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conclusion Posted on June 14, 2026 at 07:16:15 AM by rkm
Gallimore: One can hypothesize that near-death experiences could be an example where the interface is sufficiently perturbed. DMT is often connected to the near-death experience as well. But this is an open question. DMT just happens to be the most efficient and reliable way to perturb the interface or alter the dynamic of your interface. But it’s very difficult to induce an NDE, ethically. It’s pretty challenging to get approval for a study where you would stop someone’s heart, for instance.
How will you test your theory?
Gallimore: In the paper, we propose a number of ways of looking at this. First, if we’re correct in that this is some kind of interaction with otherwise imperceptible conscious agents, then we should be able to study that, just as we study any other observable phenomena. We should be able to test, for example, whether these conscious agents demonstrate the characteristics of a real conscious agent interaction.
For example, can we put two people into the DMT state simultaneously? Can they interact at the same time with the same kind of being? Can information be shared between these two individuals via this conscious agent? We have an experiment we call deposit and retrieval. Can one individual in the DMT state deposit information—a randomly generated number, a randomly generated word—into the DMT space, effectively transmitting that information to a conscious agent, and then can another individual retrieve that information? That would give some validity.
How much control does a person undergoing a DMT experience have when they’re in the midst of it?
Gallimore: This is the huge problem that we have. For the vast majority of people, the answer is zero control. They’re kind of fired into this space, and they’re shocked, bewildered, and astonished for a few minutes, and then they’re dragged back out. But with this DMTX technology, you can extend the DMT state from just a few minutes to potentially an hour or two or more, by maintaining the brain DMT levels at a constant amount using a technique from anesthesiology called target controlled intravenous infusion.
We validated this now, myself and Rick Strassman, who did the world’s biggest DMT study in the 1990s. We proposed taking this technique from anesthesiology and repurposing it with DMT. We published a model that said this should be a proof of principle, and it was validated by the Imperial College London team five years ago. Using this protocol, we can induce people stably into the DMT state, and induce very experienced people who are trained. We don’t send in just a random person who wants to do this. If you wanted to study a region of virgin rainforest, you wouldn’t send in some random person and say, “Have a look around.” You’d send in botanists, primatologists, ecologists, geologists, water scientists, and soil scientists to extract specific kinds of data. People who are very experienced working within that kind of environment.
The same applies to the study of DMT space. Some people report having developed relationships to specific entities under DMT that have lasted for weeks, months, or years. Every time they go into the DMT space, they meet with the same entity. Some couples claim to have shared experiences—to be able to meet within the DMT space or to communicate with the same entity within the space. These are the types of people we need. And you need people who are mathematically trained if you want to understand the geometry and the topology of these spaces, to understand if they have extra dimensions. We would move away from this era of just sending in random people who want to experience DMT, which has been the approach so far.
We’re not looking at one big mic drop experiment that proves everything. We’re looking for an extensive and targeted program of studying this space and treating this space as uncharted territory that we can map and analyze, so we can understand how it’s structured and why it’s different from the three plus one dimensional spacetime that we’re so familiar with. What kind of perturbation is going on? What kind of dynamical regimes are going on within that region of the experience space? And what kinds of entities and what kinds of beings are we dealing with?
They seem to be able to manipulate high dimensional objects. They almost seem godlike to us because we sit within this very narrow, lower dimensional interface normally. Then we’re suddenly thrust into this world where those rules no longer apply.
In the paper, you mention how your theory aligns with a number of mystical traditions that have existed for a long time—for example, shamanist Indigenous religious traditions and Eastern religious traditions. Is the idea that these traditions are built on psychedelic experiences, or was there some other way that they were able to access these alternate realities?
Gallimore: Certainly psychedelics are present in shamanistic cultures. They have a completely different worldview, but they know they’ve been interacting with beings—normally unseen beings, imperceptible conscious agents, if you like—for millennia. They might call them spirits or gods. They have different words for them. But they recognize that when they consume certain plants, they can enter into altered states of consciousness. They can go to what they might call an alternate world, a spirit world, a different plane of existence and interact with beings. In a way, we’re catching up and starting to take those ideas seriously because they’ve been summarily dismissed as hallucinations. We say they’re deluding themselves, these primitive peoples, that we should ignore everything they’ve got to say about these other states of consciousness because they’re just having hallucinations.
What’s important about what Don and myself are doing is saying, “Well, actually, within this conscious realism framework, their experiences make sense.” They found a way using these natural, plant-based molecules, to perturb their interface. They might not understand the pharmacology, the mathematics, or the trace logic, but they understand the practicalities of what you need to do. You put something into your brain, and it perturbs the whole system and it drives you into this alternate experience of the world.
Read more: “Is Matter Conscious?”
How does conscious realism differ from something like panpsychism? Or are they closely related?
Hoffman: Panpsychism is a label for several different views. There’s one view of panpsychism that says that consciousness is in everything—that even an electron has some consciousness and so forth. Conscious realism differs completely from that version of panpsychism, because an electron is something inside spacetime. It’s part of the spacetime headset. It’s absolutely not fundamental. It disappears when the headset disappears. That kind of panpsychism is just putting physical stuff inside the headset on an equal footing with consciousness, which transcends the headset. There are versions of panpsychism that are different, but when most people talk about panpsychism, they have that kind of view in mind.
Gallimore: Conscious realism is really a form of idealism. This is one of the oldest ways of viewing reality. It goes back to the ancient Hindu ideas of Brahman, or pure consciousness, being the only true reality. But people have dismissed idealism, because they seem to think that if reality is merely consciousness, then it must somehow be this diaphanous mist without form or anything. That’s clearly not true. Consciousness has structure. Clearly if everything’s consciousness, it has structure, it has dynamics, it has mechanics, it has complexities.
What Don’s doing is saying, “Okay, what are these structures? What are these complexities? How do these conscious agents interact, and how does that generate the world as it appears to us?” The problem is that the materialists have had several hundred years of a head start. Don has been working in the last few decades to try to boot up physical reality. The idea that matter is fundamental has consistently failed for several hundred years to explain how consciousness emerges. Most scientists now just say, “Oh, consciousness is unknowable.” What? You just opted out of the problem.
The critical misstep in the history of science is when we had two things. We had the one thing we couldn’t deny, which is subjective consciousness. Descartes tried to deny it, but the only thing he couldn’t deny was his own consciousness—his own mind. And then we have the physical world, which appears within consciousness. For some reason we said, “Ah, that physical world, which we can deny, which disappears when we close our eyes, when we lose consciousness, that’s the fundamental that has ontological primacy in reality and consciousness is emergent.”
When you think about it, it’s almost psychotic. And yet, it’s so ingrained now that people think that guys like me and Don are crazy nutcases, whereas actually, it’s the most sensible thing in the world. Consciousness is the only thing we can’t deny exists. So let’s take that as our fundamental and then try to explain the appearance of reality from that foundation.
What challenges do you anticipate to what you’re proposing?
Hoffman: We wrote an unpublished essay called “Consciousness and the Space-time Headset,” which offers a nice answer to your question. At the very end, we have eight or nine mathematical conjectures and theorems that need to be proven about how to actually build Einstein’s curved spacetime—how to build quantum field theory, how to get quantum non-locality from our theory of conscious realism and trace logic.
We understand that these are technical theorems that we must prove, or we’re wrong. So we put those out there. I’m pretty confident that we’re going to be able to do it. If we pass those eight or nine technical challenges, we can actually start to use this theory and look at other challenges ahead for it. My attitude about any scientific theory, including my own, is that it has a scope—it’s a good theory, but it’ll also have hard limits. And that’s gonna be true of this theory. So we’ll find out what those limits are. But the scope is gonna be much broader than the spacetime of physics scope.
If it turns out that your hypotheses are true, will that change anything about the way you lead your lives?
Gallimore: If consciousness really is fundamental, it suggests what ancient philosophies say—effectively, that we’re all part of one unified fundamental ultimate reality. We weren’t born. We don’t die. It’s just shifting perspectives. And we’re part of this incredibly beautiful, rich, and largely unexplored vast reality. We’re like these neophytes, who are just waking up. We’re locked. We’ve held ourselves within this little prison of reality—this tiny little slice of this much broader and more complex and beautiful reality. DMT and other psychedelics, they’re the clues that show us, “Yes, we’re part of something much larger, much vaster, much more beautiful and much more incredible, rather than just these beings stuck to this muddy rock.”
Part of what we’re doing is finding a way out of this game, finding a way of waking up. We’re approaching Buddhist ideas of enlightenment, but from a more scientific perspective—finding a logical, mathematical, technical, and scientific way out. Some others might sit and face a wall for 30 years until they realize it intuitively. Replies: