant and objective… an independent, constant reality.’⁴

Karl described his interaction with some faerie-type entities during an ‘inter glacial’ only eight minutes into a high-dose session: ‘That was real strange. There were a lot of elves. They were prankish, ornery, maybe four of them appeared at the side of a stretch of interstate highway I travel regularly. They commanded the scene, it was their terrain! They were about my height. They held up placards, showing me these incredibly beautiful, complex, swirling geometric scenes in them… I heard a giggling sound— the elves laughing or talking at high-speed volume, chattering, twittering.’⁵

The language in the testimonials over time is interesting; are the ‘spirits’ and ‘dwarves’ in Szára’s studies, 1950’s versions of the ‘elves’ and ‘imps’ of the participants in Strassman’s research? It is certainly the case that many folkloric descriptions of the faeries described them as ‘spirits’. There are plenty of examples of this in WY Evans-Wentz’s 1911 collection of faerie beliefs, published as The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries,⁶ where (especially in Ireland and Brittany) there appeared to be a high level of interchangeability between the faeries and the spirits of the dead. The folklorist David Halpin has commented about this trait while describing one of Evans-Wentz’s encounter reports from Limerick, where a young doctor equates the faeries as spirits: ‘This may be, perhaps, an unconscious referral to the belief that in many cases the faeries were both the dead and another type of spirit, or it may be that there was more of an acceptance of this crossover than there sometimes is today.’⁷ This ambiguity of language to describe supernatural entities over time is important. But it is clear from Strassman’s research study that almost all the volunteer participants encountered various forms of entities during their DMT experiences, and that (whatever the terminology used) many of them can be coded within the broad ontological spectrum that may be described as faerie entities.

Strassman’s study could be seen, at least in part, as correlative to folkloric research. The primary take away is the anecdotal testimonies of people who attempt to describe the DMT-induced realities they found themselves in and the entities they found there. This is not so dissimilar to a folklorist collecting reports of supernatural faerie encounters. The means of arrival in a reality where faeries appear to exist is evidently different, but Strassman is in many ways simply recording extraordinary encounters with (apparently) non-physical entities, much in the same way as Evans-Wentz and every other folklorist who has attempted to record human interactions with faeries.

An important survey is from 2010, collated by the computational physicist Peter Meyer.⁸ ‘340 DMT Trip Reports’ documents what Meyer describes as, ‘reports which attest to contact with apparently independently existing intelligent entities within what seems to be an alternate reality.’ The 340 (anonymous) reports certainly contain many encounters with faerie-type entities, most often described as elves. Forty-six of the reports describe encountering faeries/elves. #49 states: ‘To start with I was travelling into what looked like a long curved tunnel. The walls of the tunnel were like bright multicolored tiles… After an indeterminate period of time I found myself in a garden, which seemed to be suspended in a sky-blue void, rather than part of any larger land mass. The garden had grass, flowers, trees, even a picket fence and seemed quite convincing and solid. I noticed two faeries sitting on a swing hanging from one of the trees. They seemed to be inviting me closer, and I floated in their direction… As I approached them I noticed that they were lewdly playing with themselves and each other, I watched them for some time before noticing that there were more inhabitants in the garden. There were more of the faeries and what I assume were their children.’ This account is quite typical of testimonies in the survey in that a transformed natural environment is encountered, and the morality of the faerie entities in ambivalent.

There are many folkloric traits and precedents in these descriptions, although there is also probably much cultural coding going on, where people in altered states of consciousness carry with them their own memories of what faeries and elves might represent. But there is certainly a general view in the testimonies that these entities are existing in an autonomous built reality not entirely dependent on our own consensus reality. The DMT world appears to be an independent hyper-reality, even if it is a reality built from entirely subjective accounts. Although only a minority of reports (c.18%) in Meyer’s study explicitly mention faeries or elves, almost all of them do record some type of contact with non-human intelligent entities, described as: spirits, insectoids, therianthropes, orbs, light beings, waves of light or sound, aliens, or distorted humanoids. There is a consistency in the reports of meeting with intelligent beings.

This theme continues in subsequent surveys, such as Jon Hanna’s 2012 study ‘Aliens, Insectoids, and Elves! Oh, My!’, which used experience reports posted on the drug-advisory website Erowid, as well as three new surveys of Erowid users.⁹ While the surveys included entity encounters brought on by a range of psychedelic substances, it is clear that DMT was always the molecule most likely to facilitate such encounters. The initial assessment of over 22,600 experience reports showed that 1,159 described entity encounters. 38% of these happened on DMT and 36% on Ayahuasca. In Hanna’s three new surveys it was also clear that DMT was the drug most likely to initiate an experience involving discarnate entities. Many of the respondents described the entities as alien, but there is a large sub-set of faerie-type beings within the testimonies.

David Luke’s 2020 paper ‘Anomalous Psychedelic Experiences: At the Neurochemical Juncture of the Humanistic and Parapsychological’ also surveys the altered state of consciousness effects of people using a range of psychedelics.¹⁰ When it comes to entity encounters Luke makes it clear that DMT is the substance most likely to induce the phenomenon. He notes that ‘encounters with elves, gnomes, pixies, dwarves, imps, goblins, and other “little people” (though clearly not human people), are extremely prevalent and have long been at the spearhead of the debate on the reality of DMT beings.’ And along with Pascal Michael and Oliver Robinson, Luke has also published the findings from a recent ‘naturalistic field study’ where thirty-six participants were observed during DMT trips in their homes and interviewed immediately afterwards.¹¹ Thirty-four of them described encountering entities, and while there is a variety in the entity taxonomy, faerie types regularly appear. If the faerie typology is extended to therianthropes, cartoon humanoids, aliens and even ‘clowns’, then they are present in the majority of experiences in the study. And in the most recent survey (2022) in Nature Scientific Reports, an analysis of 3778 experiences from the r/DMT Reddit community over a 10-year period from 2009 to 2018, also demonstrated encounters with faerie-type entities.¹² While only a minority of contributors specifically labeled the entities as faeries/elves, there are many phenotypes which would slot into a folkloric understanding of faerie phenomenology, such as shadow figures, masked characters and any of the more vague descriptions of ‘humanoids.’ If the descriptors for entities in this study are compared to the faerie phenotypes listed in the Aarne-Thompson Motif-Index of Folk-Literature,¹³ more than half of them could be classified as faerie encounters.

The DMT experience is evidently a real subjective phenomenon. Even filtering for misrepresentations through deceit and false memories, the large number of testimonies, from both clinical research and surveys, over a long time period, point to the conclusion that this particular molecule consistently produces entity encounters via an altered state of consciousness. And many of the entities correlate with folkloric (historic and modern) faerie typologies.

The DMT Experience Compared to Folkloric and Modern Faerie Encounters

While folkloric faerie encounters (and modern encounters) were evidently not caused by inhalation or injection of DMT, many of the stories and testimonies from the record do involve the immersion of the participants into an ulterior reality inhabited by non-human intelligent entities. One story from the folkloric record that does sound as if it were an historic version of a DMT experience is the well-documented description of Ann Jefferies, who, in the late 17th century experienced a vivid trip into an otherworld populated by faerie entities.¹⁴ After going into service with the wealthy Pitt family near St Teath, Cornwall she, one day while sitting in the arbour of the house, found herself accosted by ‘six little men, all clothed very handsome in green.’ The 19th-century folklorist Robert Hunt recounted the subsequent testimony in Popular Romances of the West of England.¹⁵ One of the little men ran his fingers over her eyes and she felt as if they’d been pricked with a pin: ‘Suddenly Ann became blind, and she felt herself whirled through the air at a great rate. By and by, one of her little companions said something which sounded like “Tear away,” and lo! Anne had her sight at once restored. She was in one of the most beautiful places — temples and palaces of gold and silver. Trees laden with fruits and flowers. Lakes full of gold and silver fish and the air full of birds of the sweetest song, and the more brilliant colours. Hundreds of ladies and gentlemen were walking about. Hundreds more were idling in the most luxurious bowers, the fragrance of the flowers oppressing them with sense of delicious repose. Hundreds were also dancing, engaged in sports of various kinds. Ann was, however, surprised to find that these happy people were no longer the small people she had previously seen.’

After coming round from her experience, Ann woke up in the arbour surrounded by concerned people and was taken to convalesce. It is conjectured that she suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy, a condition which manifests traits similar to DMT-induced experiences. Interestingly, like many of the people on Strassman’s study and respondents to the Johns Hopkins survey, Ann found she was a changed person after the experience, and became transformed into a natural healer, gaining much fame for this in her subsequent life. Anecdotal folklore about faerie encounters is rarely as detailed as Ann Jefferies’ story (Hunt’s narrative is backed up by contemporary letters, civil records and other accounts about her), but there are numerous testimonies about people who claim to have left consensus reality and entered another, where they meet faerie entities. This is perhaps best seen in the common motif of the faerie dance – where an individual enters into a circle of dancing faeries and remains in their otherworld for a short period of time, only to return to this world and find they have been absent for weeks, months or even years.¹⁶ This is perhaps the folklore turning a real numinous episode (perhaps via an altered state of consciousness, of whatever type) into a palatable story, with the allegorical slant that the trip into an otherworld gives an enhanced cubit of wisdom in a very short time – much like a DMT-induced episode.

While most people partaking of DMT will perhaps not be overly familiar with faerie folklore stories and motifs, they will probably be imbued with the faeries in popular culture. Put this alongside their likely knowledge of Terence McKenna and his various descriptions of machine-elves, and there may be a predisposition for the DMT experiencer to encounter faerie-type entities. The cultural code is locked into their subconscious and the molecule unlocks it, creating an apparently real encounter with a supernatural creature based on their hard-wired expectations. This is also the case for modern faerie sightings where the participant has not engaged with DMT or any other mind-altering substance. As the recent census by Simon Young for The Fairy Investigation Society shows, there continue to be many people reporting encounters with faerie entities.¹⁷ Indeed, the rate of modern testimonies of non-psychedelic induced experiences far outstrips the number of people detailing their DMT encounters. But both may be culturally coding their experiences. There are certainly many similarities between DMT and non-DMT testimonies of faerie encounters. This example is from The Fairy Investigation Society’s census (#114) and happened to a female in her twenties during the 1990s in Somerset, UK: ‘Friends had gone ahead and I straggled behind. As I turned a corner, it was misty. The mist had a weird glow. As I walked into the low mist there was a procession [of faeries] around three feet tall. With lanterns! But in the mist, I paused and they saw me. They came forward and I waited for them to pass. They passed. I have never taken drugs and was not on any alcohol. This was the weirdest experience. It lasted three to five minutes. By [the] time I got back to cottage my friends were concerned as I was away for around forty-five minutes! Very strange. They looked medieval in dress. But their clothes were covered by the mist at times.’

The time dilation and feeling of numinosity, and, of course, the meeting with (apparently intelligent) humanoid entities, could come from a DMT-trip report. But the main difference is that (despite the missing time) the respondent encountered the faerie entities within consensus reality. She was not in an alternate reality. This is the main contrast between most (but not all) modern faerie experiences, which have not been induced by a mind-altering substance, and DMT encounters, which always happen in a hyper-space. This could suggest that with DMT rushing through the brain the experience is taken further, and those people encountering entities without its benefit only get a partial view, constrained within their natural environment. The folkloric record is more divergent on this. The stories such as Ann Jefferies’, and the circle dancing experiences transport the participant into the otherworld of the faeries, but, the majority of faerie folklore happens in the everyday world, where the entities infringe upon our reality and make their appearances there.

The DMT experience of supernatural entities is only a part of this metaphysical intersect, but it is important, not least due to the consistency of the testimonies. Most people who take DMT experience intelligent entities, and many of their encounters are similar enough to folkloric and modern faerie testimonies to allow for the possibility the experiences are related. While there are evidently many differences between experiences of faerie entities in folklore/modern encounters and those from DMT use, there are also enough similarities for us to ask the question about the phenomenological correspondence. People in the past and the present appear to have experienced a range of faerie entities, through a variety of means; injecting or inhaling DMT can invoke analogous experiences. Faerie entities, however experienced, and while morphing through different taxonomies through time, do seem to be resistant to cultural changes – they retain their form and remain recognisable as a category of supernatural entity. Whether they exist in an autonomous reality, which interacts with ours occasionally, or whether they are aspects of human consciousness, accessible under certain conditions, they remain with us; liminal but exclusive, at a metaphysical intersect.

References

1. Davis, AK., Clifton, JM., Weaver EG., Hurwitz, ES., Johnson, MW., Griffiths, RR. (2020) ‘Survey of Entity Encounter Experiences Occasioned by Inhaled N,N-dimethyltryptamine: Phenomenology, Interpretation, and Enduring Effects’, Journal of Psychopharmacology, 34:9, pp. 1008-1020.
2. Gallimore, AR. and Luke, DP. ‘DMT Research from 1956 to the Edge of Time’, Reality Sandwich (15 Oct. 2015), https://realitysandwich.com/dmt-research-from-1956-to-the-edge-of-time/.
3. Strassman, R. (2001) DMT: The Spirit Molecule (Rochester, VT.: Park Street Press).
4. Strassman, DMT, pp. 193-95.
5. Strassman, DMT, p. 188.
6. Evans-Wentz, WY. (2004, 1st pub. 1911) The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (Franklin Lakes, NJ.: Career Press).
7. Halpin, D. ‘A Strange Irish Fairy Encounter’, Circle Stories (18 June 2020), https://www.facebook.com/CircleStoriesDavidHalpin/posts/1202465446768796.
8. Meyer, P. ‘340 DMT Trip Reports’, Serendipity (20 Aug. 2010), https://www.serendipity.li/dmt/340_dmt_trip_reports.htm.
9. Hanna, J. ‘Aliens, Insectoids, and Elves! Oh, My!’, Erowid Extracts #23 (24 Nov. 2012), https://www.erowid.org/chemicals/dmt/dmt_article3.shtml.
10. Luke, D (2020) ’Anomalous Psychedelic Experiences: At the Neurochemical Juncture of the Humanistic and Parapsychological’, Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 62:2, pp. 257-97.
11. Michael, P., Luke, D., Robinson, O. ‘An Encounter With the Other: A Thematic and Content Analysis of DMT Experiences From a Naturalistic Field Study’ Frontiers in Psychology, 12:720717 (2021) https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.720717.
12. Lawrence, D.W., Carhart-Harris, R., Griffiths, R.. Timmermann, C., ‘Phenomenology and Content of the Inhaled N, N-dimethyltryptamine (N, N-DMT) Experience’, Scientific Reports 12:8562 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-11999-8.
13. Thompson, S. (1955-58) Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folk-Tales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books, and Local Legends, 6 vols (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger).
14. Young, S. (ed.) (2021) Ann Jefferies and the Faeries (London: Pwca Pamphlets); Rushton, N. ‘The Faerie Abduction of Ann Jefferies’, Dead but Dreaming (23 Sep. 2017), https://deadbutdreaming.wordpress.com/2017/09/23/the-faerie-abduction-of-anne-jefferies/.
15. Hunt, R. (1903) Popular Romances of the West of England (London: Chatto & Windus), pp. 127-29.
16. Hancock, G. (2005) Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind (London: Century), pp. 398-412; Rushton, N. ‘Going Round in Circles: The Faerie Dance’, Dead but Dreaming (28 May 2016), https://deadbutdreaming.wordpress.com/2016/05/28/going-round-in-circles-the-faerie-dance/; Rushton, N. ‘The Space-Time Continuum in Faerieland’, Dead but Dreaming (10 July 2016), https://deadbutdreaming.wordpress.com/2016/07/10/the-space-time-continuum-in-faerieland/.
17. Young, S. ‘Fairy Census 2014-2017’, The Fairy Investigation Society (8 Jan. 2018), https://www.fairyist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/The-Fairy-Census-2014-2017-1.pdf.

Contents of the Psychedelic Press Journal XL:

• Editorial: ‘Folklore and Psychedelics’ by Jack Hunter
• Folklore and the British Magic Mushroom by Andy Letcher
• Tattoo You?: The Blue Star Tattoo Legend in Britain by Andy Roberts
• Atropa belladonna and the Raving Ones by the Seed Sistas
• Datura Use and the Native American Death Trip by PD Newman
• Faerie-type Entities and the DMT Experience: An Ontological Survey by Neil Rushton
• Narratives of the Self: Psilocybin Experiences and Changes in Subjectivity by Joshua Falcon
• Three Folk Poems by Mark Juhan

Journal cover by Roscoe Stark

The cover image for this article is by KingCandyFlip

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Dead but Dreaming the novel is available now