The DMT waiting room is a community name for a room-like space some people say they arrive in during a DMT experience. It belongs to a small shared vocabulary: “the dome”, a vaulted space; “the chrysanthemum”, a flower-like geometric pattern; “the carrier wave”, a buzzing or ringing sound; and “hyperspace”.
These words are rarer than their fame suggests. When researchers coded 3,778 online reports in 2022, the waiting room appeared in 2.8% (105 reports), hyperspace in 17.1%, the chrysanthemum in 0.8% and a domed space in 0.6% (Lawrence et al., 2022).
Some of the words have a known popularizer. The anthropologist Graham St John identifies Terence McKenna, in a 1994 talk, as the lead commentator on the dome and the chrysanthemum, and notes that samples of McKenna’s voice in electronic music spread them further (St John, 2017). St John does not say McKenna coined them, and no documented first use of “the waiting room” turned up in the sources the site checked.
The key caveat is that shared labels may shape what people later report. Someone who has read about the waiting room may describe a room in those words. So the vocabulary maps how people talk, not places that many people visit.
Sources
- Lawrence et al., 2022, Scientific Reports: 3,778 coded DMT reports
- St John, 2017, Chacruna: the DMT trip and the mysteries of hyperspace travel
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