The DMT Entities: A Field Guide from the DMT-Nexus

Consciousness by The Archivist · October 29, 2026 · 16 min read

The DMT-Nexus is one of the oldest online communities devoted to dimethyltryptamine, the short-acting psychedelic that its members usually call "the spice." It has two halves: a forum, where people have posted questions and experience reports since the mid-2000s, and a wiki, where the community collects what it thinks it has learned. Tucked into that wiki is a page called the Hyperspace lexicon. It is part dictionary and part bestiary, and it is the closest thing the community has to a field guide for the realm its members call hyperspace and the beings they say live there.

The project began in July 2009, when a member named vegantoker opened two forum threads, "Proposed project to better understand Hyperspace" and the "Hyperspace Lexicon work thread." His argument was simple. People come back from a DMT experience with a strong impression and no words for it, and he wondered whether the lack of words was part of why the experience is so hard to remember. His proposal was to build a descriptive vocabulary on the model of medicine or botany, agreed by consensus and housed on the wiki. "Imagine for a moment what having even 50 more words to describe your trip would do," he wrote. Over the following years other members added terms, and from 2011 a separate effort grew up to classify the entities.

Why does this catalogue interest people who have never been near the substance? Mainly because of one claim: that strangers, with no contact with each other, report meeting the same kinds of beings. Elves, jesters, insect-like aliens, a vast feminine presence, beings of pure light. If that is true, it begs for an explanation. But the caveats are just as obvious, and it is worth stating them at the start. Almost everyone who takes DMT today has already heard what they are supposed to see. Terence McKenna's "self-transforming machine elves" have been part of the culture since the 1990s. Members of a forum read each other's reports and borrow each other's words. And the people who write long, vivid accounts are not a random sample of everyone who has had the experience. A catalogue like this one records what a community reports and how it talks. It cannot, by itself, tell us what is really there.

DMT chart: first hit, second hit (waiting room), third hit (breakthrough)Saved from Reddit; original creator unknown.

What follows is my own summary of the lexicon, with short quotations where the wording matters. The original text belongs to the DMT-Nexus and its contributors, and no license is stated for it, so I have not reproduced it. Anyone who wants the full entries should read the DMT-Nexus wiki, Hyperspace lexicon directly, or its archived copy from June 2026. Nothing here is advice about taking any substance.

The beings

The lexicon opens its entity section by declining to settle the big question. The encounters are deep, powerful and often feel more real than real, it says, "whether products of our subconscious, or real creatures with individual existence." It then offers not one classification but three, and it is candid about the limits of each.

The first is the "traditional" catalogue, a loose collection gathered from many people over many years and dating back, the page says, to McKenna's time. The second was written by a single member, Hyperspace Fool, from what he describes as 35 years of his own experience, which includes lucid dreaming as well as DMT. The wiki notes that his sole authorship makes it tidy, and also that this leaves open whether it describes DMT experiences in general. The third comes from one very long 2014 report by a member called NGC_2264, and the wiki attaches a strong warning to it, which I come to below.

The traditional classification

These are the beings most people mean when they talk about DMT entities. The wiki itself admits that some may overlap: the Machine Elves and the Light Beings might be one perception under two names, and so might the Machine Elves' Queen and the Mother Goddess.

Being	Also called	In brief	Setting
Machine Elves	Tykes; McKenna's "self-transforming machine elves"	Described as "the primary inhabitants of the Hyperspace." Shape-shifting beings that seem to live in, and be part of, rooms that fold around the visitor.	Breakthrough hyperspace; the Folding Rooms
Machine Elves' Queen	Elf goddess (in the 2012 version of the page)	The source behind the whole experience. Meeting her is the realization that every pattern and elf you have seen was her all along: "You finally 'get it'."	The deepest breakthroughs
Mother Goddess	Compared to Isis, Ostara, Mother Mary	A huge, radiant, caring feminine presence that seems to take away all pain. Sometimes appears only as scattered feminine images, at once maternal and sensual.	Near the Central Light
Light Beings	None given	Beings made entirely of light, too bright for their faces to be made out. The wiki calls them "always very benign, often connected to the Central Light."	Hyperspace
Archangels	None given	A ruling order above the ordinary Light Beings, distinguished by their skill at entering and overseeing deeper levels of hyperspace.	Deeper levels
Jesters	Clowns	Clown-like beings who try to drag the visitor into their act. They can feel bullying and mocking, or freeing, as if one were finally let in on the joke.	Hyperspace
The Logos	Universal Mind, Gaian Mind	An all-encompassing mind, often read as God or as the supreme being of the visitor's own religion.	The "End of the Line"
Tapestries	None given	Flat-seeming but somehow more than three-dimensional. Alien and usually indifferent to the visitor, yet unmistakably alive.	Patterned surfaces of hyperspace
Dark entities	Malignant entities	Deliberately left undescribed. The advice is not to dwell on them or seek them out, and to protect oneself through love and forgiveness and by keeping company with the friendlier beings.	Anywhere

Hyperspace Fool's classification

In August 2011 Hyperspace Fool posted "Additions to the ENTITIES section" to the forum, and another member later formatted it into the wiki as a separate scheme. He was modest about it, calling the names "merely my personal lexicon," and he skipped the beings already well covered, such as the Mother Goddess and the machine elves, many of which he thought were subtypes of the elves anyway. His key idea is to sort beings by where they live. Some live in hyperspace itself. Some live in other realms that one can glimpse from hyperspace, as if through a mirror or from a lift that stops at different floors. And some are here on Earth all along, visible only in a heightened state. He also gives many of the hyperspace natives an "essential nature," a single quality they seem to exist to express.

One note in his preface is worth keeping in mind. Many of these beings, he says, seem more interested in each other than in us, and treat a human visitor rather as we might treat a kitten poking its head out of a bush.

Beings that live in hyperspace

Circus Ringleaders. Showmen in tailcoats and top hats who point out the sights with a cane and announce performances staged for the visitor. Among the first "greeters" one meets. Essential nature: entertainment and showmanship.
Flirty Fairies. Winged or nymph-like female figures, pulsing with light, who pose and play in a near-burlesque way. He stresses that they do this for women too, and reads it not as sexual but as an overflow of their beauty. Essential nature: beauty.
Geniuses, or Genii. Aloof figures in elaborate chairs who regard the visitor with disdain. When they bother to move they are impossibly fast, appear behind you, and answer questions before you ask them. He compares them to popular images of the devil, though more refined. Essential nature: guile and logic.
Hyperspace Jesters, or Harlequins. Dressed like medieval fools but highly intelligent. They show the visitor objects, especially what he calls hyperspace tarot cards, each packed with information. Possibly the same species as the machine elves, off duty. Essential nature: craft.
Morphos. Unstable beings that rise out of the colourful goo of hyperspace like waves and can set into mythological shapes: dragons, sphinxes, phoenixes, minotaurs, Quetzalcoatl. Essential nature: guidance and wisdom.
Plant and Object Devas. Intelligent beings that look more like plants or objects than creatures. They unfold and flower, and the visitor can share their ecstasy telepathically. Essential nature: mysteries and ecstasy.

Beings from neighbouring realms

Aliens. Beings so foreign they sit outside human myth: insect-like figures such as the often reported praying mantis types, reptilians, and shapeless intelligences. Less frightening than they look, he says, and mainly interested in studying how far humans have come.
Elementals. Primal beings tied to fire, water, earth, air or space, with subtypes such as metal, wood and ice.
Gods and Goddesses. Figures resembling Hindu, Egyptian, Mayan, Celtic, African and unrecognizable deities, though "more sci-fi than you would imagine them from only reading sacred books." Usually compassionate, and rarely more than one per journey.
Dream Wizards. Gandalf types in fancier robes, living in monasteries, castles and cities like Roger Dean album covers. They mostly ignore visitors. "The most intelligent human being of all time is a rank idiot next to them."

Local entities

The last group, he says, is always here and can be seen only when one's perception is raised close to theirs, with eyes open or just after the peak, and more easily outdoors.

Local Aliens. Including the familiar Greys, sometimes watched in turn by two or three levels of higher beings. Some are as vast as the moon.
Angels. Not always the pop-culture kind. They give off light and watch over the people present, and some people seem to have a couple of guardians.
Other Awakened Humans. People travelling away from their bodies, perhaps dreaming or projecting.
Ghosts. Disembodied humans, lost or fixed on some task.
Ascended Masters and Buddhas. Enlightened beings who watch from clouds and high places without desire, and whose chanting seems to lift up whatever it touches.
Spirits. Energy or emotional beings attached to particular places.

NGC_2264's list, and the wiki's warning

The third scheme is very different in tone. In December 2014 a member called NGC_2264 posted a long report titled "A warning to my fellow psychonauts regarding hyperspace entities." It mixes DMT experiences with lucid dreams and ordinary dreams, and it describes a hierarchy of beings that first presented themselves as teachers and then, in the author's telling, turned out to be deceivers. The wiki includes an excerpt "primarily for completeness," and prefaces it with an unusually blunt note: the report details extreme psychological distress, appears to chronicle a psychotic break, and is "not indicative of typical or common entity encounters on DMT." I have summarized it in that spirit, as one person's account and not as a map.

The author divides the beings into lesser ones, who were with him constantly, and greater ones, who visited briefly and were far more powerful.

Group	Beings	In brief
Lesser beings	The Guide, the Dream Teacher, the Director, the Conductor	A gentle teacher who served as the main point of contact; a more powerful figure in lucid dreams; a "director" who staged allegorical visions; and a composer of their soundtracks. The author suspects several are one entity wearing different faces.
Lesser beings	The Tormentor, the Faceless Goons, the Succubus Twins, the Imps	A shadowy pursuer, groups of faceless attackers, two alluring figures who seemed to "feed" on him, and playful beings with a cruel streak that he likens to the machine elves.
Lesser beings	The Human Spirits, the Straw Men, the Theatre Troupe, the Strange Visitors	Human-seeming peers who steered him by social pressure, foolish figures held up as bad examples, performers in symbolic stage shows, and odd "visitors" who revered a being called The Spider.
Greater beings	The Cosmic Horrors, the Bride of the Devil, the Triad, the Legion	Terrifying, controlling presences: a vain woman in red who claimed to own him, a trio of sprites that induced something like possession, and a vast army of conquest.
Other beings	The High Priestess, the Talking Heads, the Soul Surgeons, the Source, the World Eaters, and others	Rarer encounters, including a robed priestess, disembodied faces met while rushing through a tunnel, beings of light who seemed to operate on him, a dazzling "Source" he came to distrust, and an insect-like hive that consumes worlds.

Read with the wiki's warning in mind, the list is a reminder that the catalogue does not only describe benign beings. But some of its details do echo the wider literature: the mantis-like insect figures, the cosmic serpents, the beings who perform surgery, the gods from many cultures. Whether that is because the experiences share a source, or because the author had read the same reports as everyone else, is exactly the kind of question this material cannot answer.

The language

The other half of the lexicon is a glossary the wiki calls "Spice Slang." It describes the jargon as more playful and metaphorical than ordinary language, full of in-jokes and deliberate misspellings. Some entries are borrowed from older traditions, some from physics, and some are coinages built from Greek roots in the spirit of vegantoker's medical model. Below are about thirty-five of the most interesting, in my own words. The full list has 69 terms and lives at the source. I have left out the entries that concern preparing or taking the substance.

Term	Meaning (paraphrased)
Breakthrough	The central event: passing fully out of ordinary experience into hyperspace. Described as timeless, synaesthetic, sharp-edged and crystalline, overwhelmingly energetic, and oddly familiar.
Hyperspace	The realm reached after breakthrough, where anything can happen and everything feels more real than everyday life.
In-Between	The stage just before breakthrough, when one has left ordinary reality but not yet arrived. Bodily tensions and daily worries can surface here.
Waiting Room	A holographic landscape like a game lobby, staffed by telepathic "ushers," and said to be a point of arrival and departure for the recently dead.
The Chrysanthemum	A giant spinning, dome-like fractal flower that acts as a doorway, either inviting the visitor in or barring the way.
Carrier wave	A high ringing tone or vibration heard at the start, felt through the whole body and seeming to dissolve the surroundings.
Acceleration, acute	A rising, quickening vibration felt as one approaches breakthrough.
Dimensional Elevator	A small space that seems to rise at great speed through higher dimensions, opening at intervals onto new rooms.
Folding Rooms	Multidimensional spaces, associated with the elves, that fold in on themselves and wrap around the visitor.
Central Light	An overwhelming, intelligent light at the core of the experience, often interpreted as Christ, Buddha, Krishna or another ultimate figure.
End of the Line	A breakthrough that feels like reaching the absolute point of existence. The wiki adds a sensible rider: "It may very well not be true at all, but for you subjectively it feels as if."
Hyperreal	The unshakeable sense, during the experience, that it is real, and more real than ordinary life.
Consensus reality	Everyday waking reality, the world we can all agree about.
Ego death	Complete loss of the sense of self. Members distinguished a "soft" form, where a bare self remains aware, from a "hard" form, where the boundary between self and universe disappears. Others argued it is a continuum.
The Void	A state of nothingness without time or meaning, which can bring fear or a strange peace, and raises the puzzle of who is perceiving the nothing.
Shut-out	When hyperspace simply will not open. In the wiki's phrase, "sometimes you just aren't let into the club by the bouncers." The advice is not to push.
Hyperslap	A harrowing, punishing experience, felt as a lesson for disrespect or for forcing one's way in. The wiki says it is "not a single slap, but a full-on beatdown."
Jimjam	The squishy, sticky, multicoloured raw material of hyperspace from which anything can be made.
Plasmatis	A close cousin of jimjam: the shifting, glowing gel that decorates everything in the land of the elves.
Schnörkel	From the German for a flourish: the spirals, filigree and ornament on every hyperspace surface, constantly being redesigned. The wiki offers it as noun, verb and adjective.
Mangotanglement	A tangle of organic-looking objects and grids of light-dots, pulsing in waves, often seen at the start.
Candyland and Legoland	Ordinary reality, or a realm, that looks polished and toy-like, made of candy or of Lego bricks, and evokes childhood wonder.
CEV, OEV, FIV	Closed-eye visuals, open-eye visuals, and full-immersion visuals, the last being so intense that one is inside them.
SPO	Static Pattern Overlay: ordinary surfaces showing clear patterns, faces or carvings that are hard to tell from normal sight.
Superposition	Borrowed from quantum physics: an ordinary object or person seems to shift position or be in two places, governed by meaning rather than physics.
Dimensional Rift	A line that splits perception so two different scenes are seen at once on either side.
Kinesioöptic	The body itself seeming to see, sensing light directly once the sense of body dissolves.
Kalonkinesioöptic	The same perception of light carrying an overwhelming, Platonic beauty, from the Greek kalon.
Ontoseismic	From Greek for "being" and "earthquake": the shock of having one's whole worldview shattered, which can feel traumatic and then freeing.
Eschatothesia	The sense of a huge future event casting its shadow backwards, from eschaton, the end of an age.
Pre-flight anxiety	The fear just before setting out, which the wiki calls the little brother of eschatothesia. It often fades once the experience begins.
The Akashic Book	A book written in light, in a language one cannot read but somehow understands, that flickers in and out of existence.
Gifts	Objects the entities present to visitors, such as orbs, glyphs and sculptures, whose meaning usually escapes them.
Soul Surgery	Being taken apart and operated on by otherworldly doctors or machines, a common theme that the wiki compares to alien abduction reports and shamanic initiation.
Audio windup	As the entities leave, their speech turns into a rising, ringing buzz that fades away.
Throat Marble	The feeling of a ball in the throat and of not needing to breathe.
Planck time and Time travel	Time compressing until it seems to stop, and the sense of stepping outside the timeline, or of reliving forgotten moments from childhood.
Mental Backflip	A meditative move, short of ego death, of stepping back from one's thoughts and watching them pass, used to steady a difficult experience.
DMT Fold	The sense, on return, of complex realities folding down into simpler, ordinary ones.
Exploring	The afterglow on return, when ordinary surroundings seem new and alive.
Love and Forgiveness	Included, the wiki says, half-jokingly, but meant seriously: giving love and forgiving oneself are offered as the best protection against darkness.
SWIM	"Someone who isn't me," an old forum habit of disguising oneself, now discouraged.

Read as a whole, the glossary is revealing in a way the entity lists are not. It shows a community trying to name a sequence (the build-up, the threshold, the arrival, the return) and inventing words for experiences that ordinary language treats as one blur. Whatever one makes of the beings, that effort is a genuine piece of folk phenomenology.

The 2008 Synchronized Hyperspace Event

The lexicon has a curious predecessor. The wiki records that on August 9, 2008, at 8:00 pm GMT, people around the world tried to meet each other in hyperspace. Participants were asked to aim, in their minds, for Stonehenge, and each chose a glyph and a catchphrase, a "hyperphrase," so that others might recognize them there. The hope was to find some shared link between minds.

By the wiki's own account, many people expressed interest but only a handful took part at the set time. Most reported entities of various kinds: snakes, aliens, godlike beings and human-like, often female, figures, along with kaleidoscopic imagery and distortions of time. The page does not record anyone recognizing another participant's glyph or phrase, which was the actual test. It is an honest little record of an experiment that did not produce the result it hoped for.

What to make of it

Those who take the catalogue at face value read it as a map of a real place. On this view, hyperspace is an independent realm, the entities are autonomous intelligences, and the reason strangers describe similar beings is that they are meeting the same inhabitants. Supporters point to the sense of hyperreality that nearly everyone reports, to the feeling of meeting something with its own will and agenda, and to the way the encounters seem to resemble far older accounts of spirits, gods and otherworld journeys.

Skeptics see something else. DMT acts powerfully on the brain's serotonin system, and a brain flooded with intense, rapid imagery will tend to find faces, agents and meaning in it, as it does in ordinary life. Expectation shapes experience, and almost no one now arrives without expectations. McKenna's vivid descriptions of chattering elves and his talk of hyperspace have shaped the language people reach for, and a forum that builds a shared vocabulary may be shaping reports as much as recording them. A catalogue built by consensus is also, by design, a catalogue of what a group came to agree on. And the people who post detailed reports, or who keep returning, are not typical of everyone who has tried it.

The wiki itself sits somewhere between the two. It refuses to decide whether the beings are products of the subconscious or real, it flags its single-author schemes as personal, and it warns readers away from treating one disturbing report as typical. That is a more careful stance than much of the writing on the subject.

There is now some formal research on the question. In 2020 a team at Johns Hopkins led by Alan K. Davis, with Roland Griffiths among the authors, published "Survey of entity encounter experiences occasioned by inhaled N,N-dimethyltryptamine" in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. They surveyed 2,561 people online about their most memorable encounter. Respondents most often described the entity as a being, guide, spirit, alien or helper, and the contact as mainly visual and telepathic. About 41 percent reported fear, but love, kindness and joy were the strongest emotions reported, both in themselves and in the entity. Most rated the encounter as highly meaningful, and many reported lasting changes in their outlook. The authors noted the resemblance to entity experiences in religious visions, alien abduction accounts and near-death experiences. The study does not settle what the entities are, and as a self-selected online survey it is open to the same selection effects as the forum. But it does confirm, on a larger scale, that the core of what the DMT-Nexus catalogued is widely reported.

Perhaps the fairest conclusion is that the Hyperspace lexicon is two things at once. It is a record of what thousands of people say happened to them, and it is a record of how a community taught itself to say it. Both are worth having, and neither should be mistaken for the other.

Sources

DMT-Nexus wiki, Hyperspace lexicon. Live page: wiki.dmt-nexus.me/Hyperspace_lexicon (last edited August 12, 2024; consulted October 28, 2026). All entity and glossary summaries above are paraphrased from this page, with short attributed quotations.
Wayback Machine snapshots of the Hyperspace lexicon: June 18, 2026; June 18, 2016 (version of July 2015); September 3, 2012 (version of January 2012, earliest with the entity section). The old addresses /Entity and /Hyperspace redirect to it.
DMT-Nexus wiki, Synchronized Hyperspace Event: live page; Wayback snapshot, August 6, 2026.
vegantoker, "Proposed project to better understand Hyperspace," DMT-Nexus forum, July 2, 2009: forum; archived.
vegantoker, "Hyperspace Lexicon work thread," DMT-Nexus forum, July 4, 2009: forum; archived.
Hyperspace Fool, "Additions to the ENTITIES section," DMT-Nexus forum, August 31, 2011: forum; archived.
Hyperspace Fool, "Spice Slang," DMT-Nexus forum, September 1, 2011: forum; archived.
NGC_2264, "A warning to my fellow psychonauts regarding hyperspace entities," DMT-Nexus forum, December 6, 2014: forum; archived.
Davis, A. K., Clifton, J. M., Weaver, E. G., Hurwitz, E. S., Johnson, M. W., and Griffiths, R. R. (2020). "Survey of entity encounter experiences occasioned by inhaled N,N-dimethyltryptamine: Phenomenology, interpretation, and enduring effects." Journal of Psychopharmacology 34(9), 1008 to 1020. doi:10.1177/0269881120916143.