A Picture of Elf
Review of Death by Astonishment by Andrew R Gallimore
I first met Andrew Gallimore in the summer of 2013, at the psychedelics conference
in cavernous old naval buildings in the lee of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. Two years later, at the following BC, Andrew, myself, David Luke and Jack Hunter shared a panel called, simply enough, “DMT Entities”. Andrew’s presentation was called “What is it like to be a Machine Elf?”
Well, what is it like?
Andrew presented zany graphics that resembled space invaders from 1980s arcade games. Strange gremlin figures in a Tron-like reality grid that contrasted splendidly with Jack’s folkloric vision trailing the witchy fog of the Welsh valleys. I was mesmerized by his illustration of the processes of brain chemistry – of neurotransmission and neuromodulation and the neuronal networks and firing synaptic pathways. Clear, coherent and simple (enough) for layfolk like myself.
I then spent deep and quality time with Andrew later that same year at a gathering at Tyringham that he describes in the opening pages of Death by Astonishment. An extraordinary assemblage of natural philosophers and magicians, sages and mages, wizards, witches and warlocks, explorers and cartographers of hidden worlds. Four days that I still cannot fully fathom.
Andrew was especially considerate to join me with a bottle of cold beer on a walk through the parkland to the handsome stone bridge over the gentle river to discuss some rather urgent metaphysical questions that the experiences in the temple the night before had rather violently thrust upon me.
He was already developing the argument that would become central to his ongoing work: ‘Your brain,’ he explained, ‘is very good at building a world. In fact, your brain builds your world, your consensus model of reality, as a default.’
Think about it: we inhabit a functional model of reality constructed by the fantastically complex machinery of the brain. Whatever state of consciousness – whether driving a car, climbing a mountain, reading a book, drinking beer, hallucinating monsters or asleep and dreaming – our brains construct the realities we experience. We think we inhabit the real world, but we know nothing of this real world that is not mediated through the neural processing function. As such we cannot really talk of external reality at all, but only of the internal construction of external reality; and from an evolutionary perspective the model needs to be functional, coherent and consensus or we would face challenges of survivability.
This makes sense, however Matrix-like it sounds.
The implications are huge. Alter brain chemistry and alter perception. Perturb the reality-building mechanism and perturb reality. At Tyringham, Andrew developed this position as axiom: ‘If a world appears to the consciousness, it must have an informational representation in the brain.’ And from this he suggests that hallucinations should perhaps not be called ‘false perceptions’ but instead ‘nonadaptive perceptions.’
Reality-build an angry bear when there is no angry bear and you live in unnecessary fear, anxiety, paranoia. Fail to reality-build the angry bear when there is an angry bear and you get eaten. But, Andrew asked: ‘When you introduce DMT into the brain, something different happens.’ And that is why we were gathered in that big house with the strange temple. Something seriously different happens.
‘It’s not like the brain shifts from building the consensus world to building a slightly different version of the consensus world. It shifts, the channel switches, and it starts building a world that has no relationship whatsoever to the consensus world. […] it’s as if the brain is switched to a completely different mode, as if a different connectivity pattern has been adopted, such that the brain now builds with a beautifully effortless manner this extremely complex, extremely coherent, crystalline, beautiful, rich, bizarre world, that has no relationship to the consensus world. And for me that’s kind of confounding.’
Damn right. It is kind of confounding. It is baffling. It is astonishing.
This is the bedrock of Andrew’s work for the ensuing decade. What the fuck is going on with DMT? If the brain is modelling a reality, what the fuck is this reality? Really, what is it? Well, not one to shirk the challenge, in 2019 Andrew published the first of his DMT trilogy of books to explore these questions: Alien Information Theory: Psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Cosmic Game.
What a book! A typographic marvel (and presumably a typesetting nightmare). Text like a dot matrix print from the late 90s (minus the perforated tear-off margins) infused with blocks of coding and the same arcade-game gremlins we met back in 2015. Meticulous step-by-step explanations of the mechanics of world-building; through the areas of the brain that correspond to different functions down to the cellular, the molecular, the atomic, the sub-atomic. And up to the organism, the ecosystem, the global, the solar, the galactic, the cosmic. The book is astonishing. The book is quite scary, but why?
ON OFF. That’s how the book opens. This is the Grid. This is the synaptic potential. ON OFF. This is the nature of reality. It is summed up in the penultimate chapter before the even scarier discussion of THE GAME. I’ll cite just the first of a series of extraordinary axioms:
‘We live in a reality constructed from digital information instantiated by a Code programmed by an alien hyperintelligence [other Other].’
‘The Code programs the structure of reality as a digital object constructed as one of a vast number of lower-dimensional slices – Grids – of a structure known as the HyperGrid.’
This Code, he explains, is not metaphorical: it underpins the structure and behaviour of reality. Our Universe is a simulation or digital machine designed to cultivate sentient, intelligent life, possibly as part of a greater evolutionary trajectory. Humanity’s increasing entwinement with technology is seen not as alienation from nature, but as a deeper expression of the natural order, fulfilling the purpose of the Code. DMT is a ubiquitous molecule, which hints at its evolutionary significance, something Dennis McKenna has also explored. It is not simply a drug, but a key, an interface, a portal, that allows humans to access hyperdimensional realities, to communicate with non-human intelligences inhabiting those realms and to gain experiential insight into the hidden structure of reality.
‘The task of the Game is to realise the nature of our imprisonment in the Grid and to find our way out. But a game it is.’ Am I imprisoned on the Grid? Am I? Is Andrew Morpheus? Am I Neo? Do I want to be Neo? Perhaps I’m Cypher, who’d rather return to the Matrix, eat the steak and forget the whole business… But I’m not Cypher. Too late for that. But what is this Game?
‘The Game has six levels, the final being resolution which involves the transcription of the brain complex and permanent – irreversible – transference into the HyperGrid.’ Irreversible. Pay attention to that. Level V Realisation is where, Andrew explains, ‘Target-controlled intravenous infusion represents the pinnacle of modern psychoactive drug administration technologies.’ This allows lengthy visitations to the DMT realities. But it doesn’t end there. The goal of the Game, as I understand it, is to reach Level VI, which means achieving permanent transcription of consciousness into the higher-dimensional container universe.
‘Once transcription is completed – by a specific set of intelligences within the HyperGrid – your original brain complex will likely be dissolved. This means, to anyone observing you from outside the DMT space – from the consensus world, the Grid – you will appear to have died. But, in reality, you will continue to exist as a hyperdimensional entity inside the HyperGrid. And, when DMT voyagers from the Grid burst into your marvellous hyperdimensional domain, you will be amongst the thronging elfin crowds cheering and welcoming them home.’
And there the book ends.
True, I can’t deny that I was a little alarmed that Andrew had envisioned some weird technodaimonic suicide cult. After all, you can only appear dead for a while before you are, really, dead. And from my experiences there is no way I would want to be plunged for cosmic eternity into the thronging elfin crowds cheering and welcoming me home. That ain’t heaven. It’s more like hell.
So, with trepidation I unwrapped
’s second book, Reality Switch Technologies: Psychedelics as Tools for the Discovery and Exploration of New Worlds (2022). Again, a typographic marvel, this time infused with a funky manual-like Japanese techno-aesthetic.Following his previous talks and writings, the book presents psychedelics not merely as mind-altering substances or therapeutic agents, but as precise neurotechnologies – tools for switching the brain’s reality channel. Not distorters of reality but replacers of reality. The old screen is swept aside and a new screen appears. A reality jump cut. A cosmic jump cut. Andrew explores how these molecules interact with specific neural systems to allow access to alternate, structured, and often alien ‘World Spaces.’ Psychedelics, especially tryptamines, open a new frontier: not outward into space, but inward into the architecture of consciousness.
Mercifully, the edgy aspiration-to-elfin-godhead conclusions of his first book were now tempered into a more seasoned technical manual (hence the aesthetic) for voyages of discovery. How to prepare the journey. What to expect. How to interact with the inhabitants and how to treat them with respect. But importantly, how to return to share the knowledge and integrate back into consensus reality. He even warns that prolonged exposure to alternate world models may remould neural connectivity, creating long-term effects that require structured reintegration.
Blast off, explore, return, and recalibrate. This seems a more balanced approach than blasting off never to return.
I also found less emphasis on the binary nature of reality than in his previous book. Yes, the base of reality is still information, and binary coding is a key mechanism for encoding information (something he explains in great detail), and, as Andrew points out, neuronal firing or not-firing can ultimately be considered binary code… But, upon deeper reflection, I cease to worry about whether I do or do not (see what I did there?) consider reality as built of binary coding, as ultimately broken down to bits and bites. Does it really matter?
Does it matter to me whether light is wave or particle? Does it affect my own metaphysic, my own relationship with reality? Not at all. So why should I mind whether Andrew does or does not present reality as binary coding? What matters is the exploration, the experience, the astonishment…
And so now, finally, we reach the shores of Andrew’s third book: Death by Astonishment: Confronting the Mystery of the World’s Strangest Drug.
Conventional typeface and formatting. Just a handful of simple illustrations, including tryptamine molecular structures. An excellent Foreword by Graham Hancock and regular chapter sequence. Not the artisanal artefacts of the previous two books. A work for a wide readership, specialist and non-specialist alike. There is no need to have read the first two books to reach the third (sorry Andrew!) The third is a different beast. It is a great book.
This book takes a broader cultural, geographical and historical trajectory. Yes, there’s still the emphasis on neurochemistry and neurocircuitary, but it’s set within a wider narrative space. It is a great story. For example, it is commonplace to talk about the complex pharmacochemistry of the ayahuasca and yagé brews: you know, one ingredient inhibiting the enzyme in the gut that metabolises DMT, thus allowing DMT from the other plant to cross the blood-brain barrier and produce psychoactive effects. It hardly needs repeating as it has been articulated thousands of times, so that even those of us with no training in biochemistry can repeat it. Generally, though, it is simply stated and stated simply. Not here.
Andrew explores cultural use of certain tryptamines across histories and geographies, and introduces the earliest European explorers of the Americas to report and investigate the various brews and snuffs. From there the long history of isolation, extraction and synthesis, and the identification of hitherto unknown admixtures. The simple statement about the brews’ complex pharmacochemistry is not simple at all. It took a long time to work out, and the process is intertwined with the isolation, extraction, synthesis and bioassaying of other psychedelic molecules. Even though parts of the story have been told before, especially by Graham St John in his tremendous 2015 book Mystery School in Hyperspace, the story is so rich that each telling is unique, and Andrew’s is a great companion piece to Graham’s.
We move to Andrew’s central axiom: ‘Your brain is a builder of worlds.’ To illustrate this, he tells a cool little tale of stumbling across a mantis in a Tokyo alley, which he carefully lifted and placed in the shrubbery. A real mantis, not a hallucination, and yet, he explains, it is the mental simulation of the mantis. It is information encoded in mantis form interpreted and reconstructed as mantis.
From here Andrew explains how the brain performs this fantastic trick of reality-building, where it takes place in the wetware of the cortex, how the microcircuitry fizzes and pops (my words, not his!) in such staggering complexity. As with his previous books, his explanation is clear, coherent and sequential. As with his previous books, this central axiom leads to the puzzling questions about how the brain reality-builds the DMT space.
‘The central question then is not whether these bizarre worlds and their inhabitants can be modeled by the brain, but whether or not the brain can fabricate them entirely independent of some external source of sensory information.’
If so, fine. It’s a hallucination. An aberration. A dream (or a nightmare…): ‘If not, then we need to sincerely consider the possibility that they represented something far stranger and far more difficult to explain.’
But what of the hallucination or the dream (or the nightmare)? Can they be dismissed so clearly? Yes, Andrew suggests. And he explains why. This takes a couple of chapters. He is very thorough. Unhooked from sensory data inputs, the reality-building capacity of the brain is let loose; and that, he explains, would account for the unhinged quality of the dream state: the oddness, the incoherence, the screwy sense of time: ‘The world your brain constructs in the dream state is the world it learned to construct in the waking state. The waking world and the dream world are built from the same stuff.’
I want to disagree. I do disagree. I want to suggest that the dream state allows interdimensional interaction, cosmic communication, faster-than-light voyaging across the vast grid of space-time. After all, I am a reader of Swedenborg, for whom dreams and visions were truly hypergalactic… But, confronted with the complexity and seeming autonomy and the sheer, total, complete and utter alienness of the DMT state, I can follow Andrew’s logic: ‘In constructing the DMT worlds, it’s almost as if the brain is using a language it never learned to speak, building models it never learned to construct – and doing so flawlessly.’
The experience is not a dream. The experience is not a hallucination. The experience is not the eruption of Archetypes from the Collective Unconscious. Here again Andrew presents a logical, sequential and ultimately compelling argument, even though, as with the dream argument, I want to disagree because I envisage the Collective Unconscious as deep and wide as the cosmos, but I can follow his logic.
The entities are just too weird. Too alien. Too outlandish. Too Other. Too autonomous in their own existence to be archetypes arising from the museum of our ancient past. ‘The idea that these are relics of our shared evolutionary history embedded in our collective neural architecture already seems to stretch the Jungian model well beyond anything Jung himself ever conceived.’ I’m not so sure.
I’ve studied Seven Sermons to the Dead. The Dead are independent in their own existence and arise from the Collective Unconscious. I’ve studied The Red Book. Jung himself questions the autonomy of Elijah and Salome, who rebuke him for doubting their existence. Whilst that does nothing to prove their autonomous existence neither does the seeming autonomy of machine elves prove their autonomy. In fact, Elijah quips that his existence is no more nor less secure than Jung’s himself.
Andrew, however, takes it deeper, continuing the dream/hallucination argument. The DMT world transcends archetypal form. So alien. So other. As such, the brain tries to make sense of the experience by translating the perception into some archetypal form: the Insectoid, the elfish, the reptilian, the Trickster.
‘The DMT state, at its deepest levels, is the apotheosis of the alien. It is a world that the brain should not know how to build. It is a world that should not exist and yet there it is, irresistible in its construction and undeniable in its presence. To smoke DMT means to confront not merely a different world, but one that is, frankly, impossible.’
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Herr Doktor Jung! As with everything in this book, it is not a question of agreeing or disagreeing with specific ideas. These are hypotheses for further exploration. So it’s not a dream. It’s not a hallucination. It’s not an Archetype of the Collective Unconscious. It’s not even a drug. It’s a reality switch. That’s what Andrew calls it.
How best to express this notion of sudden reality switching – instantaneous journeying – than by the metaphor of the radio first used by Henri Bergson over a century ago, and updated by Andrew (and many others) to the television. The radio and the television do not generate the content. They receive it and present it. Change the channel and change the show. Turn the dial of consciousness and tune into a different reality.
‘After more than a decade of studying, writing, speaking, and thinking about DMT, I’d finally found myself compelled to reach a conclusion I’d never have thought possible when I began – that DMT was allowing us to interface with some kind of intelligent agent external to the brain. […] I couldn’t make sense of DMT without such an agent.’
An agent. An autonomous, self-aware, self-defined, self-selfed agent. I have been here before, and my response for years has been to evoke the imaginal, which I interpret as the buster of Aristotelian logic. Is it A or B? Yes! Is the entity autonomous in its own existence or did I just imagine it? Yes! But here Andrew presents a scenario that is truly nuts – something I had no idea before reading this book – which does challenge my simple evocation of the imaginal. Lock-out!
These agents control the experience to the extent that they can expel the tripper. Literally slam the door in their face. Andrew rules out simple drug tolerance. That’s to say, it is not that some fellow has been hitting the pipe so much that he now cannot get the hit without upping the dose. No. He’s kicked out of the hyper-room. Barred from returning until the time comes when access is permitted again. The agents control the experience, which leads to Andrew’s question at the end of Chapter 14: ‘Who are they?’
Now we enter the deepest, wildest, craziest, most dazzling ontological questions. And this is what I have been exploring all these years too, and the reason I was invited to share a panel with Andrew, Dave and Jack at BC in 2015 and share the grand house and its strange temple a few months later.
Andrew’s explorations in the remaining chapters of the book and my explorations over the years share many features. Ancient and indigenous reports of other-than-human entities. Fairy-lore and elf-lore. Shamanism. UFOlogy and alien abduction experiences, especially with reference to Jacques Vallée and John Mack. And in my case, I have also explored mediumship, mysticism, cryptozoology, apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the works of Swedenborg. Many explorers of many crazy places. Crazy stories.
And what are my conclusions? That we live in a populated universe. That the universe is filled with consciousness, with conscious beings, with discarnate entities who are invisible most of the time. We are not taught that. Maybe kids are taught that in Sunday school about angels and demons. I wouldn’t know. Our dominant cultural worldviews – scientific, social, cultural – do not teach us that. Ok, maybe there’s extraterrestrial life somewhere out there. This is what Carl Sagan was working on. But interdimensional-hyperdimensional critters all around us? Sorry pal - we’d be told - you’re mistaken, deluded, insane.
Graham Hancock concludes the Foreword to Andrew’s book with a simple statement in response to this critique of delusion or insanity: ‘I know! It still sounds crazy. But here’s a glass pipe…’ So that’s the gnosis-noesis. But, really, who are they? Are they to be trusted?
The stories that WB Yeats collected about fairies are full of cattle-thieves and baby-snatchers. Whitley Strieber’s accounts of Greys and Kobolds are scary. This is no Disney cartoon of doe-eyed cuddly critters in a flower-filled landscape. Especially not the cattle mutilators nor the emotionless abductors with anal probes. They’re horrible. Shamanic accounts are as full of beings that harm as beings that heal. And so on…
And who are we? Are we to be trusted? Who is making the trips? Who are our ambassadors? Are we to assume that only the most lovely members of the human race are making these journeys to hyperspace? What power-hungry fuckwits? What dark Sith Lords might be in training? What unholy alliances? I don’t fucking know. Who or what are we dealing with in these breakthrough landscapes?
What are Andrew’s conclusions?
‘Whatever our future might hold, whether we call them gods, spirits, aliens, or post-biological superintelligent agents, there are discarnate intelligences of unimaginable wisdom and power, accessible right now to anyone and everyone who wishes to reach them, using one of the simplest and most common molecules on the planet. And if that alone isn’t the most remarkable, important, and truly astonishing discovery in the history of our species, then I can’t imagine what might be.’
Hard to argue with that.
Are they really of ‘unimaginable wisdom and power?’ Do the trip reports bear this out? Maybe. I certainly agree with Andrew that we are on the threshold of deeper discovery, especially given the results of the DMTx explorations. The first threshold has been crossed, and this is what Andrew (and Yeats and William James) has so compellingly articulated: that there is a universe teeming with beings. That is an important threshold to cross, and one that many will struggle to accept. Beyond this is contact, communication, interaction, information transfer, relationships.
And so I sense that Andrew’s trilogy may not yet be complete. The next book might be a cartography and ethnography of these hyperdimensional lands, these antipodes of the mind. An account of the interactions, of the gnosis, of the noesis. And what will we find? Only one thing is certain: ASTONISHMENT.
What else?
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As an aside, Dennis McKenna’s presentation at Tyringham: “Is DMT a Chemical Messenger from an Extraterrestrial Civilization”, remains the most important talk I have ever attended. It is astonishing. It is published in the 2018 book DMT Dialogues: Encounters with the Spirit Molecule. It is an extraordinary, mind-blowing (literally) piece of writing...
Wonderful! Thanks Will! :)