The DMT dream hypothesis is the idea that the visions of dreaming come from the body’s own psychedelic tryptamines, such as DMT. The scientific version dates to 1988, when J.C. Callaway proposed such a mechanism and suggested a protocol to test it (Callaway, 198890064-3)). A 2018 review describes it as a hypothesis that remains to be tested (Barker, 2018). No study has measured DMT in the human brain during sleep.
There are real resemblances. In a 2019 Imperial College study of 13 volunteers, slow delta and theta brain rhythms emerged at the peak of the DMT experience, and the authors noted that these rhythms have classically been linked to dreaming (Timmermann et al., 2019). But the study recorded people awake under DMT and did not record anyone asleep, so the signals were never compared directly.
Language studies give a mixed picture. A 2018 analysis comparing drug reports with dream reports found that hallucinogens as a class read most like dreams, with LSD, not DMT, ranked highest for similarity to lucid dreams (Sanz et al., 2018). Resemblance is not mechanism, and the claim that you release DMT every night is unsupported.
Sources
- Callaway, 1988, Medical Hypotheses: a proposed mechanism for the visions of dream sleep
- Barker, 2018, Frontiers in Neuroscience: DMT, an endogenous hallucinogen
- Timmermann et al., 2019, Scientific Reports: EEG of the DMT experience
- Sanz et al., 2018, Frontiers in Neuroscience: drug reports compared with dream reports
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