A Trip That Looks Like Dying

There is a moment in a strong DMT experience that people struggle to put into words: the body falls away, a sense of overwhelming peace arrives, and consciousness seems to pass through some kind of threshold into an unearthly, luminous realm populated by presences. If that description sounds familiar, it is because it is almost word-for-word what people report after cardiac arrest — after their heart has stopped and, by every clinical measure, they were dying. For a century this resemblance was an anecdote. Then a team of neuroscientists decided to measure it, and the numbers that came back turned a curiosity into one of the most provocative findings in the science of consciousness.

The experiment that measured a ghost

In 2018, Chris Timmermann and colleagues at Imperial College London ran a deceptively simple study. They gave thirteen healthy volunteers intravenous DMT — the fast, overwhelming psychedelic that peaks in two to three minutes and is gone in fifteen — and afterward had them fill out the Greyson Near-Death Experience Scale, the sixteen-item instrument that clinicians have used since 1983 to quantify an NDE (a score of seven or higher counts as the real thing). Then they compared those scores against a carefully matched group of people who had lived through actual near-death experiences, drawn from a coma-science registry (Timmermann et al., 2018).

The result was uncanny. Every single volunteer scored above the NDE threshold on DMT. And when the two groups were compared item by item, there was no statistically significant difference on 15 of the 16 features, on any of the four subscales, or on the total score. The feelings of peace and cosmic unity, the sense of leaving the body, the encounter with an unearthly realm, the meeting with sentient beings — the drug reproduced them all at the same intensity as the memory of nearly dying. The people in the comparison group had had their brushes with death up to fifteen years earlier, and their reports still profiled like a fresh DMT trip.

Only one feature came apart, and it is a poignant one. Real near-death experiencers scored higher on a single item: “Did you come to a border or a point of no return?” — arguably the one thing you can only feel if you are actually, and not experimentally, at the edge (though even this difference did not survive the study’s strictest statistical correction). The volunteers, lying safely in a lab knowing a doctor sat beside them, did not reach that border. Everything else about the threshold, they crossed.

What a near-death experience actually is

To see why this matters, it helps to know how solid the near-death phenomenon is. This is not fringe territory. In 2001, the cardiologist Pim van Lommel published a landmark prospective study in The Lancet: across ten Dutch hospitals, his team interviewed 344 consecutive patients who had been resuscitated from cardiac arrest. Sixty-two of them — 18% — reported a near-death experience, and about 12% described a deep “core” experience with the classic elements (van Lommel et al., 2001). Strikingly, the team could not find any physiological, psychological, or drug-related factor that predicted who would have one. The experiences were real, common, and stubbornly unexplained — which is exactly the vacuum a molecule like DMT rushed in to fill.

The Spirit Molecule and its problem

The idea that the brain makes its own DMT and releases it at death was popularized by the psychiatrist Rick Strassman in his 2001 book DMT: The Spirit Molecule. Strassman speculated that the pineal gland — Descartes’ “seat of the soul” — secretes DMT at birth, in dreams, and in death, opening a chemical door between worlds. It is a beautiful story, and it has one large problem: as science, it was speculation, not evidence. There has never been a demonstration that the human pineal releases DMT in psychoactive amounts, and the “Spirit Molecule” framing should be treated as a hypothesis that inspired research rather than a finding that settled it.

But then the actual biochemistry started to catch up in unexpected ways. In 2019, a team including Jimo Borjigin at the University of Michigan reported the most careful measurements yet of DMT in the mammalian brain. They found that the enzyme needed to synthesize DMT is present in multiple brain regions, not just the pineal; that extracellular DMT in the rat cortex reaches concentrations comparable to serotonin and dopamine; and, most provocatively, that DMT levels surged in the visual cortex after experimental cardiac arrest — and did so even in rats whose pineal glands had been removed (Dean et al., 2019). The pineal, it turned out, was never the point. The machinery to make DMT is woven through the brain itself, and something about the dying process switches it on.

The caveat has to be stated plainly, because the story is seductive: this is rats, not people. It shows that a rodent brain can make and release DMT around cardiac arrest. It does not show that the human brain reaches psychoactive DMT concentrations at death, and it does not prove that endogenous DMT causes near-death experiences. The bridge from “the dying brain releases some DMT” to “DMT is what a near-death experience is made of” has not been built. It is a superb lead, not a verdict.

The other explanation: a brain that flares before it fades

Here is the twist that keeps the DMT story honest. You do not actually need an endogenous psychedelic to explain a vivid experience at the edge of death, because the dying brain does something remarkable on its own. In the same lab, Borjigin’s team had earlier discovered that when rats went into cardiac arrest, their brains did not simply switch off. Within about thirty seconds of the heart stopping, and before the EEG went flat, there was a transient surge of highly synchronized gamma-wave activity — with connectivity and coherence that actually exceeded the normal waking state (Borjigin et al., 2013). Gamma is the frequency band associated with conscious binding and vivid perception. The dying brain, in other words, briefly becomes more connected than it is in ordinary wakefulness — a plausible physical substrate for an experience of extraordinary clarity, with no exotic chemistry required.

In 2023 the same group reported the first human hints: monitoring four comatose patients as life support was withdrawn, they saw a similar gamma surge in the posterior “hot zone” of the cortex — the region most tied to conscious content — in two of the four (Xu et al., 2023). The patients did not survive, so no one can say what, if anything, they experienced. But it suggests the human brain, too, may flare before it fades. Whether that flare is driven by a flood of DMT, or is simply the electrical signature of a brain running out of oxygen, is precisely the open question.

Two doors to the same room

And there is a third clue that complicates the picture in a useful way. DMT is not the only drug that reproduces near-death experiences — ketamine does too, and arguably does it best. In 2019, Charlotte Martial and colleagues ran a vast text-analysis study, comparing roughly 15,000 written reports from 165 psychoactive substances against 625 real near-death narratives. The drug whose accounts were most semantically similar to genuine NDEs was ketamine — ahead of Salvia and the serotonergic psychedelics like DMT (Martial et al., 2019). This matters because ketamine works through an entirely different mechanism: it blocks the NMDA glutamate receptor, whereas DMT stimulates the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor. Two completely different pharmacological doors, opening into the same strange room.

That is the deepest lesson here, and it cuts against a tidy answer. If a near-death experience can be produced by a serotonergic psychedelic (DMT), by a glutamate blocker (ketamine), and by the sheer electrical crescendo of a dying brain (the gamma surge), then the resemblance across all of them may not point to a single “death chemical” at all. It may instead reveal something about the architecture of consciousness itself — that when the ordinary, self-modeling brain is pushed past a certain edge, by whatever means, it defaults to the same profound family of experiences: the dissolving self, the light, the peace, the threshold.

The honest place to stand

So: is DMT the chemistry of dying? The truthful answer is that we have a spectacular set of clues and no proof. It is genuinely established that a DMT trip is, by the numbers, nearly identical to a near-death experience. It is established that the mammalian brain makes DMT and that, in rats, it surges around cardiac arrest. It is established that the dying brain flares with hyper-connected gamma activity. What is not established — what remains wide open — is whether the human brain releases enough DMT at death to matter, and whether any of this is the cause of the experience or merely a correlate riding alongside it. Near-death experiences happen without any drug at all, which means no endogenous psychedelic is required to explain them.

Maybe the most honest way to hold it is this: at the threshold, the brain seems to have more than one way to show a person the same vision. DMT can open that door in a laboratory in fifteen minutes. Cardiac arrest can open it involuntarily. And what lies on the other side — whether it is a glimpse of something real, or the mind’s last, most beautiful act of meaning-making as the lights go down — is a question that neuroscience has, for now, only learned how to ask more precisely. That precision is not a small thing. It is the difference between a rumor and a mystery worth taking seriously.

OOTW Journal is educational and does not provide medical advice. DMT and related psychedelics are controlled substances in most countries and are not safe for everyone, including people with a personal or family history of psychosis or bipolar disorder, cardiac conditions, or those taking serotonergic or MAOI medications. Nothing here is a recommendation to use any psychedelic. If you are grieving or in distress about death and dying, please reach out to a qualified professional or a trusted person for support.