A recent case study published in Frontiers in Psychology sought to compare the experiences of a near-death experience (NDE) and an experience induced by the psychedelic drug 5-MeO-DMT. The subject of the study was a 54-year-old Caucasian man from North America who had a profound NDE during a coma caused by bacterial meningoencephalitis and subsequently had experience with 5-MeO-DMT.
While there were notable similarities between the experiences, such as entering other worlds and meeting entities, the case study also identified several characteristics that were unique to the NDE. The findings add to the growing body of research on the effects of psychedelic substances and their potential therapeutic applications. It also raises important questions about the nature of consciousness, the spiritual significance of altered states, and the potential role of endogenous compounds in producing profound experiences.
5-MeO-DMT (short for 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine) is a potent psychedelic drug. It is found in various natural sources, such as the yopo snuff derived from the Anadenanthera bean in the Amazonian basin and the venom of the Bufo Alvarius toad in the Sonoran desert. The drug has a high affinity for the 5HT-1A receptor and is known for inducing intense mystical-type experiences.
DMT has been detected in small amounts in various bodily tissues and fluids, suggesting that the body itself produces the substance. While the exact endogenous functions of DMT are still a topic of scientific investigation and debate, their ability to induce powerful altered states of consciousness has led researchers to explore their potential roles in various psychological and spiritual experiences.
“It may be relatively known to those well-acquainted with psychedelics that the 5-MeO-DMT experience classically elicits the core mystical experience – ego death, unitivity, time- space transcendence, etc,” said study author Pascal Michael, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Greenwich. “However, no one had actually conducted any study on this. Asking someone who has had both a classical psychedelic experience and an NDE to describe both of them, in the unique way only someone in that position would be able to do, has never been done before (other than very nebulously and briefly by Stan Grof).”
The methodology involved a semi-structured interview with the participant, which took place 22 months after his 5-MeO-DMT experience. The interview lasted for 1 hour and 21 minutes. The interview questions were designed to elicit detailed descriptions of both the near-death experience and the 5-MeO-DMT experience. The participant was asked about various aspects of his experiences, including sensory perceptions, visual experiences, and emotional states.
The interviewee reported having three experiences with the venom from the Sonoran Desert Toad, administered via a glass pipe. The doses escalated over time, with the most significant experience (46 mg dose) being the focus of the interview. The interviewee’s responses were then analyzed using thematic analysis, with codes derived from the transcript data collated into broader theme headings. This analysis aimed to identify common themes and differences between the NDE and 5-MeO-DMT experience.
The study found a high level of comparability between the NDE and the 5-MeO-DMT experience in terms of several themes, including the transcendence of time and space, ego dissolution, and a sense of cosmic love. However, there were specific themes present in NDEs that were not observed in the 5-MeO-DMT experience, such as life review, encounters with deceased entities, and the concept of a threshold.
“Ultimately, as I (personally) predicted, the features of the classical mystical experience were those which were effectively identical in both experience-types – but especially that of transcendence of time and space, as emphasised by the participant,” Michael told PsyPost. “This was the only way the two states resonated between each other – as the 5-MeO-DMT trip did not contain anything else which the NDE did, yet the NDE enveloped a slew of other qualitative components which the 5-MeO-DMT didn’t. Generally, the 5-MeO-DMT mystical state is a state which is void of content (albeit, it is arguably a maximally content-full state and paradoxically is subjectively felt as ‘content-free’) – whereas, the NDE is characteristically suffused with content.”
“There were a few experiences within the participant’s NDE which were of a decidedly anomalous nature. Firstly, he encountered a girl acting as a guide, which he then subsequently identified as his biological sister who had passed away before they could ever meet. This is the so-called Peak in Darien experience, and is one of the most compelling elements of an NDE which may allude to a more trans-materialist interpretation of the NDE. Similarly, his book recounts that when his Glasgow Coma Scale denoted very deep coma, friends he would not anticipate visiting him in hospital – and yet he correctly reported seeing them in an OBE state.”
“Also surprising was the uncanny emergence of features of the NDE which looked amazingly like perinatal regression i.e. very explicit womb-like imagery and directly uterine language use – and lucid dreams i.e. the participant’s capacity to still reality-test his experience yet still concluding that his experience was real, and the conscious control he could exert over the unfolding visionary state,” Michael explained. “This, then, is testament to the deeply overlapping nature of NDEs, psychedelics, lucid dreams, and perinatal memory. More surprising still, though, is that the participant, neither in his original book nor our interview, never volunteered such similarities or that they may all share common mechanisms.”
The participant himself perceived the experiences to be significantly different in several dimensions, leading him to argue against attributing his NDE to endogenous psychedelics.
“When asked if he thought endogenous compounds could produce his NDE, he said no,” Michael said. “It may be that he hadn’t had enough psychedelic experiences in the past to couch his 5-MeO trip in a broader perspective, as many psychonauts would instead agree that (although they may be less inclined to think they produce the NDE in a reductive way) psychedelics are far too similar to NDEs to totally dismiss this possibility. And although his 5-MeO trip only shared a subset of dimensions to his NDE, it may have contributed to the others, and other people’s 5-MeO experiences could be more similar to NDEs. This said, its crucial to maintain attention to and respect the subject’s own experiences and reports, as they had the two experiences in question – not the researcher.”
The participant’s conclusion was based on the belief that his cortex was “disabled” during the experience, rendering relevant serotonin receptors unavailable for triggering a response.
“However, this may have been a premature conclusion, as the degree of the impact of the participant’s encephalitis throughout the coma varied,” Michael told PsyPost. “There are other compounds with different receptor profiles such as 5-MeO-DMT; and most importantly, the release of a compound which happens to share some experiential effects to explain the NDE is exceptionally simplistic, and it’s possible that – as argued in the paper – that his cortical damage, and similar brain insults causing other NDEs, may ‘mimic’ the activity of psychedelics, generally, via neocortical disinhibition whereby higher order networks are compromised and so release previously suppressed networks leading to expanded conscious states.”
The participant’s ratings of the comparability between their NDE and their experience with 5-MeO-DMT showed very low agreement. This subjective response is notable because it contrasts with the objective thematic analysis conducted by the researchers. “This is a very interesting conflict in itself, reflecting the differential answers one gets when approaching a phenomenon objectively or subjectively,” Michael told PsyPost.
This study is a single case study, and the conclusions drawn may not be applicable to all individuals who have had NDEs or psychedelic experiences. Further research with a larger sample size is needed to corroborate these findings and explore the complex relationships between NDEs, psychedelics, and altered states of consciousness.
Michael also noted that the participant deliberately sought out the experience with 5-MeO-DMT with the intention of attempting to recreate or revisit the transcendent state he had experienced during his NDE. The act of seeking to recreate the NDE experience highlights the deep and fundamental meaning that NDEs can hold for individuals.
“It not only gestures toward the fundamental meaning of these NDEs and the difficulty in fully understanding them, and how one often yearns to be reunited with that sense of transcendence – it also points to the potential role of these substances in helping people integrate them, in a not too dissimilar way to the therapeutic administration of psychedelics to those who are facing death in the near-future,” he explained.
“As I argued in past papers, this attempt to simulate the NDE and its transformative effects by using these compounds echoes scholarship suggesting that this is how shamanic societies began to form – for instance, by the afterlife beliefs and their community-cohering effects which such flirtations with death may have elicited being crystalised by ritualized use of entheogens. Substances evincing effects more akin to alien abduction experiences, such as n-n-DMT, may similarly aid in the integration of this other exceptional human experience, which is typically even more ontologically shattering and hard to integrate, perhaps in a way akin to exposure therapy.”
The study, “This is your brain on death: a comparative analysis of a near-death experience and subsequent 5-Methoxy-DMT experience“, was authored by Pascal Michael, David Luke, and Oliver Robinson.
