“More real than real”, or “hyperreal”, describes the sense that a DMT experience felt more real than everyday life. How common it is depends on how you ask. In a 2020 survey of 2,561 self-selected people describing their most memorable DMT entity encounter (Davis et al., 2020), 81% reported it as more real than everyday reality, according to a later field study that compared results (Michael et al., 2021). Yet in 3,778 unprompted online reports, only 22 (0.6%) said so (Lawrence et al., 2022).
The feeling is not unique to DMT. In a 2019 survey of “God encounter” experiences, people whose encounter happened without any drug rated it 72.7 out of 100 for being more real than everyday consciousness, against 77.5 for DMT encounters (Griffiths et al., 2019).
Brain research suggests “real” is a judgment the brain makes. In a 2023 study, people imagining a faint pattern were more likely to judge a real faint pattern as real when it matched what they imagined, which the authors link to how strong the signal felt (Dijkstra and Fleming, 2023). No one has measured that reality judgment under DMT. A feeling of realness shows how intense an experience is, not whether its contents exist.
Sources
- Davis et al., 2020, Journal of Psychopharmacology: survey of entity encounters
- Lawrence et al., 2022, Scientific Reports: 3,778 coded DMT reports
- Griffiths et al., 2019, PLoS One: survey of God encounter experiences
- Dijkstra and Fleming, 2023, Nature Communications: signal strength and reality judgments
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