DMT art: how reported visions have been painted, modelled and simulated

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Search for DMT images and you will find thousands of glowing, symmetrical pictures. None of them is a photograph of anything. Each is someone’s attempt to show an experience that happens inside a person. This article looks at what people actually report seeing, the science of hallucinated geometry, the painters who made ayahuasca visions famous, the visionary-art tradition, and the newer AI and virtual-reality simulations. We describe artworks; we do not reproduce them.

What is DMT art?

“DMT art” is a loose label, not a formal school. It covers paintings and digital images that try to depict visions reported on DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine, a short-acting psychedelic) or on ayahuasca, an Amazonian brew that contains it. Researchers treat such paintings as one way of recording the experience, alongside verbal reports and questionnaires. A 2020 paper by Imperial College London researchers lists “paintings featured in ‘visionary art’” among the sources that describe how DMT changes perception (Schartner and Timmermann, 2020). Evidence: established as a description of how researchers use art.

So a DMT painting is closer to a translation than a record. The artist remembers, selects and arranges, using skills and visual habits learned elsewhere. For what the experience is like in words, see what does DMT feel like. Evidence: established that paintings are made after the fact; how faithful any one painting is remains unresolved.

What do people say DMT visuals look like?

The largest count comes from a 2022 study that hand-coded 3,778 DMT experiences posted to the r/DMT Reddit community over ten years. Fractals, geometric shapes and patterns appeared in 1,231 experiences (32.6%). “Vivid, novel, neon, beautiful, hyperintense” colours appeared in 953 (25.2%). A tunnel-type structure appeared in 390 (10.3%), and visuals with eyes open in 499 (13.2%) (Lawrence et al., 2022). Evidence: preliminary; the posters were self-selected, and the counts measure what people chose to write.

Lab studies describe the same kind of imagery. In Rick Strassman’s early-1990s lab study, 12 experienced volunteers received DMT under controlled conditions. The paper reports a “rapidly moving, brightly colored visual display of images” (Strassman et al., 1994). The 2022 authors quote the same team: many subjects described “kaleidoscopic geometric patterns that were not obviously representational” (Lawrence et al., 2022). Evidence: established as reported content in small lab samples.

The very first account set the tone. A 2021 paper quotes Stephen Szára, who took DMT himself in 1956, describing “brilliantly coloured oriental motifs and wonderful scenes altering rapidly” (Michael et al., 2021); our Szára article tells that story. In the same 2021 field study of 36 interviews, 16 people (44%) described geometric objects, and some called the patterns alive, “sentient geometries”. Evidence: preliminary; a single self-report and a small field study.

Why is DMT art so geometric? Klüver’s form constants

Long before DMT research, the neurologist Heinrich Klüver sorted geometric hallucinations into four groups he called “form constants”. A 2001 mathematical paper sets them out (Bressloff et al., 2001):

• Gratings, lattices, fretworks, filigrees, honeycombs and chequer-boards.
• Cobwebs.
• Tunnels, funnels, alleys, cones and vessels.
• Spirals.

The 2001 paper modelled the primary visual cortex (V1, the first area of the brain’s outer layer to process sight). It showed that if V1 becomes unstable, as the authors presume happens under hallucinogens or flickering light, its own wiring would generate patterns matching all four form constants (Bressloff et al., 2001). Evidence: preliminary; a mathematical model.

If the model is right, it would offer one reason why honeycombs, spirals and tunnels are so common in psychedelic pictures; that link to art is our inference, not something the paper tested. Evidence: preliminary; it is a mathematical model, never tested with DMT, and it covers simple geometry, not scenes or beings.

The famous radiating “chrysanthemum” pattern fits this geometric family; our article on the waiting room, the dome and the chrysanthemum covers that vocabulary, and the DMT laser experiment looks at claims about seeing hidden code.

Who was Pablo Amaringo, and what is ayahuasca art?

Pablo Amaringo (1943–2009) is the painter most often linked with ayahuasca visions in the sources we read. He came from a family of vegetalistas, mestizo healers who specialise in plant medicine, and worked as one himself. He first painted portraits and landscapes. In the 1980s, after the anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna asked him to draw his ayahuasca visions, they became his subject (Dino, 2019). Luna says he met Amaringo in 1985, during research in the Peruvian Amazon (Luna, 2023). Evidence: established from biographical sources.

Their collaboration produced the book Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman, published in 1991 according to Dino (Dino, 2019) and reviewed in the journal American Anthropologist in 1993 (Whitten, 1993). Researchers still cite it, in a 1999 edition, when they discuss how DMT and ayahuasca visions are depicted (Schartner and Timmermann, 2020). Dino describes the paintings as dense images of the many spiritual realms Amaringo said he had visited. Evidence: established for the book and its use by researchers.

What was the Usko-Ayar school of painting?

In 1988 Amaringo and Luna founded the Usko-Ayar Amazonian School of Painting, which charged no fees. Luna says it had around 300 students when he left the project in 1994, and that former students have since exhibited internationally (Luna, 2023). The school is in Pucallpa, a major city of the Peruvian Amazon, and its Quechua name means “spiritual prince”; Dino reported in 2019 that it still teaches Amaringo’s style (Dino, 2019). Evidence: established from first-hand and secondary accounts; we could not confirm its current status independently.

This painting is newer than many viewers assume. Western Amazonian peoples are known for geometric designs on ceramics and bodies, while figurative painting is relatively absent from traditional contexts. Dino argues that mestizo artists, some trained in art schools, translate visions into familiar images for a wider public. He also names the Shipibo-Konibo artist Olinda Silvano, who brings traditional kené designs to murals (Dino, 2019). For the brew itself, see what is ayahuasca. Evidence: established as an art-historical account.

What is visionary art, and how is it linked to DMT?

“Visionary art” is the wider label for art that depicts inner, spiritual or altered-state experience. In DMT research, two books are cited as its examples: Ayahuasca Visions and Alex Grey’s 1990 book Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey (Schartner and Timmermann, 2020). Researchers cite them as depictions, including of the beings (“entities”) people report, not as evidence of what DMT does. Evidence: established for how the works are cited.

Museums have treated psychedelic and visionary art as a strand of contemporary art. A 2010 exhibition organised by the San Antonio Museum of Art, with a catalogue by David S. Rubin and others, traced a psychedelic sensibility from 1960s Op Art through painters including Alex Grey to digital work. Its catalogue says the story is about the influence of psychedelic culture on art, “not necessarily the influence of drugs” (Rubin et al., 2010). Evidence: established as a curatorial account.

DMT culture itself leans on pictures. The anthropologist Graham St John, studying online user reports, found that the DMT “breakthrough” is often linked to perceived contact with entities and to information transmitted in the form of “visual language” (St John, 2018). That helps explain why so much DMT talk is illustrated. For the places people describe, see what is DMT hyperspace; for the beings, see DMT entity types explained. Evidence: preliminary; an exploratory anthropological study.

Does DMT art shape what people see?

Possibly. An 18-month ethnography at a shamanic centre in the Peruvian Amazon found that visitors’ ayahuasca visions often echoed familiar imagery. The anthropologist David Dupuis notes that an iconography of paintings, drawings and films, “strongly influenced” by artists such as Amaringo, decorates the books and forums of shamanic tourists. One recurring scene, a woman with plant and snake features, is a major trope of that iconography (Dupuis, 2022). Evidence: preliminary; one centre, one researcher, ayahuasca rather than DMT alone.

Dupuis argues that culture shapes not only how people interpret visions but their content, through what people learn to notice and expect (Dupuis, 2022). The 2022 Reddit study raises a similar worry: earlier posts may influence later reports, as shown by recurring labels (Lawrence et al., 2022). So art and reports may feed each other. Evidence: unresolved; no controlled study has tested whether seeing DMT art changes what people later see.

Can AI or virtual reality simulate DMT visuals?

Researchers have tried, as illustrations and as research tools. In a 2020 paper, two Imperial College London researchers used deep neural networks (AI systems that learn patterns from many images) to alter ordinary pictures. Adding noise to a face generator, and transferring the style of a painting onto a photo, gave images they call consistent with reported DMT hallucinations and with entities in visionary art (Schartner and Timmermann, 2020). Evidence: preliminary; the authors call these speculative examples, with no participants.

The best-known simulation is the “Hallucination Machine”, built at the University of Sussex. It runs panoramic videos through the DeepDream algorithm and shows them in a virtual-reality headset. Twelve participants rated the experience as clearly different from normal video and broadly similar to earlier psilocybin ratings, though stronger evidence of a difference appeared for intensity. The simulation did not distort time, as drug states often do (Suzuki et al., 2017). Evidence: preliminary; small sample, compared with psilocybin, not DMT.

A 2022 study used the same kind of DeepDream VR videos and measured how flexibly people then solved thinking tasks (Rastelli et al., 2022). We found no peer-reviewed study that used virtual reality to simulate a DMT experience specifically; our DMT therapy research article reached the same finding for trials combining DMT and VR. So a “DMT simulation” online is an artist’s interpretation, not a validated replica. Evidence: unresolved.

Researchers have also watched people paint during a DMT state. In a 2026 double-blind, placebo-controlled study, 30 healthy men had sessions with a DMT and harmine formulation, harmine alone, and placebo. They completed thinking tasks and a real painting task. The DMT formulation impaired convergent thinking (finding one correct answer) and reduced the moments of sudden insight recorded during painting (Suay et al., 2026). Evidence: preliminary; one small study, men only, abstract read.

Why can’t DMT pictures capture the experience?

The reports themselves point to several gaps between an experience and any image of it:

• Words fail first. In the 2022 Reddit coding, 534 experiences (14.1%) included a sense that the experience “cannot be described adequately in words” (Lawrence et al., 2022). A painting depends on memory and description too.
• Motion. Lab volunteers described a rapidly moving display (Strassman et al., 1994); a canvas stands still.
• Colour. Posters described colours as “novel” and “hyperintense” (Lawrence et al., 2022); paint and screens have fixed ranges.
• Meaning. Some people describe geometry as alive or aware (Michael et al., 2021), a quality no pattern can show on its own.
• Intensity and time. Even a well-built VR simulation differed from a drug state on intensity and did not distort time (Suzuki et al., 2017).

Evidence: preliminary; each point rests on self-report or small studies, and none measures how faithful a given painting is.

What we still don’t know

• Whether the form-constant model explains DMT geometry; it has never been tested with DMT (preliminary, as a hypothesis).
• Whether seeing DMT or ayahuasca art changes what people later see, or only how they describe it (unresolved).
• How common these visuals are among people who do not post online; the largest counts come from self-selected reports (unresolved).
• Whether any simulation can match a DMT state on intensity, motion and meaning; no DMT-specific VR study was found (unresolved).
• The current status of the Usko-Ayar school; the latest account we found dates from 2019 (unresolved).

For the wider science, start with what is DMT.

Shroomverse sells mushroom products. This article is general information about how DMT and ayahuasca visions have been depicted in art and research. It is not medical, legal or purchasing advice, and it does not recommend any product.