Under The Dome, and DMT (Dimethyltryptamine) SPOILERS!! Finish the book first!

[duncan108]

Just finished listening to the Under The Dome audiobook and loved it, though I'm pissed that that Jim Renny didn't have something even worse happen to him than choking to death in the darkness while being preyed upon by his victims If you ask me he should have been thrown into a jaunt portal with a null exit, but that's just my humble opinion.

What I found particularly curious about the novel were the parallels between the experiences had by those who touched the grey dome generator, and the trip experiences many people report after smoking Dimethyltryptamine which is apparently one of the most powerful hallucinogenics known to man, and happens to be the primary component in the amazonian brew known as Ahayuasca. Following is one of the best known descriptions of a DMT trip written by Terrence Mckenna who is a notorious, but respected "ethnobotanist" which is a fancy title for someone who eats a wide variety of hallucinogenics in the name of science.

Following taken from deoxy.org Link: http://deoxy.org/t_adt.htm

"Hello... So that was like an introduction, now for some preaching to the choir on the subject of how come it is that the further in you go the bigger it gets. I remember the very, very first time that I smoked DMT. It was sort of a benchmark you might say, and I remember that this friend of mine that always got there first visited me with this little glass pipe and this stuff which looked like orange mothballs. And since I was a graduate of Dr. Hoffman's I figured there were no surprises. So the only question I asked is, 'How long does it last?' and he said, 'About five minutes.' So I did it and... (long pause, audience cheers) there was a something, like a flower, like a chrysanthemum in orange and yellow that was sort of spinning, spinning, and then it was like I was pushed from behind and I fell through the chrysanthemum into another place that didn't seem like a state of mind, it seemed like another place. And what was going on in this place aside from the tastefully socketed indirect lighting, and the crawling geometric hallucinations along the domed walls, what was happening was that there were a lot of ahh.. beings in there, what I call self-transforming machine elves. Sort of like jewelled basketballs all dribbling their way toward me. And if they'd had faces they would have been grinning, but they didn't have faces. And they assured me that they loved me and they told me not to be amazed; not to give way to astonishment. And so I watched them, even though I wondered if maybe I hadn't really done it this time, and what they were doing was they were making objects come into existence by singing them into existence. Objects which looked like Faberge eggs from Mars morphing them- selves with mandiean(sp) alphabetical structures. They looked like the concrescence of liguistic intentionality put through a kind of hyper-dimensional transform into three-dimensional space. And these little machines offered themselves to me. And I realized when I looked at them that if I could bring just one of these little trinkets back, nothing would ever be quite the same again. And I wondered, Where Am I? And What Is Going On? It occurred to me that these must be holographic viral projections from an autonomous continuum that was somehow intersecting my own, and then I thought a more elegant explaination would be to take it at face value and realize that I had broken into an ecology of souls. And that somehow I was getting a peek over the other side. Somehow I was finding out that thing that you cheerfully assume you can't find out. But it felt like I was finding out. And it felt.. and then I can't remember what it felt like because the little self-transforming tykes interrupted me and said, 'Don't think about it. Don't think about who you are. Think about doing what we're doing. Do it. Do it now. DO IT!!' "

Mckenna writes about this experience in many other places, but consistently refers to the beings as "tykes" as though to imply that they were kids. In Under the Dome one of the primary qualities of the multidimensional leather head beings was that of youth, and also of the shifting psychedellic quality of their faces. The difference of course being that the leatherhead "children" were unaware of the vitality of humans and viewed them as bugs, and Mckenna's beings seem to love humans and relate to them in the way adults deal with small children.

Also the DMT experience itself has been described as going into the DMT dome- The following from Urbandictionary.com:

DMT DOME: Psychedelic drug induced experience brought about through the consumption of Dimethyltryptamine(DMT). The term was coined by the late writer and activist Terrance Kemp McKenna who decribed it as a psychedelic underground space to which the DMT user may be transported. This so called 'space' is apparently inhabited by beings who McKenna decribes as 'self transforming machine elves'. According to McKenna and the accounts of some users, the beings interact with users while they are under the affect of the drug, attempting to communicate visually through gestures and signals. McKenna describes the dome as the most incredible of all his psychedelic experiences.

I wonder if Mr. King's inspiration for this novel has it's roots in an amazonian psychedellic, or even better if the similarities are all some kind of "coincidence." Either way I loved the novel, and I hope he put's down whatever he's doing and gets to work on the new Dark Tower book.

[wally wonder]

dunno, i had an image of leather football helmets, maybe a medicine ball...don't get "the shifting psychedellic quality of their faces." interesting post. thank you. i think the idea of "you wouldn't do this if you were alone" is more interesting...an idea that we've seen before...welcome to the board.