Immersive realms
Also: other worlds · hyperspace · scenes and landscapes · the beyond · otherworlds
Within traditions: Ahpikondi (Desana) · the yagé domains (Siona) · Céu, Terra, Mar (Barquinha) · Vernacular: hyperspace, the waiting room
The experience of being located in a coherent place or world that is not the room the body occupies. The person is inside the scene, not looking at it.
Pharmakon is agnostic about where these places are. Indigenous cosmologies, first-person phenomenology, transpersonal psychology, informational realism and neuroscience are treated as serious frameworks, each with its own standards of evidence. Grades on this page apply to claims about what people report, measure and practise. They are never verdicts on whether the realms exist.
- Inhaled and injected DMT
- Ayahuasca with a DMT leaf
- Historical yajé and ayahuasca recipe unrecorded
- Salvia divinorum
- Iboga and ibogaine
- LSD imagery, imaging
- Psilocybin mushrooms
- Caapi alone
- Shanon (2002): scenes and immersive “virtual reality”
- 11-factor ASC: complex imagery; location itself not measured
- NDE scale: “some other, unearthly world”
- MEQ: transcendence of space
- No dedicated validated instrument
- Geometric patterning often precedes
- Autonomous entities inhabitants
- Out-of-body flight the journey there
- Dreamlike states a neighbour
- Unitive experience where place dissolves
01Definition and boundaries
The defining feature is location. A person may see vivid scenes for hours without ever being in one. This entry concerns the point at which the scene stops being an image and becomes a place: it has depth on every side, persists while the person turns, and contains them. Shanon’s typology of ayahuasca visions marks the threshold. Snapshots, glimpses and full scenes are watched, while in what Shanon calls “virtual reality” the drinker is located within the scene, able to turn, travel, converse and act, though the body may remain seated (Shanon, 2002).
Three neighbouring experiences share some features and differ on one. A dream is also an inhabited world, but it arrives in sleep and usually without the knowledge that one has left anywhere. Under LSD, waking imagery took on the bizarreness of dream reports, an effect blocked by a serotonin 2A antagonist (Kraehenmann et al., 2017). An out-of-body experience relocates the self within ordinary space, while a realm replaces that space. In a corpus of 3,778 inhaled-DMT reports, out-of-body experiences appear in 17.3%, and descriptions of an alternate or higher dimension in 25.2% (Lawrence et al., 2022). A deliriant world, finally, is not another world at all. Under tropane-bearing Brugmansia, people talk with figures who appear in ordinary rooms, often without recognising them as hallucinations (Isbister et al., 2003). The person is displaced in mind but not relocated in experience.
Virtual-reality research offers a precise vocabulary for what is at stake. Slater separates place illusion, the sensation of being there, from plausibility illusion, the sense that what is happening is really happening, and argues that people respond realistically when both are present (Slater, 2009). A psychedelic realm produces both without any display or headset. The two can come apart: a person may feel fully present in a place they know is a vision, or glimpse a distant scene they are certain is real. Section 04 uses this distinction.
02Anatomy of a realm
As with entity encounters, the quantitative literature concerns inhaled or injected DMT, where the transition is fast enough to be described as a single event. Three datasets are used here: 36 interviews conducted immediately after use in a naturalistic field study, a corpus of 3,778 forum reports, and a placebo-controlled study of 13 volunteers scored on the near-death experience scale.
Described emerging into a qualitatively different space of consciousness or reality. 58% described emergence into a novel reality, 31% navigation through space and 22% breaking through a veil (Michael, Luke and Robinson, 2021).
Described an alternate or higher dimension; hyperspace by name in 17.1% (Lawrence et al., 2022).
“Did you seem to enter some other, unearthly world?” was the highest-scoring near-death item under DMT, higher than in people who had nearly died (1.31) (Timmermann et al., 2018).
Coded for loss of the usual sense of space, the most frequent mystical-experience item in the corpus (Lawrence et al., 2022).
The field study gives the clearest picture of the transition. Its themes run from breaking through a veil, to emergence into a novel reality, to navigation through space, and then to the scene, contents and textures of the new world (Michael, Luke and Robinson, 2021). Some participants described an initial “start screen” of computer-like symbols. Others found a latticed field, an “empty blueprint of the universe”, in which objects then materialised.
Realms have a recognisable texture. In the field study, 42% described synthetic textures, and geometric and organic objects each appeared in 44% of accounts, among them cube-like hyperdimensional structures and dense plant growth (Michael, Luke and Robinson, 2021). In the ayahuasca literature, Shanon’s reports emphasise extreme chromatic saturation, ornament, translucence and materials that seem luminous from within: gold, crystal, jewels and filaments of light (Shanon, 2002).
03The range of places
Realms vary more than any typology can hold. Two coded datasets give a first map of how often each kind appears. Neither was designed for this purpose, and each counts only what reporters chose to name.
Settings in 3,778 DMT reports
Lawrence et al. (2022) · percentage of 3,778 inhaled-DMT experiences. Categories overlap, and hyperspace is a subset of alternate dimensions.
Scenes in 36 field interviews
Michael, Luke and Robinson (2021) · percentage of 36 post-session interviews.
The ayahuasca literature fills in the content. Shanon groups it into the personal and autobiographical, the natural world, human cultures and history, mythological and religious domains, and scenes that seem unfamiliar or impossible. Forests, rivers and immense landscapes recur alongside processions, temples, palaces and ancient or futuristic cities, with Egypt and pre-Columbian civilisations appearing in non-Indigenous as well as South American accounts (Shanon, 2002). Harner’s comparison of South American reports found distant cities and flight among the recurring themes (Harner, 1973).
At cosmic scale the realm becomes a universe. Bache describes passing through the collective unconscious and archetypal reality to a unified field of consciousness and, at the limit, a “Diamond Luminosity” outside cyclic existence (Bache, 2019). At the other extreme the place is a single room. Rooms appear in 15.4% of DMT reports, including a recurring “waiting room” (2.8%) and sterile, clinical rooms (2.3%) (Lawrence et al., 2022). Strassman, whose volunteers received DMT in a university hospital research unit, attributed the medical character of rooms like these to that setting (Strassman, 2001; Hirshfeld-Flores, 2002). That the same rooms recur in home use, where 13% of reports name a bedroom or living room, suggests the imagery now travels culturally, through Strassman's book and its retellings.
Smaller settings occur too. Carnival, circus and playhouse settings appear in 1.4% of DMT forum reports, and five of 30 participants given salvinorin A in a laboratory (17%) described carnival scenes (Lawrence et al., 2022; Addy et al., 2015).
How culture furnishes a realm
Dupuis's fieldwork shows the furnishing happening. Over 18 months at Takiwasi, a Peruvian centre combining addiction treatment with ayahuasca seminars, he followed how participants' visions became more shaped over time, which he treats as “the result of a learning process” (Dupuis, 2022, p. 628). Darkness and stillness turned attention inward; after each session officiants gave participants criteria for identifying the beings they had met; and the resulting imagery, of demons, the spirit of ayahuasca as a snake or snake-woman, Saint Michael and Christ, matched the centre's Catholic and shamanic framework, with stereotyped patterns “much higher among experienced users than among newcomers” (Dupuis, 2022, pp. 629–632).
Dupuis reads the vision as “a predictive bet emerging from the encounter between expectations and sensory stimuli”, and the result as “an invasion of perception by culture” (Dupuis, 2022, p. 632). Because the experience feels like revelation, it can carry a culture's categories with unusual force. The cycle below sets out the steps he describes.
04Degrees of immersion
Shanon’s structural types already order visions by how far they surround the drinker: from modification of the seen room, through independent images and scenes, to immersive worlds (Shanon, 2002). The scale below makes location the axis and adds a fifth degree at which place itself gives way. Intensity is a poor guide. A faint but enveloping world is more fully a realm than a dazzling scene watched from outside.
05Across preparations
Generated from the phenomenological profiles on plant and complex pages, and updated when those pages are regraded. Immersive realms occur with serotonergic tryptamines, the kappa-opioid salvinorin A and ibogaine. That breadth matters for section 07. The deliriant tropanes are the instructive exception: they produce vivid, populated hallucinations, but in ordinary space.
| Preparation | Grade | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Inhaled and injected DMT | Established | Three independent methods agree. 100% of 36 field interviews described emerging into another space (Michael, Luke and Robinson, 2021); a quarter of 3,778 forum reports describe another dimension (Lawrence et al., 2022); and under placebo-controlled injection, entering “some other, unearthly world” was the highest-scoring near-death item (Timmermann et al., 2018). |
| Ayahuasca, with a DMT-bearing leaf B. caapi entry | Supported | Shanon's immersive “virtual reality” (Shanon, 2002); “limitless expansive states” in written ceremony accounts (Kjellgren, Eriksson and Norlander, 2009). In fMRI, eyes-closed imagery after the brew drove primary visual cortex to levels comparable with seeing (de Araujo et al., 2012). |
| Yajé and ayahuasca, recipe not recorded | Supported | The Desana ascent to the Milky Way and descent to Ahpikondi (Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1971); Villavicencio's “viaje aéreo” over cities and towers in 1858 (Villavicencio, 1858, cited in Real Academia Española, 2023); distant cities and flight in Harner's comparison (Harner, 1973). These sources give no recipe, so they stand apart from the column above. |
| Salvia divinorum and salvinorin A | Supported | In a placebo-controlled study of 30 people, 83% reported closed-eye imagery, 17% carnival scenes, 60% disorientation and 30% a total loss of awareness of the session (Addy et al., 2015). Realms here are abrupt and disorienting, and often merge with the body. |
| Iboga and ibogaine | Supported | “Strong perceptual phenomena, especially dreamlike visions, were commonly reported” among 22 patients in treatment (Schenberg et al., 2017), a half-day immersion in visual imagery and autobiographical memory (Davis et al., 2018). The realm is often one's own past or future. |
| LSD | Supported | Increased primary visual cortex connectivity correlated with complex imagery (r = 0.74, n = 15) (Carhart-Harris et al., 2016); waking imagery gained dreamlike bizarreness (Kraehenmann et al., 2017). Neither study measured location itself. |
| Psilocybin mushrooms | Variable | Psilocybin “dose-dependently induced profound changes in mood, perception, thought and self-experience” across 110 volunteers (Studerus et al., 2011), but trials have not separated immersion from imagery. Research in progress. |
| Brugmansia | Not reported | Populated hallucinations occur in the ordinary room, without relocation (Isbister et al., 2003). |
| Caapi alone | Unresolved | Vine-only accounts foreground a darker, oneiric and bodily field; immersive scenes have not been isolated from the vine (Rodd, 2008). |
06Within traditions
Where these preparations have long histories of use, the places visited are already known, named and mapped. The terms below overlap with the category without translating it. Each adds what the scientific term leaves out: whose place it is, how one goes there, and what one is there to do.
| Term | Tradition | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| the Milky Way and Ahpikondi | Desana (Tukanoan), Vaupés | In the collective yajé rite, the participant first feels “a violent current of air, as if a strong wind were pulling him along”, which the kumu explains is “the ascent to the Milky Way”; following it, the men descend to Ahpikondi, where shapes, figures, the Daughter of the Sun and “all the animals and beings of myth and nature” appear (Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1971, pp. 171–175). The journey has a route, and a specialist names each stage of it. |
| the yagé domains | Siona | Yagé gives entry into named, morally differentiated domains. Correct seeing is learned: to recognise where one is, who is acting and what response is required (Langdon, 1979). |
| Céu, Terra, Mar | Barquinha | The church works through three Mistérios, of sky, earth and sea (Frenopoulo, 2004). Its founding image is a little boat that carries practitioners through seas and spiritual realms; mobility is built into the cosmology (Araújo, 2008). |
| celestial cities | Peruvian vegetalismo | Pablo Amaringo's paintings set palaces, celestial cities, ships and technological craft among plant persons and healers, held together by currents of force (Luna and Amaringo, 1991). They are composed retrospectively, so they show how a realm is understood, not a record of one session. |
| un viaje aéreo | Upper Napo, 1858 | An Ecuadorian geographer who drank ayahuasca describes “un viaje aéreo” with views of great cities, high towers and beautiful parks, then being abandoned in a forest and attacked by wild beasts (Villavicencio, 1858, p. 373, cited in Real Academia Española, 2023). It is one of the earliest first-person accounts of the effect by an outsider. |
| hyperspace, the waiting room | Contemporary psychonaut culture | Hyperspace is named in 17.1% of DMT reports and the waiting room in 2.8% (Lawrence et al., 2022). The waiting room began as clinical imagery in hospital research (section 03). Like “machine elves”, these terms became reporting conventions and now shape what new users expect. |
Amerindian thought also changes what it means to go somewhere. In perspectivism, beings with souls see themselves and their kin as human, but are perceived by others as animals or spirits. Shamans are the people “capable of assuming the perspectives of other beings”, and of seeing them as human too (Maciel, 2024; Viveiros de Castro, 1998). On this view another world is first another point of view. To enter the domain of the peccaries or the river people is to see as they see, which explains why these journeys are described as dangerous and why they are guided.
07Frameworks of interpretation
Six frameworks address what these places are. They differ less in their conclusions than in what they count as evidence: apprenticeship and consequence, first-person description, convergence across reports, laboratory measurement. Each is set out in its own terms and given the same space. The squares mark only the empirical claims each framework rests on.
Indigenous relational ontologies
Emic and interpretiveThe realms are real domains with inhabitants, routes and rules. The question is how to travel well in them. The Desana kumu names the stages of the journey as it happens (Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1971), and Siona specialists teach novices to recognise where they are and whether an appearance deceives (Langdon, 1979). In perspectivist terms, another world is another body's point of view (Maciel, 2024).
Within its own terms, this knowledge is situated. It belongs to particular peoples, languages and lineages, and its circulation to outsiders raises questions of custodianship that the archive respects.
Phenomenological
InterpretiveThis framework describes the realm as it is given and suspends judgement on where it is. Shanon separates the structure of a vision, from snapshot to immersive world, from its content, and treats the reality-feeling of a scene as a feature to be described in its own right (Shanon, 2002). Slater's distinction between place and plausibility, developed for virtual environments, adds a tool this framework has lacked: it can say precisely which of the two a realm supplies (Slater, 2009).
Within its own terms, it leaves the question of location open by design. Its corpora favour experienced, articulate reporters and spectacular, bounded scenes.
Transpersonal and parapsychological
InterpretiveRealms are levels of a consciousness larger than the individual. Bache's 73 sessions describe an ordered ascent from the collective unconscious through archetypal reality to a unified field of consciousness (Bache, 2019). Luke places extra-dimensional perception alongside near-death and out-of-body experience, mediumship and alien abduction, as data a full account of mind has to include (Luke, 2017). Near-death research gives this framework an empirical point of contact: DMT and actual near-death experiences overlapped on almost every scale item (Timmermann et al., 2018).
Within its own terms, its maps rest heavily on a few highly experienced individuals, and its ordering of levels is an interpretation of their reports.
Informational realism
InterpretiveThe brain is a world-building machine, and ordinary reality is one of the worlds it builds. Gallimore argues that DMT alters this world-building so that the brain models a different, coherent world, and speculates that DMT may once have had an ancestral role in the brain (Gallimore, 2013). On this view a realm is a world the brain is genuinely modelling, not a degraded copy of this one, and prolonged infusion has been proposed as the way to explore it (Gallimore and Strassman, 2016).
Within its own terms, it is a research programme rather than a finding. Its claim of shared structure across users has not yet been tested with naive participants.
Cultural-psychological
InterpretiveRealms are shaped by the categories a person brings. Ritual discourse educates attention and supplies the places to be visited, and later narration consolidates ambiguous impressions as recognisable visions, so that stereotyped imagery grows with experience (Dupuis, 2022). Global ayahuasca discourse tends to make visions private possessions of an inward self, whereas some Amazonian traditions treat seeing as relational and publicly consequential (Gearin and Calavia Sáez, 2021). Clinical rooms that began in hospital research and now recur in home use are what this framework predicts (section 03).
Within its own terms, it explains variation better than recurrence.
Neurocognitive
Empirical findings, interpretive claimAfter ayahuasca, imagining with the eyes closed activated primary visual cortex to levels comparable with seeing natural images with the eyes open (de Araujo et al., 2012), and under LSD, increased primary visual cortex connectivity correlated with complex imagery (Carhart-Harris et al., 2016). The visual system behaves as if it were receiving input that is not there. Under injected DMT, which its authors call a “deeply immersive” state, global functional connectivity rose and networks lost their usual segregation, with effects concentrated in transmodal association cortex (Timmermann et al., 2023). In the REBUS model, psychedelics relax high-level priors and free bottom-up information flow (Carhart-Harris and Friston, 2019).
Within its own terms, its measurements are correlates. They show what the brain does while a realm is experienced, and they are compatible with the brain producing the realm, filtering it or receiving it; the claim that it produces it is an ontological reading, not a finding. It also explains how imagery gains the vividness of perception better than why it organises into a coherent, meaningful place.
08What a realm is: open accounts
Every account of what a realm is has to answer to the same two bodies of evidence: what people report, and what can be measured while they report it. Neither settles the question. The reports are consistent and weighty: 81% of surveyed DMT users judged the experience more real than everyday waking life (Davis et al., 2020), and ceremony participants describe orderly, meaningful worlds and lasting changes in how they see their lives (Kjellgren, Eriksson and Norlander, 2009). The measurements are real too, but they are correlates. So every ontological reading below, including the reading that the brain simply produces the realm, is graded conjectural. The grade marks a question the evidence leaves open, not a judgement against the experience or the people who report it.
Produced by the brain
ConjecturalThe most common scientific reading holds that a realm is an internally generated model: with high-level priors relaxed, the brain builds a world from its own activity, and nothing is visited (Carhart-Harris and Friston, 2019). The measurements in section 07 fit it well, but they fit the other readings too.
It is a default in much of the literature rather than a result. It has yet to account for why the worlds built are so often coherent, shared in their features, and experienced as more real than this one.
The filter
ConjecturalHuxley proposed that brain and senses act as a “reducing valve”, narrowing a wider “Mind at Large” to what is useful for survival; on this view a realm is a part of what the valve ordinarily shuts out, and the brain receives consciousness rather than generating it (Sjöstedt-Hughes, 2024). Sjöstedt-Hughes traces the idea to Bergson and argues that Huxley simplified, and slightly misunderstood, Bergson's metaphysics.
It shares one feature with the neurocognitive account: both describe psychedelics as loosening a constraint. They part over where the content then comes from.
The dying brain
Conjectural, on a measured baseLuke hypothesises that DMT made in the body may drive dreaming and be involved in near-death experience (Luke, 2011). A measured finding now sits under the idea. In rats, DMT was found in the visual cortex at concentrations comparable with serotonin, and rose after induced cardiac arrest, more than doubling in 60% of animals with an intact pineal gland (Dean et al., 2019). The authors caution that it is unknown whether such levels can produce psychedelic effects. The speculative step is that the realm of the near-death experience and the DMT realm are one place, entered through the same molecule. The overlap of their reported features gives it its appeal (Timmermann et al., 2018).
Fewer than one in five cardiac-arrest survivors report a near-death experience, and not every rat showed a surge, as Dean et al. note.
World-building and simulation
ConjecturalGallimore extends informational realism into the claim that consensus reality is itself a model the brain builds, and that DMT switches the brain into building a different, equally coherent one (Gallimore, 2013; Gallimore, 2015). It is the most testable of these accounts: it predicts that a realm revisited under extended infusion will keep its layout.
That prediction has not yet been tested. Luan et al. (2024) showed the state can be held steady, not that its contents recur.
Shared worlds and telepathy
ConjecturalThe idea is as old as the chemistry. The first alkaloid isolated from yagé was named “telepathine”, after the belief that the brew conferred telepathy; the compound was later shown to be harmine (Villeneuve, 1966). In the Desana rite the journey to the Milky Way is collective: the men ascend and descend together (Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1971). That participants can enter the same realm, or perceive at a distance from within one, remains conjectural (Luke, 2017).
A collective rite with a shared vocabulary would also produce convergent reports. Separating the two needs blinded comparison of independent accounts.
Hyperspace and higher dimensions
ConjecturalMeyer considered that DMT may give access to a hyperspace “closer” to physical reality than ordinary experience (Meyer, 1993). The vernacular has taken the geometry literally. 1.5% of DMT reports describe four or five dimensions (Lawrence et al., 2022), and field participants describe cube-like “hyperdimensional” structures (Michael, Luke and Robinson, 2021).
Reports of extra dimensions are reports of how space felt. They cannot, on their own, show that the space has more dimensions.
09Reality and aftermath
Asked directly, people rate these experiences as extraordinarily real. In the DMT encounter survey, 81% said the experience felt more real than everyday waking consciousness at the time, and 65% still said so afterwards; 49% placed the entity in a real but different dimension or reality, and a further 26% in both that dimension and ordinary reality (Davis et al., 2020). Unprompted, they mention it far less. Only 0.6% of forum reports said spontaneously that the experience felt more real than everyday reality, while 12.8% described familiarity and 1.5% a sense of home (Lawrence et al., 2022). The gap is a lesson in method: realness is a judgement people make when asked, and a feeling they rarely volunteer.
Belief changes follow. In the same survey, identification with a belief in ultimate reality or God rose from 36% before the encounter to 58% after (Davis et al., 2020). These figures describe what people report about their lives afterwards. They do not show that the experience caused the change, and the samples are people motivated to answer a survey about such experiences.
10Difficult realms
Not every realm is welcoming. “Metaphysical hell” appears in 0.8% of DMT reports, slightly more often than heaven or nirvana (0.6%) (Lawrence et al., 2022). Ceremonial accounts describe a “contractile frightening state” of chaos and loss of control before the turn to expansive worlds (Kjellgren, Eriksson and Norlander, 2009). Under salvinorin A, 60% reported disorientation and 43% felt out of control for part of the experience (Addy et al., 2015). Ibogaine's visions have been framed as simulations of threat and danger, after an evolutionary account of dreaming (Schenberg et al., 2017).
One feature of near-death experience is notably weaker under DMT. Coming to “a border or point of no return” scored 1.00 in actual near-death experiences but 0.23 under DMT (Timmermann et al., 2018). The DMT realm, so far as this measure shows, is entered without the sense of a threshold that cannot be recrossed.
Traditions treat getting lost as the central risk. The kumu's narration of the Desana journey and the Siona apprenticeship in recognising where one is are both forms of navigation (Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1971; Langdon, 1979). Contemporary use outside such frameworks usually lacks that guidance. Medical and psychiatric risks belong to the preparation, not the effect, and are set out in each plant's safety box.
11Measurement and research frontiers
No validated instrument measures immersion in a psychedelic realm. The 11-factor Altered States of Consciousness scale captures complex imagery but not where the person is (Studerus, Gamma and Vollenweider, 2010). The near-death scale has a single item on entering an unearthly world (Timmermann et al., 2018), and the mystical experience questionnaire records only the loss of ordinary space (Lawrence et al., 2022). Virtual-reality research, by contrast, has spent decades measuring presence. Adapting its instruments to separate place and plausibility in psychedelic states would answer questions every framework above cares about (Slater, 2009).
A realm lasting minutes is hard to study from within. A bolus followed by constant intravenous infusion extended the DMT state stably over 30 minutes; visual imagery tracked intensity throughout, and entity encounters increased in the later part of the infusion at the higher doses (Luan et al., 2024). The method had been modelled in advance as a way to hold the state steady (Gallimore and Strassman, 2016). Extended-state studies can ask whether a realm persists, whether it can be revisited, and whether its geography is stable.
- Can a realm be returned to, and is its layout the same on a second visit? Unresolved
- Do people with no exposure to psychedelic culture describe hyperspace or waiting rooms? Unresolved
- Does caapi alone ever produce relocation, or only scenes? Unresolved
- What distinguishes, in the brain, an immersive world from a vivid scene watched from outside? Unresolved
- Would presence instruments from virtual-reality research separate place and plausibility in psychedelic states? Unresolved
- Does a surge of endogenous DMT occur in the dying human brain, and at levels that could matter? Unresolved
Sources
How to read the labels on each source
- Source type
- What kind of work it is: journal article, book, legislation, patent application, database record and so on. A word after the dot (ethnography, protologue, primary source) keeps the genre the entry was first filed under. “Unclassified” means the citation does not say enough to tell.
- Peer review
- Recorded for each work separately, and only where it has been confirmed for that work. It is never inferred from a DOI, a publisher or a journal, since journals also publish editorials, letters and commentaries. Where it has not been confirmed, the entry records it as not established. It does not apply to legislation, court decisions, treaties, patents, datasets, database and collection records, historical texts, films, talks, press releases or web pages.
- Check
- What was checked when the entry was added. DOI checked: the DOI’s registry record (Crossref) matched the citation’s title, first author and year. Verified: the record itself was opened and matched the citation: a library catalogue record for a book, or the page itself for a database entry, law, patent or archive document. “Verified (abstract)” and “(summary)” mean only the abstract or a summary was read. Located: a record was found but not fully matched. Bibliographic record and Stable record (in essays): a catalogue or stable web record exists; what was checked against it is not recorded. Unverified: no check is recorded. No locator found: a search found no record. Secondary: read through another source.
- What the labels do not say
- None of them means the source supports a particular sentence. Where a sentence is graded, its evidence note names its sources and whether each supports it, disputes it or gives context. Dates and reviewers of checks are not recorded for each entry; the version note at the foot of a graded page dates its last review.
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- Araújo, W.S. (2008) ‘The Barquinha: symbolic space of a cosmology in the making’, Fieldwork in Religion, 2(3), pp. 350–362. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1558/firn.v2i3.350.
- de Araujo, D.B. et al. (2012) ‘Seeing with the eyes shut: neural basis of enhanced imagery following ayahuasca ingestion’, Human Brain Mapping, 33(11), pp. 2550–2560. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.21381.
- Bache, C.M. (2019) LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press.
- Carhart-Harris, R.L. et al. (2016) ‘Neural correlates of the LSD experience revealed by multimodal neuroimaging’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(17), pp. 4853–4858. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1518377113.
- Carhart-Harris, R.L. and Friston, K.J. (2019) ‘REBUS and the anarchic brain: toward a unified model of the brain action of psychedelics’, Pharmacological Reviews, 71(3), pp. 316–344.
- Davis, A.K., Renn, E., Windham-Herman, A.-M., Polanco, M. and Barsuglia, J.P. (2018) ‘A mixed-method analysis of persisting effects associated with positive outcomes following ibogaine detoxification’, Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 50(4), pp. 287–297. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/02791072.2018.1487607.
- Davis, A.K., Clifton, J.M., Weaver, E.G., Hurwitz, E.S., Johnson, M.W. and Griffiths, R.R. (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. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0269881120916143.
- Dean, J.G. et al. (2019) ‘Biosynthesis and extracellular concentrations of N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) in mammalian brain’, Scientific Reports, 9, 9333. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-45812-w.
- Dupuis, D. (2022) ‘The socialization of hallucinations: cultural priors, social interactions, and contextual factors in the use of psychedelics’, Transcultural Psychiatry, 59(5), pp. 625–637. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/13634615211036388.
- Frenopoulo, C. (2004) ‘The mechanics of religious synthesis in the Barquinha religion’, REVER: Revista de Estudos da Religião, 4(1). Available at: https://www4.pucsp.br/rever/rv1_2004/t_frenopoulo.htm.
- Gallimore, A.R. (2013) ‘Building alien worlds: the neuropsychological and evolutionary implications of the astonishing psychoactive effects of N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT)’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 27(3), pp. 455–503.
- Gallimore, A.R. (2015) ‘Building human worlds: DMT and the simulated universe’, PsyPress UK Journal, 6.
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