The waiting room, the dome and the chrysanthemum: DMT’s vocabulary explained

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Read enough DMT trip reports and the same handful of phrases keep coming back. People say they reached “the waiting room”, saw “the chrysanthemum”, heard “the carrier wave” or entered “hyperspace”. To a newcomer it can sound like a guidebook to a real place. This article treats these words as what they are: vocabulary. For each term it explains what people describe, where the word is documented, and how often it appeared when scientists systematically coded thousands of reports. It ends with the most important caveat: shared labels may shape what people later report.

Where does DMT vocabulary come from?

Mostly from users talking to each other: in talks, books, forums and music. The anthropologist Graham St John, who has studied DMT culture, describes the breakthrough into “hyperspace” as a private passage that is nonetheless “ritual like”, and he traced the vocabulary through online user reports and other cultural sources (St John, 2018). Evidence: established as a description of user culture.

In a 2017 essay he identifies Terence McKenna as the lead commentator on two of the best-known images: McKenna, in a 1994 talk, described a vaulted, domed space that he said aficionados call “the dome”, and he named a recurring pattern “the chrysanthemum”. Recordings of McKenna’s voice were widely sampled in psychedelic electronic music, which spread the words further (St John, 2017). We paraphrase McKenna rather than quoting him, and St John does not say McKenna coined either word. Evidence: established for McKenna’s role in popularising these terms; their first use is unresolved.

For “the waiting room” and “the carrier wave” we could not find a documented first use in the sources we checked on 20 October 2026. Both appear in coded research data (Lawrence et al., 2022), as described below, so we can say how often people use them, but not who used them first.

How often do the terms appear in reports?

The best numbers come from a 2022 study that manually coded every DMT experience posted to the r/DMT Reddit community over ten years, 3,778 experiences from 3,305 posts (Lawrence et al., 2022). The table sets each term beside the wider category it belongs to. Percentages are of all 3,778 experiences. Evidence: preliminary; the posters were self-selected, and the counts measure what people chose to write, not what everyone experiences.

What is the DMT waiting room?

In user accounts, “the waiting room” is a room-like space that some people say they arrive in, sometimes before or instead of a fuller scene. Rooms in general were common in the 2022 coding: 582 experiences (15.4%) described being inside a room, and 105 (2.8%) named “the waiting room” specifically. Other rooms were described as sterile, clean or functional, including medical, operating or examination rooms (88, 2.3%), and some as geometric, fractal or multi-coloured (Lawrence et al., 2022). So the waiting room is a well-known label, but most people who described a room did not use it. Evidence: preliminary; self-selected reports.

What is “the dome”?

“The dome” refers to a vaulted, domed space. St John links the image to McKenna’s 1994 description and notes that it also appears in forum posts and in an account from a volunteer in Rick Strassman’s 1990s study (St John, 2017). In the 2022 coding it was rare: 22 experiences (0.6%) described being inside a domed or large spherical space (Lawrence et al., 2022). The gap between how famous the dome is and how seldom it was reported is a useful warning about relying on well-known stories. Evidence: preliminary.

What is the DMT chrysanthemum?

“The chrysanthemum” is a name for a flower-like, radiating geometric pattern, a name McKenna is credited with popularising (St John, 2017). Geometric imagery itself is one of the most common features of DMT reports: fractals, geometric shapes and patterns appeared in 1,231 experiences (32.6%), including kaleidoscopes (2.2%), mandalas (1.2%) and sacred geometry (0.6%), while the chrysanthemum by name appeared in 32 (0.8%) (Lawrence et al., 2022). Evidence: established that geometric imagery is common in reports; preliminary for the exact figures.

Why might geometry be so common? A mathematical model offers one idea. The neurologist Heinrich Klüver grouped geometric hallucinations into four “form constants”: lattices and honeycombs, cobwebs, tunnels and funnels, and spirals. A 2001 paper showed that when the primary visual cortex becomes unstable, the cortex’s own wiring could produce exactly those shapes (Bressloff et al., 2001). It is a model, not a DMT experiment, and it covers simple geometry only, not scenes, rooms or beings. Evidence: preliminary, as a hypothesis.

What is the “carrier wave” or buzzing?

Many reports describe a sound or vibration early on. In the 2022 coding, an auditory ringing-type sound was described in 583 experiences (15.4%), with descriptors including ringing, buzzing, humming, static, droning and an “auditory carrier wave”. Separately, a bodily vibration, buzz or tingling appeared in 1,026 (27.2%) (Lawrence et al., 2022). Evidence: preliminary; self-selected reports.

Lab and text-mining studies point the same way. The 2026 lab interview study also distinguished abstract sounds “such as a buzzing, or ringing sound” from sounds of recognisable things, and found bodily effects typically came before visual and auditory ones (Sanders et al., 2026). A 2022 text-mining study of 6,850 drug reports found “buzz” among words on an auditory factor, beside ringing, tone and tinnitus (Ballentine et al., 2022). Evidence: established that sound and vibration are commonly reported; the reports are subjective.

What does “hyperspace” mean in DMT reports?

“Hyperspace” is the umbrella word for the sense of having entered other dimensions. In the 2022 coding, alternate or higher dimensions appeared in 952 experiences (25.2%), with hyperspace named in 646 (17.1%), four- or five-dimensional experience in 56 (1.5%) and one- or two-dimensional experience in 30 (0.8%) (Lawrence et al., 2022). Evidence: preliminary; self-selected reports.

Earlier research describes the same sense of replacement. A 2021 field study, reviewing earlier work, summarises one prior analysis in which ordinary experience was supplanted by “DMT hyperspace” (Michael et al., 2021). Strassman’s 1994 study described effects that completely replaced the volunteers’ ongoing mental experience and felt more vivid than dreams or waking awareness (Strassman et al., 1994). The word describes how the experience felt; it is not evidence that other dimensions exist. Evidence: established as common reported content; what it means is unresolved.

For how researchers measure the moment people call “breaking through” into this space, see what is a DMT breakthrough.

Do shared labels shape what people report?

Possibly, and the researchers who did the counting say so. Among their limitations, the 2022 authors write that previous reports on the platform may influence the experiences and reporting of other users, and that this is evident in “the recurrent invocation of specific terminology and labels” for novel phenomena, with “machine elves” as their example (Lawrence et al., 2022); our article on machine elves follows that label’s history. They also note that Reddit users are likely not representative of DMT users at large and may be more likely to post interesting or meaningful experiences. Evidence: established as a limitation; the size of the effect is unresolved.

Three lines of evidence from outside DMT research suggest why this matters:

• Culture and context. An 18-month ethnography at a shamanic centre in the Peruvian Amazon argues that cultural background and social interactions organise not only how people interpret visions but their very content, through the education of attention, categorising perceptions and shaping expectations (Dupuis, 2022). That was ayahuasca in one centre, not DMT on its own.
• Culture and sleep paralysis. In general-population samples, 25% of people in Denmark and 44% in Egypt reported sleep paralysis, and in Egypt believing it had a supernatural cause was linked to more fear and longer episodes (Jalal and Hinton, 2013). Causation could run either way.
• Expectation and noisy signals. In a preregistered study, people who expected more voices in noise reported detecting more of them, and the effect was strongest when the sound was unreliable (Szymanek et al., 2024). That was a hearing task, not a drug study.

Within DMT research itself, expectation has been shown to change intensity: identical doses were rated less intense when given open-label, step by step, than when given blind (Erne et al., 2026). That study did not look at content. We found no controlled study that has manipulated what people expect to see on DMT and measured whether they then report waiting rooms, domes or chrysanthemums. Evidence: preliminary for expectation effects in general; unresolved for DMT vocabulary.

What we still don’t know

• Who first used “the waiting room” and “the carrier wave”; we found no documented origin (unresolved).
• How common these features are in people who do not post online; all the counts here come from self-selected reports (unresolved).
• Whether learning the vocabulary in advance changes what people experience or only how they describe it; no controlled DMT study has tested it (unresolved).
• Whether the form-constant model explains DMT geometry; it has not been tested with DMT (preliminary, as a hypothesis).
• Why some well-known images, like the dome, are rare in systematic counts (unresolved).

For the wider picture, read what is DMT and what researchers have recorded about entities, and see how psilocybin, LSD and DMT differ.

Shroomverse sells mushroom products. This article is general information about the vocabulary people use to describe DMT experiences. It is not medical, legal or purchasing advice, and it does not recommend any product.