“Reality switch” comes from the title of Andrew Gallimore’s 2022 book, Reality Switch Technologies: Psychedelics as Tools for the Discovery and Exploration of New Worlds (Open Library). Gallimore is a researcher whose DMT papers list the Computational Neuroscience Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology.
The core idea runs through his papers. In 2016 he and Rick Strassman wrote that DMT users consistently report the complete replacement of normal experience with a novel “alternate universe”, often densely populated with complex visual content and what appear to be sentient beings (Gallimore and Strassman, 2016). On this view DMT does not merely distort the familiar world; it swaps it for another. The replacement is what users report. Reading it as access to another world is a hypothesis no study has tested.
In 2026 he and two co-authors posted a preprint, not peer reviewed, proposing experiments to test whether DMT entities are independent of the person, using extended-state infusions; none has been run (Gallimore, Hermansson and Hoffman, 2026). A rival 2026 model in a peer-reviewed journal explains entity encounters as the brain attributing its own content to someone else (Mago et al., 2026). The question stays open.
Sources
- Gallimore and Strassman, 2016, Frontiers in Pharmacology: model for a prolonged DMT experience
- Gallimore, Hermansson and Hoffman, 2026, PsyArXiv preprint: are DMT entities real?
- Mago et al., 2026, Neuroscience of Consciousness: computational spirits
- Reality Switch Technologies (Gallimore, 2022), Open Library record
Last checked .