Machine Elf - Other Mentions of The DMT Elves

Other Mentions of The DMT Elves

McKenna was not the first to experience or report DMT elves, even if they probably owe most of their popularization to him. In an article published in The Journal of Mental Science (now the British Journal of Psychiatry) in 1958 under the title “Dimethyltryptamine Experiments with Psychotics”, researcher Stephen Szara (the chemist who first studied the human effects of DMT) talked about how one of his subjects under the influence of DMT had experienced “strange creatures, dwarves or something” at the beginning of the trip.

In a book entitled Psychedelic Monographs and Essays Volume 5, Peter Meyer, a philosopher, mathematician and developer of Terence McKenna's "Timewave Zero" software, spoke about the DMT elves. He reported a subject's experience of the elves after ingestion of DMT: "The elves were dancing in and out of the multidimensional visible language matrix". Meyer associates this experience with that talked about by Walter Evans-Wentz, who expressed that a world of entities such as fairies and elves exists "as a supernormal state of consciousness into which men and women may enter temporarily in dreams, trances, or in various ecstatic conditions". Meyer believes that the objective space that one may enter on DMT, and the faerie world described by Evans-Wentz, are one and the same.

Psychiatrist Rick Strassman, who made extensive research on DMT, encountered many DMT smokers who had experienced beings similar to McKenna's machine elves. Since, at the time, all of the subjects were from California, his first guess was that this was a just a "West Coast eccentricity". In Strassmans words, "Also surprising were the common themes of what these beings were doing with so many of our volunteers: manipulating, communicating, showing, helping, questioning. It was definitely a two-way street".

The subject of machine elves is one that occupies the works of author and scientist Cliff Pickover and has been a major theme in his book Sex, Drugs, Einstein, & Elves.