New Realities recorded on February 29, 2020
Summary
Alan Steinfeld interviews neuroscientist Andrew Gallimore about his research into psychedelics, specifically DMT. They discuss the theory that DMT acts as a technology to tune the brain to parallel dimensions, allowing contact with advanced non-biological intelligences. They also cover proposed methods like continuous intravenous infusion to extend the DMT state, facilitating more profound two-way communication with entities in these alternate realities.
Transcript
Alan Steinfeld
Welcome to New Realities. I’m Alan Steinfeld, and this program is about the evolution of consciousness. One of the things I feel is key to this evolution is this bigger cosmos that we’re a part of. The ET realities that seem to be coming into our field of awareness, and there’s many different approaches to how to make contact. Tonight’s guest, Andrew Gallimore, is a neuroscientist, chemical pharmacologist, writer focusing on the effects of psychedelics on the brain, research into DMTs, also worked with Rick Strassman. It seems like altered states for many people is a way to make this sort of ET contact. You’re speaking at Contact in the Desert, May 29th to June 1st, 2020. What are you going to be talking about there?
Andrew Gallimore
I’m going to give two talks. My main lecture will be about thinking about why it’s perhaps not best to focus our efforts entirely upon beings within this universe, but actually consider why it’s highly likely that the vast majority of contactable intelligences are non-biological or post-biological, and that perhaps exist outside of our reality, and why psychedelic drugs offer the opportunity as these tools for actually establishing communication with them. I will kind of give a broad lecture on using psychedelics, particularly DMT, and how we develop these as tools for interdimensional communication. Then I’ll also give a workshop where I will go much more deep into the actual mechanisms of thinking about the brain and the way that the brain is able to tune into our reality and how psychedelic drugs allow it to switch the reality channel. If people are really interested in what’s actually going on in the brain when people take these powerful psychedelic drugs like DMT, then the workshop is there for them as well. I think it should be a really interesting experience for everyone.
Alan Steinfeld
Talk a little bit, Andrew, about what that connection between altered states and ETs are.
Andrew Gallimore
Anyone who’s familiar with psychedelics, particularly certain psychedelics like DMT, dimethyltryptamine, which has this remarkable, unique ability to transport the user really within a few seconds from this reality to this very strange alternate reality that seems to be heavily populated with this extremely diverse ecology of extremely intelligent beings that look and appear to be from an extremely advanced, highly culturally and technologically evolved civilization.
Alan Steinfeld
But before we go a little further into that landscape, I have to ask you as a neuroscientist that you are, is it a transportation of consciousness or is it a manifestation of chemicals interacting with neurology?
Andrew Gallimore
First of all, it’s certainly an interaction of chemicals with your neurology, with your brain. But I think when people think about those options, if you’re not neuroscientifically trained, people will assume there’s two options here. We can say it’s purely a product of the brain, the brain is making it up, or there’s some transport to another dimension. But actually, that’s not what’s necessary. The brain is an information generator and the brain builds your reality, a model basically. The world you experience from moment to moment is a model of the environment constructed by your brain.
Alan Steinfeld
Based on what we’ve known and our conditioning and the environment we’re in. Yes.
Andrew Gallimore
Exactly. So your brain is always trying to construct a model of reality that works for it. And it achieves that by sampling information. It receives information from the outside world. We understand this as information through the eyes, through the ears, through the nose, etc. And that’s what the brain uses. But the brain is always constructing a model. Now, when you go to the DMT space, the brain is changing its model. So even when you are in this very strange, bizarre world, your brain is still constructing a reality using a model. Now the question is, is the brain receiving information from some other place? And that’s what’s required. The requirement isn’t that somehow consciousness needs to leave the brain in some way and go to this other place. But somehow the brain has to start receiving information from this alternate reality. And if that’s possible, then the brain can start constructing a model of that reality, the DMT world, based upon the information it’s receiving. So the question really is how does the brain suddenly start, is suddenly able to receive information from this alternate reality. And that’s really what I’m interested in trying to solve that question.
Alan Steinfeld
But I want to ask you, I think that’s really interesting because I love talking about perception and consciousness and awareness. But what we know of this reality is in a sense a conditioning and a programming. When we’re suddenly thinking in an alternate way, what grounds for a new model are there? Because we’ve been brought up by our parents and all that to specify the world we know.
Andrew Gallimore
That’s a really good point and a really good question because you’re absolutely right. Your brain in a sense learned to construct this model of reality. And there are a number of ways that it learned and also over a number of time scales. So the brain is a product of evolution and your brain evolved to construct this model of reality. From the moment you’re kind of dragged screaming from the womb, your brain is learning and developing to construct this model of reality. So that really is what makes the DMT world all the more confounding and difficult to explain. Because your brain only learned, as far as we are aware, to construct one model of the world and that’s the normal waking model. You don’t realize most of the time that your brain is really constructing a model and it’s making predictions. It takes samples of very incomplete information from the environment and then it uses that to predict what should be happening next and to form this coherent model. There’s a lot of filling in that goes on. We never kind of see the world as it is, so to speak. It’s always a model, it’s always an interpretation of the information that your brain is constructing. And so for many people it’s a curiosity, it’s that desire to explore. And I think as humans, we are an exploratory species. We came out of Africa however many millions of years ago, and we populated the world. We explored. We’re kind of pioneers. And I think when you’re faced with, and of course we have the space program wanting to leave Earth and actually reach other planets. And that seems to be a fundamental drive of human curiosity, I think. And I think it’s the same with DMT, is that you’re faced with this world that is completely alien, that is completely bizarre, that is completely unrelated to the normal world that we’re familiar with. And the natural response to that is, what on earth is going on? How is it possible that you can smoke this very simple drug, this drug that is everywhere, that is in basically pretty much all plants at different levels, and yet this very simple and common drug has this astonishing effect on consciousness and allows you to communicate with beings that are perhaps millions or trillions of years more advanced than us? That’s remarkable. And I think anyone who’s smoked DMT and met these beings often there’s no going back. It’s like, we have to go back and we have to find out what these beings are and how they relate to us and what it means for us as human beings, as conscious beings within this little world.
Alan Steinfeld
When you do DMT, it is a world outside your own making that you feel you’re transported to, is that your experience?
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, for sure. That’s one of the remarkable things about DMT is that for people who’ve never smoked it, never taken DMT, it’s very easy to say, oh, you’re just hallucinating. And that seems like a very facile and simple explanation to explain it away like that. But when you actually go to the DMT space, it has a number of properties that are ontologically shocking, in that they are kind of undeniable. The structure of this place, the complexity, this very, very profound, deep feeling that this place has been there for a very, very long time. I.e. trillions of years before the beginning of our universe and that our reality is very much a very, very thin slice of this much, much larger structure. And you get a realization of that. And that’s often accompanied by this very, very profound sense of deja vu. The sense that oh my goodness me, I’ve been here before. This is the weirdest place that I could never possibly imagine, and yet I’ve been here before. This is like coming home. And that’s quite shocking for people.
Alan Steinfeld
So when you go there, do you, I mean, because you’ve been there a bunch of times, do you start to recognize, do you start to, your brain is now more familiar with the landscape, and are there beings that communicate with you, talk to you, tell you their secrets?
Andrew Gallimore
Yes. That does happen. The DMT experience is very strange because it’s a higher dimensional state. The world that you go to is kind of impossible in the sense that you go to a place that seems to have many more dimensions and is an entirely different geometry to the normal waking world. And so when you come back from that, your brain struggles to render that experience into your normal waking consciousness. And so often you go to this very strange place and you’re shocked and you’re astonished and you’re amazed. And when you come back, 10 minutes later, you’re kind of struggling to remember the details. And often it kind of slips through your fingers. So this is kind of one of the frustrating things about DMT is it’s actually often quite difficult to bring back information. But then when you go back again to the DMT space, it’s like, ah, here we are again. And the recognition is instantaneous. So it’s an extremely profound and amazing drug, but it’s also very frustrating in many ways, in that it is difficult to bring back information from this higher dimensional realm into our normal lower dimensional realm.
Alan Steinfeld
But are you able to make contact with the beings in those realms?
Andrew Gallimore
Yes. So most of the time, during most journeys, people will encounter some kind of intelligence, some kind of being, whether it’s an alien or a god or a spirit or something like that, but that’s very, very common. The way that they interact with you will vary, as will their character. So sometimes they will seem more like a guardian angel and they will take you and they will guide you around. Sometimes they will play with you. They will be very curious and go, who is this? And what are you doing? And they will show you things as if they’re trying to, oh, there’s someone here, we can show him around this wacky little world that we live in. Sometimes they will just ignore you and not even notice that you’re there. Sometimes they can be quite menacing and quite nasty, or they will mock you. So interactions are extremely common, but they vary a lot. So the ones where you can actually sit down or face-to-face with an intelligence and actually communicate in a sensible kind of way that we would here on earth, are more unusual, I think. And that takes practice as well, because if you haven’t taken DMT very often, often you’re overwhelmed by the experience and it’s so shocking that it’s difficult to kind of get your head around what’s going on. And so actually establishing two-way communication with these intelligences is quite tricky. This is really why I work with Rick Strassman to think about ways that you can extend the experience and actually control it a lot more so that we can establish two-way communication with these intelligences and not simply rely on bursting into their realm for five minutes with smoked DMT and then being dragged out again after a few minutes.
Alan Steinfeld
Have you had other experiences like I have, I think, with aliens or whatever you want to call these beings that do not seem from this world? And I do have to say, being in the company of these beings is also a mental distortion. It’s also like you’ve done something and your whole field of perception, in my experience, is distorted from its normal sense. So have you had any of those experiences?
Andrew Gallimore
For me personally, no. However, what you’re describing kind of makes sense, is that your brain is this, I always describe, the brain is this obviously extremely complex, almost seems magical in its complexity and its ability to carry out all these tasks required for life. Your brain is always receiving and generating and processing information. That’s basically what it does. Now, sometimes that information is sent to your muscles so you can move around or it’s sent to your heart or whatever. But also that information is also constructing your reality. And it’s receiving information as I said from the external world. Now, if you are able to distort that, imagine knocking a radio just slightly out of tune. That’s really what psychedelics are doing. They are detuning, if you like, your reality. And the effects of the regular, what we might call the classic psychedelics, LSD, magic mushrooms, is they tend to knock the brain out of tune slightly and the brain responds by trying to find the right channel again. It breaks down the world reality model that your brain constructs. And so the brain tries to retune itself. And this is why the world becomes much more fluid and dynamic as your brain is shifting through these states. That is really the nature of the psychedelic state. Now, what certain drugs seem to be able to do, particularly DMT, but also Salvinorin from Salvia divinorum, is they seem to be able to just find a new channel. Rather than simply knocking the brain out of tune, they seem to be able to shift the brain with great precision and efficiency into an entirely new channel where the brain is somehow able to pick up information towards which it normally has no access. And so I think that’s what’s going on. Now, of course psychedelics are not necessarily the only way to do that. And if something else, whether it’s a drug or whether it’s some kind of other practice, some kind of meditative practice, or a trauma or some kind of encounter, yeah. Exactly. So a state of trauma, anything that affects the brain and the brain’s ability to tune into this normal reality, anything that disrupts that has the potential for allowing the brain to start receiving information towards that it normally has no access to. And so that’s perhaps an explanation for why people often have anomalous experiences with other intelligences under very particular circumstances. It’s also possible, of course, as, of course you know John Mack.
Alan Steinfeld
Oh yeah, I knew the new John Mack actually, yes. Great guy, really great, intelligent, very present person.
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, I was always very impressed. I never got to meet him sadly, but I’ve read his books and he was a really unique as a psychiatrist in that he really was open to the idea that these abductees were actually having experiences with these beings. And he suggested, and I think he’s probably correct, that it’s not necessarily grey beings coming in through the window, but actually that these beings perhaps exist in some other slice, parallel slice of reality and there is some way manipulating your brain in some way to allow you to interact with them.
Alan Steinfeld
I do think our brains are much more aware of these realities if it was given a chance.
Andrew Gallimore
Your brain is kind of this functional machine that has a job. As far as your brain is concerned normally, its job is to allow you to survive and reproduce basically. It’s a creature of evolution. It has these abilities to perhaps receive information that it normally doesn’t have access to, but most of the time it’s filtering out a lot of information. Your brain is this filter that tries to explain away and filter out most information but only really takes notice of information that it considers to be important in that moment for your survival. Carl Jung, for example, wrote about this idea of these what he called autonomous psychic complexes, these fragments of the psyche of your consciousness that could actually be fully independent of the main psyche, the main ego that’s interacting with the world in a normal way, and that these can become completely independent and actually might have their own consciousness. And that might be what’s going on, is that somehow you’re able to access these other parts of your psyche that you normally don’t have access to and that psychedelics are able to in some way break down the boundary between your normal main egoic consciousness that’s really very, very functional and driven to survive and reproduce, and actually reach other parts of your psyche that have perhaps other intentions, that are not outwardly directed in that way, but actually are directed and focused on entirely different realities. Right. And so it could be that you are really living parallel lives in a sense that you have other parts of you that you’re completely unaware of that are interacting with these other realities. And that might explain why the DMT reality is so strangely familiar, because in a way you’re always in contact with it, but you’re not aware of it.
Alan Steinfeld
Well the same thing could be said of the ET abduction realities. I think this is what Rick Strassman’s work was about, right? That perhaps, although I don’t think he said it was an external reality in the sense where you’re saying the DMT states are actually going places, I think Rick was saying, from what I read, a fabrication in a sense of the ET abduction experience when people were in altered states. I think he…
Andrew Gallimore
I think he remained circumspect. He offered both, I don’t think Rick certainly isn’t your standard materialist psychiatrist by any stretch of the imagination. So he certainly entertains the idea that DMT somehow allows you to access some other reality. He doesn’t necessarily doesn’t really speculate too much on how that might work or why DMT in particular should allow you to access these realities. But he’s certainly open to the idea and he certainly discusses in the book, in his first book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, and then there was a follow-up more speculative book called Inner Paths to Outer Space, where both himself and a number of other authors kind of contributed and really were discussing how to interpret the DMT state and how can we explain what’s going on and is it really possible that DMT really does allow you to access some other independent, freestanding reality populated by intelligent beings. So Rick remains I think somewhat on the fence, should we say, with regards to what actually is going on with the DMT state, which is reasonable. Whereas I tend to side more with the idea that these entities actually exist and you are really communicating with conscious beings.
Alan Steinfeld
I take the DMT state quite seriously. And I actually think that DMT represents one of the most important opportunities in human history really to actually establish two-way communication not just with intelligences beyond Earth, but intelligences actually beyond our universe. And that would be, if we were able to establish communication with such beings, that would be in my opinion the greatest discovery in the history of humankind, right?
Andrew Gallimore
But how do you say it’s outside of our universe? What makes you think, I mean maybe, I’m not saying it’s not, but where does that idea come from?
Alan Steinfeld
Well, I mean, you’re right. I can’t make that assumption, but there’s nothing about the DMT space that suggests that it’s within this universe. This is not 3D in this physical sense. Exactly. It appears to be a much higher dimensional space. It seems to be 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 dimensional, which is so it appears like this our reality is kind of a slice, a lower dimensional slice of a higher dimensional structure that we’re somehow accessing. So that’s what I when I say outside the universe, I kind of mean outside of our slice of reality. What the exact relationship is is less clear, but I think I think it certainly doesn’t appear that they’re within this universe. But they could be, but I think that it’s less likely.
Andrew Gallimore
So maybe they are a higher dimensional reality. So you and Rick are developing ways to stay in that altered state longer so you could then translate those landscapes into our understanding. Is that it?
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah. So I’ve always seen our we’re kind of we have to be kind of interdimensional diplomats. I kind of think about us. If we really do believe that these beings could be real and conscious and have something to tell us, we need to take it seriously. And I’ve always thought it’s kind of slightly rude and impolite to burst into somebody’s reality, kind of look around wide-eyed for five minutes and then disappear again. I think that’s not really the way to approach it and we can do a lot better. And I’ve thought that for a long time that smoking DMT in a little glass pipe is not the be-all and end-all. It’s not the most effective and efficient way of accessing that reality. And that really we should be thinking of bringing our best tools to the table, our best technologies. And DMT has a number of properties. So obviously it’s very short-acting, lasts normally just a few minutes and you burst into that place and then you’re dragged back out again after only a few minutes. But also it has the lack of what’s called subjective tolerance, which means that you can, and again this is something that Rick Strassman was able to demonstrate in his 90s studies in the early 90s, where he would inject someone with DMT, they would have an experience, they would rate it on this rating scale, the intensity, and then he would inject them again 30 minutes later, and they would have exactly the same intensity. And so it doesn’t, unlike other drugs where the effect seems to diminish over time, with DMT it doesn’t. And that’s kind of amazing.
Andrew Gallimore
So that person, he would inject one person and they’d be there for 10 minutes, they’d come down or the blood circulation would clear it from the brain, and then he’d be injected again, would he go back to the same space that he just…
Alan Steinfeld
Often yeah, often, yeah. And so and so this really gave me the idea that perhaps we can use a technology that’s used in anesthesiology called target-controlled intravenous infusion. So if you go into hospital and they put you to sleep to do some kind of surgery, what they normally do is they don’t just inject you with a drug and then hope it keeps you asleep for two hours or whatever, is they give you a very slow, precisely regulated infusion of the drug. And the idea is that the infusion machine that delivers the drug with this constant, or not necessarily constant, but with a precisely, mathematically regulated stream of drug into your veins, then enters your brain and is held at a certain level in your brain over time, which allows them to keep you in your unconscious state throughout the surgery, but to or to push you deeper, or to bring you out. They can have a lot of control over that. And it occurred to me that DMT as a drug pharmacologically has the same kind of properties as these anesthetic agents. And so what I did is I contacted Rick and I said, hey, do you have this blood data? Because he took blood samples at intervals in all of his subjects. We had all of this really valuable data of how DMT is distributed and removed from the body over time. And so I Rick shared that data with me and I used this what’s called a pharmacokinetic model, which is a model of the way DMT is distributed and metabolized in the body over time. I used that to create this mathematical model that would then be then used to actually model the levels of DMT in the blood over time so that we can, rather than simply injecting someone with a drug and it goes into the brain, it reaches a peak and then it comes down again, but actually to keep the level of DMT in the brain constant over time. The idea being that you can push them into this breakthrough DMT state and actually hold them there. And that could be for 30 minutes, it could be for an hour, it could be for really an indefinite period of time, you can hold someone within the DMT state. And so that has the, you’ve done that, you’re saying?
Andrew Gallimore
That hasn’t been done yet. So at the moment, the paper that we published was back in 2016 now. But what that really was, is a proof of principle. We were trying to show that the properties, the pharmacological properties of DMT would allow this technique to work. And what’s now happening is there are at least a couple of groups, one in the United States and one in the United Kingdom, who are actually working on implementing this in humans. There are a number of steps you need to go from a purely mathematical theoretical model to actually doing it in humans. But yeah, it’s ongoing, it’s an ongoing process.
Alan Steinfeld
But couldn’t it be dangerous? I mean, I don’t know, couldn’t it stress the neurochemistry in the brain in ways that may not be healthy?
Andrew Gallimore
This, it certainly it’s not something to be taken lightly. As with all new approaches to taking drugs in this way. What I will say is that there was a group back in 2005 or 2007, I forget, who actually were doing a study of the subjective effects of both DMT and ketamine. And they used this continuous infusion. It wasn’t the same as our model in that they didn’t really, it wasn’t precisely regulated, they simply chose some kind of infusion rate. But they actually kept people in the DMT state, so they could measure the subjective effects, for at least 40 minutes.
Alan Steinfeld
What did they report from those visits to those other realities?
Andrew Gallimore
We contacted the people who did that study back in 2005, but they were unwilling to give us the actual notes from, I guess there was privacy issues, but the actual notes from these. So what we know is that nobody died, nobody was severely psychologically damaged by the experience or neurologically. So we know that DMT doesn’t seem to possess any sort of toxicity, either directly or any kind of metabolic breakdown products. So we have that study at least that shows us that it’s probably going to be relatively safe.
Alan Steinfeld
Would you volunteer to be one of those subjects?
Andrew Gallimore
I’d consider it, yeah. I’m not one of these intrepid wild psychonauts that tries every single drug combination on the planet. I am aware of my own mortality and I am very respectful of these compounds. And yeah, I do have some trepidation and fear really going into these experiences, as any sensible sane person does.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, I mean, I do think we maybe not be able to get to the DMT state, but I do think with our own chemistry and our own overcoming our psychological parameters, we can access other realities, like visionaries and seers and shamans have done throughout time. I mean, that’s what, I think DMT opens a door, but I think we could somehow get there with our own intention, perhaps. I don’t know.
Andrew Gallimore
I don’t rule that out. I think psychedelics are very, very potent catalysts that are very efficient in switching that reality channel and nudging the brain into this state where it can actually start being receptive to these patterns of information that it doesn’t normally have access to. But certainly there are alternate ways, and I think often is a combination of approaches. So I think people, modern psychonauts who take the idea of psychedelics seriously, will often combine breathing techniques, meditative techniques, ritual, and all of these things in order to direct the experience in some way, rather than simply smoking it and lying down and hoping for the best, but actually bringing a lot of intent and structure behind it. And I think that’s equally important. I think it’s not simply about the drug, it’s about the drug together with your brain and your own physiology, your own consciousness, your own intent and your own preparation, all that kind of stuff. So I think all of these things can be brought together.
Alan Steinfeld
Is DMT legal? I mean, not that it matters, but…
Andrew Gallimore
No, it’s a Class A in the UK or Schedule 1 in the United States. So yeah, obviously I can’t encourage you to go smoking DMT. But it is everywhere, it’s spread all around you and it’s not difficult to obtain.
Alan Steinfeld
But is it, it’s also Ayahuasca is everywhere too, isn’t it a big part of the Ayahuasca experience, the DMT?
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, precisely. So Ayahuasca is often described as oral DMT. Ayahuasca is actually quite a different experience, but the main psychoactive compound within the Ayahuasca brew is DMT. It just has other things in there that allows that DMT to be active orally, so allows you to actually drink it. Normally if you drink DMT it has no effect.
Alan Steinfeld
But you don’t go to those same alternate universe places, at least I don’t know if you do.
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, that’s true normally. I mean if you actually measure the levels of DMT in the blood when someone takes Ayahuasca, it’s normally only about 20% of what you achieve with smoked DMT. So DMT seems to be a whole different level than what you achieve with Ayahuasca. Ayahuasca tends to be a much more manageable, slower, normally more gentle experience, whereas breakthrough DMT is like being fired out of a cannon through many, many levels into this very, very strange world that is beyond anything you normally reach with Ayahuasca.
Alan Steinfeld
But it seems like what you said before, in a sense all of this is in our brain, it’s the right chemicals or combination that takes us not that it’s in our brain, but our brain is capable of being the vehicle for transporting ourselves to these other universes.
Andrew Gallimore
Yes. So again, I don’t normally describe it as transportation because that suggests somehow movement out of our head. What’s actually required is the brain has to be able to receive information from these alternate realities. That’s all you require. Is that the brain suddenly is able to stop receiving information from this reality and suddenly able to receive information from this alternate reality, this higher dimensional structure. And that allows your brain then to model that reality and that’s what you experience. So it yeah, it’s not actually required that your consciousness somehow exits the brain, everything can be done from in the brain. In the same way that if you’ve got a radio set on your desk, an old radio receiver, when you switch the channel, what’s happening is the radio suddenly starts to receive information on a different frequency band and you can pick up an entirely different radio channel in a different part of the world, but nothing has to actually travel anywhere, if that makes sense.
Alan Steinfeld
No, it does make sense. But what I’m getting to, have they done EEGs on the brain and see which parts of the brain are stimulated with DMT and is it possible just to stimulate those parts of the brain to duplicate a DMT type experience?
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, this is a really good question actually. There was a paper published literally this year, only maybe a month or two ago, by a team in London who actually did a very in-depth EEG study with DMT. And what they normally find with psychedelics is that when people go into a psychedelic state, when they give them psilocybin from magic mushrooms or LSD, is they see this desynchronization of these brain waves which suggests the brain is going from a very ordered state to a very disordered state, and that makes sense how we understand the psychedelic state to work. But when they were given DMT, they got the emergence of this new order, this new synchronization and power in a very particular frequency range of the EEG spectrum, which suggests, and it was in particular parts of the brain as well, which suggests that the brain has found this new channel. Now, whether that’s possible to achieve by some kind of transcranial magnetic stimulation or some other way of stimulating the brain, that might be possible at some point in the future. We’re not there yet. We’re not there where we can actually replicate the psychedelic state by stimulating someone’s brain directly, actually generate these states. And sure, be able to hold someone in that state or in various states. We might find that there are for example with Salvinorin extracts, people often go to a very, very strange world that is very different to the DMT world, very different to the type of worlds people experience when they take Ketamine. And so it might be that the brain is able to latch onto a number of different reality channels, if you like. And that in the future you will be able to lie down, put on one of these caps, and then choose your channel basically, and choose your time and say okay, I want to go to the DMT world for 30 minutes, or this Salvia world I want to go to for 25 minutes or whatever. That’s kind of possible.
Alan Steinfeld
Did you see that movie Brainstorm? It’s about 20 years old. Do you know that one? Natalie Wood’s last movie, Christopher Walken. Have you heard about that?
Andrew Gallimore
No I haven’t. Brainstorm, I’ll check it out.
Alan Steinfeld
Brainstorm from the 90s. It’s about just that and you put on this helmet and this one guy programmed it for orgasmic states and he was just in this orgasmic state. Anyway, it’s sort of along those lines. But I think it’s possible in future technologies as we understand the brain more to possibly go deeper into that way of understanding. When you talked about DMT just having a short term effect because of the, you know, it eventually leaves the body. How come LSD in such micro doses has such a long time of activation in the body?
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, this is a good question. So we actually understand this a lot more now than we did a few years ago. So LSD has always been kind of remarkable in that, as you say, the actual dosage is in the microgram level. And the actual when you swallow a tab of LSD, the amount that actually makes the number of molecules that actually makes it into your brain is actually very, very small. So the question has always been why does LSD have such potent and long-lasting effects? We now know through work done in the United States actually, where scientists were able to crystallize the actual receptor, the serotonin receptor in the brain that binds to LSD called the 5-HT2A receptor, or a related receptor they were able to crystallize. But anyway, what they found is that when LSD binds to this receptor, it kind of sticks in there and there’s a little kind of lid on the receptor, a flap of protein that folds over and kind of holds it in there. LSD sticks to the receptor for a very, very long time and doesn’t want to come out. So it has this very long lasting effect that can last as you you know, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve hours because of this effect. So you don’t need much LSD. Whereas something like DMT will tend to stick to the receptor quite weakly and then come off again. And then it’s often broken down by enzymes in the brain. So the brain is very, very good at clearing DMT out very rapidly, just as it does with other neurotransmitters like serotonin. LSD is kind of special in that it’s a very complex structure and it has lots of parts that often grab onto these serotonin receptors in the brain which means that they tends to stay there for a very long time.
Alan Steinfeld
Isn’t that amazing though? Isn’t that fascinating how that happens, how that works?
Andrew Gallimore
Oh yeah, it’s remarkable, yeah. And the idea that this highly complex natural alkaloid from the plant kingdom, from this ergot fungus, when you modify it in this very particular way that Albert Hofmann did all those years ago, that produces this astonishingly potent, extremely potent psychedelic drug that happens to stick into these these very particular receptors in your brain. Yeah, it’s a remarkable discovery.
Alan Steinfeld
So your expertise is really in the whole field of psychedelia, right? Would you say?
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, so I’m interested in drugs generally, psychoactive drugs, but particularly psychedelics, particularly the classic psychedelics, so psilocybin from mushrooms and LSD and DMT. I’ve certainly focused on DMT because it’s held the most interest for me from a neuroscientific perspective, but yeah, all psychedelic drugs are my kind of thing.
Alan Steinfeld
As the field of psychedelics is now brought back into mainstream awareness or is becoming brought back, I think there’s more of a chance to explore the different dimensions these different drug states bring us into as something that can contribute to human evolution.
Andrew Gallimore
Oh absolutely. There’s the psychedelic renaissance as it’s called I think is accelerating and I think it’s a wonderful thing. And I think we’re going to see there’s a number of different paths it’s taking or a number of different aspects to this renaissance. One is the clinical aspect and I think we’re going to see in the next few years psychedelics being used to not just treat but actually to cure many really quite serious and debilitating psychiatric conditions, whether it’s depression or anxiety or trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, that kind of thing. Psychedelics are going to be seen to be extremely powerful tools and we’re going to see a revolution in psychiatry. And there are a lot of scientists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists focusing on that. I’m trying to keep the flame lit on the kind of slightly stranger aspects of psychedelics and thinking about them as tools for exploring altered states of consciousness and exploring the possibility that we can communicate with beings that we would often not even imagine exist.
Alan Steinfeld
I’m curious if you ever get to meet an ET of this universe, what you would make of that? Are you curious about that?
Andrew Gallimore
Oh, I’m certainly curious. Yeah. I mean I often go to sleep at night and hope that somebody will come and get me, but they never do.
Alan Steinfeld
But you know they might. It just may be that same sort of thing. We’re so unfamiliar with that territory that there’s no way for the brain to process those realities. This is my theory anyway. And there’s many more people who’ve had abduction type experiences. And I think that’s also what Rick may or may not have been aware of, that these other states were being activated because the walls were broken down between the personality structure. So I’m a proponent of the ET realities as we expand consciousness and to include these new perceptions that are different than the drug state because they come from a whole other realm, I think.
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah. I think summing up in a way, we know so little about the structure of this universe, and the idea that we kind of know it all about the structure of any other universe is simply ridiculous. We’re kind of cosmic neophytes, we’re a very young intelligent species that has an eye towards perhaps one day galactic citizenship or interdimensional citizenship. But we’re really playing with these toys in a way, these technologies and just trying to work out where we are. And I think yeah, we are within this very, very thin slice of a much, much larger and more complex reality structure. And I think it’s not surprising that there are intelligences beyond this reality that are able to in many ways manipulate this reality and that might include being able to manipulate our neurology such that they can communicate with us, or that they can abduct us quote unquote, or that psychedelic drugs in some way might be some kind of implanted technology that allows us to access their realm. I think we know so little we need to keep our certainly need to keep our minds open on this and simply explore and work out what we can.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, no I think that’s great and I appreciate your research and your exploration of these other states because we have to make new friends with our psychology, in a sense that psychiatry has limited what we think is possible to perceive.
Andrew Gallimore
Yes. Exactly.
Alan Steinfeld
I think when we realize that perception is not limited, we’re not necessarily crazy if we hear voices or have visions. That’s been the big stigma that we’ve been afraid of our own minds. And there’s lots of people I know who channel other beings and other dimensions. I mean it’s strange but they don’t seem crazy, they just seem altered.
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, exactly, yeah. I agree with you entirely, yeah. We certainly shouldn’t rule out the possibility that there are beings, intelligences that exist, and that there might be ways that we can communicate with them. So we should be very, very careful about dismissing people who make these claims as being wackos or being insane. I think that’s a very childish approach to take.
Alan Steinfeld
I think what you’re saying, we have to make new friends with our own mind and our own potential, right?
Andrew Gallimore
Exactly, yeah.
Alan Steinfeld
Well I appreciate that. It’s courageous to willing to go into those states. I mean I know Terence would always talk about, well you don’t know what to expect anytime he did a journey like that so.
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, Terence McKenna he always said if you’re not scared then there’s something wrong with you.
Alan Steinfeld
Is that true of you, every time you do a little DMT, is it like uh oh what’s going to happen?
Andrew Gallimore
I think that’s almost universal, unless you are completely kind of a bit of a wacko, kind of a bit crazy. If your hands not shaking when you’re lighting when you’re holding the pipe then perhaps there’s something loose there. I think it’s a natural experience. It’s natural to be frightened. These are strange, inexplicably strange, astonishing, bizarre places to which you’re being granted access. And if you’re not frightened, then there’s something wrong.
Alan Steinfeld
Well yeah, because it’s the total unknown. I mean we know what this reality, but when you take that step into those other worlds, and that’s the reason I think people are traumatized by aliens in general is, not like anything we’ve been programmed to perceive.
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, exactly.
Alan Steinfeld
Anyway, and once you’re there you feel at home though. Is that what you’re saying?
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, it feels like you’ve come home. It’s very strange, kind of weird cognitive dissonance in one sense it’s like oh no this is the weirdest strangest experience I could ever possibly or not possibly have, and yet somehow it feels like I’ve come home again, and it’s very very weird, yeah.
Alan Steinfeld
Maybe we are from there actually.
Andrew Gallimore
Well, a lot of people suggest that perhaps that’s where we came from in some way.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, it’s really fascinating. Thanks Andrew for that. Anything else you want to say about coming to contact or some of the work you’re doing?
Andrew Gallimore
People are interested in my ideas, are interested in my work. The first port of call would be to go to my website, buildingalienworlds.com, where you can find links to a lot of the articles and papers I’ve written, lectures I’ve given, slideshows, podcast interviews, that kind of thing. You can also go to my book. So my book was published last year, Alien Information Theory: Psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Cosmic Game, which goes into really everything I’ve thought about DMT and my kind of worldview about what DMT is and how it relates to the structure of reality, how it works in the brain, all that kind of stuff, fully illustrated, full color, beautiful book. So that’s available. You can get that from my website, buildingalienworlds.com, or you can go to Amazon, just search for Alien Information Theory and you’ll find it there as well.
Alan Steinfeld
Just one more question, has anybody ever done DMT together and seen the same thing at the same time? Like, look over there, you see that? Has that happened?
Andrew Gallimore
There are anecdotal reports. I think these are the sort of things that one would aim to do with an extended state study, would be to think about bringing two people into the DMT state at the same time and actually in some way trying to direct that experience and seeing if it’s possible to have the same experience and perhaps have some corroboration between them in terms of what they were seeing. That would be definitely on the list. At the moment you’ve got isolated trip reports on the internet where people describe their friend who was in the same room and they saw this. But it’s very difficult to know what to make of that without a much more controlled environment where you actually look at that. So yeah, that would be on the list of experiments to do for sure.
Alan Steinfeld
But as a scientist, I know you have to be sort of objective, but do you suspect that might be true, that people could enter that world together and see the same things?
Andrew Gallimore
Well, obviously I have to remain somewhat skeptical about that. But no, I do go a lot further than most scientists in that I really do take the idea that these are free-standing realities. I take that quite seriously. And so it would be an experiment I’d be keen to do. And it wouldn’t surprise me too much. It would excite me enormously, but it wouldn’t surprise me too much if it turned out that people could have corroborated parallel experiences where they went to the same place and saw the same things and were able to demonstrate that.
Alan Steinfeld
That would be a breakthrough in corroboration of these worlds in a sense.
Andrew Gallimore
Yeah, for sure.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, thank you Andrew for your time.
Andrew Gallimore
Thank you very much. Will you be at Contact in the Desert?
Alan Steinfeld
Yes, I’m one of the hosts. I might do one of the panels you’re on. Yeah, I’ll be there. It’s one of my favorite gatherings. I recommend everyone coming to Contact in the Desert. That’s May 29th to June 1st, 2020. Just go to contactinthedesert.com for tickets and schedules and Andrew’s all over that place. So yeah, I’ll see you there.
Andrew Gallimore
Awesome. Great. Nice to talk to you, Alan. Thank you so much.
Alan Steinfeld
Thanks for your time. Talk to you.