How DMT Banned me · SoberCuriousRecovery

How DMT Banned me

I saw this youtube video on DMT. It talked about how the drug would ban people from using it. If "it " (The entities) felt it (the sacred medicine) was being used for recreational or non wholesome reason they would ban you. Also, as I leaned they don't like it when you show up drunk off your ass. Check out the video link below. And for the love of God comment if this article resonates. Let's build a community.

Out of the Trees

It was early summer in Florida, and I was there on business.

The air felt thick the way it only does in Florida, like you could wear it instead of breathe it. Even in the evening there was heat radiating off the pavement, palm trees standing still against a violet sky, the whole state seeming to hum with mosquitoes, neon, and bad decisions. I had flown in to see a client in Jacksonville, the kind of guys who liked to work hard during the day and then spend the night proving to themselves they were still wild. They were heavy partiers, old-school in their appetite, and I spent a couple of days with them doing business by daylight and drifting into long, lubricated nights after dark.

I had always been what people politely call a heavy drinker. Not the kind of drinker who needed a reason. If anything, I needed a reason not to drink. Drinking had a way of making life feel briefly possible. It softened the edges, dimmed the static, made me feel less trapped inside myself. For a few hours, the world seemed more open, more forgiving. Or maybe I just became less aware of the cage.

By the time I finished with the client in Jacksonville, I had an idea. Since I was already in Florida, I’d drive down and see an old friend in St. Petersburg, a guy I hadn’t seen in years. Let’s call him Brian. We’d been through enough life together that I could already imagine the tone of the reunion: good stories, easy laughs, a few drinks that would become too many.

Brian was dating a woman I hadn’t met yet, and the three of us agreed to meet up that evening. St. Petersburg had that loose coastal feeling to it, breezy and bohemian, the kind of place where every bar seems to have a patio and every patio seems to promise one more round. It was one of those evenings where the sky stayed bright longer than it should have, the light lingering over the buildings while the streets filled with people who looked like they had nowhere urgent to be.

We started with cocktails.

They went down easy.

Then they went down easier.

We bar-hopped through the little downtown, slipping in and out of places with warm lights and cold glasses, talking loud and laughing louder. Brian was in great form, the way old friends sometimes are when enough time has passed that every story feels polished by memory. His girlfriend was sharp and funny and seemed to understand his rhythms, which made me like her immediately. The night had the feeling of a movie montage, one perfect spot folding into the next, the kind of night you assume will stay harmless because it begins so pleasantly.

We stopped for dinner somewhere along the way, though I can barely remember what we ate. Food was just a pause between drinks. The real event was the feeling—of reunion, of momentum, of being briefly untethered from consequence. By the end of the night, everything had that warm, forgiving blur that alcohol gives you before it starts collecting payment.

Eventually I was ready to head back to my hotel. But Brian and his girlfriend invited me back to their apartment for one last drink, or maybe one last conversation, or maybe because none of us wanted the night to admit it was over. I said yes.

The apartment had the casual disarray of people still young enough to live for the moment—empty glasses, low lamps, music equipment, ashtrays, a lived-in feeling. There was a patio off the main room overlooking a parking lot and, beyond it, a line of dense Florida trees. Bushy, overgrown, ordinary-looking in the way that makes you not look at them twice.

Brian disappeared for a minute and came back holding a DMT vape pen.

He asked me if I wanted to try it.

I had never done DMT before. I knew the reputation. I knew enough to know it wasn’t like taking a few hits off a joint or easing into mushrooms over the course of an afternoon. DMT belonged to another category, a substance people talked about with a mix of reverence and lunacy, like they were describing a place rather than a drug. Under other circumstances maybe I would have hesitated. But I had been drinking all night, I was feeling no pain, and curiosity has always had a way of dressing itself up as courage.

Brian gave me instructions in the calm, serious tone people use when they’re about to hand you a live wire.

“You have to hit it deep,” he said. “A couple of big pulls. Hold it in. If you do it right, you’ll blast off.”

Then he put on music.

Heavy dubstep.

The bass filled the room first, low and mechanical, a grinding pulse that seemed less like music than machinery waking up beneath the floorboards. It was dark and physical and strangely ceremonial, all those deep wobbling tones and fractured beats. It made the room feel charged. It made the air feel inhabited. It was as if he had chosen a soundtrack not for listening, but for crossing a threshold.

We stepped out onto the patio.

I remember the pen in my hand, metallic and warm.

I remember the smell of summer and distant pavement and the faint sweetness of whatever flowering thing was blooming somewhere nearby.

I remember taking the first pull and feeling the vapor hit my lungs with a taste that was somehow both chemical and ancient, like plastic and mothballs and incense and burnt flowers. I held it in.

Then another.

By the time I took the third hit, the world began to loosen.

Not gradually. Not politely.

Reality didn’t fade. It broke open.

The bass from the dubstep didn’t just stay in the background; it entered me. It became architecture. The low end rippled through my body like a second heartbeat, and each drop in the music seemed to bend the air itself. The patio railing started to shimmer. Space folded. The night became layered, as if what I had thought was solid reality was just a thin painted screen and something vast and intelligent had been waiting directly behind it the whole time.

The trees across the parking lot changed first.

What had been an ordinary line of leafy brush became impossibly vivid, hyper-detailed, alive with intention. Every leaf looked carved, every branch outlined with a sharpness beyond normal sight. Then patterns began to emerge in the foliage—faces, or the suggestion of faces, appearing inside the leaves as if they had always been there and I had simply lacked the eyes to see them.

At first they were beautiful.

Not beautiful in a sentimental way. Beautiful in the way lightning is beautiful, or a cathedral, or something too large to understand all at once. Their faces were intricate and luminous, woven out of leaf and shadow and geometry. They shifted between plant and being. The edges of them glowed with impossible precision. There were two or three of them, maybe more, but I remember sensing distinct presences, distinct intelligences. They seemed to be studying me with a kind of amused curiosity, as if I had arrived unexpectedly at the door of an exclusive place and they were deciding what to make of me.

Everything around them pulsed with impossible depth. The leaves became stained glass. The spaces between branches turned into corridors of cosmic black-blue velvet. The dubstep bass rolled through the vision like thunder from another dimension. Every wobble in the music seemed to animate the trees further, sending waves through their faces, their expressions shifting in time with the beat. It was not like seeing something while listening to music. It was more like the music and the vision were part of the same living system, each one speaking through the other.

For a moment, I felt wonder. Childlike wonder. The kind that strips you of all sarcasm.

And then the tone changed.

One of the entities focused on me more intently. I could feel it before I understood it. There was a narrowing. A seriousness. The same way a room changes when a joke stops being funny. It was as though one of them had noticed something the others hadn’t yet—some flaw in my state, some contamination.

The feeling I had was bizarrely familiar.

It was like being looked at by a police officer during a traffic stop, when he shines a flashlight directly into your face and asks a question he already knows the answer to.

Have you been drinking?

Except this wasn’t a question.

They knew.

The message came not exactly as sound, not exactly as words, but clear enough that there was no room for misunderstanding.

You can’t be here.

Then, more specifically:

You are not allowed to come here under the influence of alcohol.

It landed with total authority.

No ambiguity. No spiritual poetry. No cosmic riddle.

A rebuke.

I remember feeling a flash of offended pride, that drunk, egoic resistance that can survive even in the face of the impossible. Somewhere inside myself I thought, almost petulantly, Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?

And the instant I had that thought, one of the faces detached from the trees.

That is still the part I can see most clearly.

It came out of the foliage and crossed the parking lot toward me, not by walking exactly, but by arriving, moving with the directness of thought. What had been distant was suddenly inches from my own face. Nose to nose. Its features were overwhelming in their detail—ancient eyes, leaf-veined skin, impossible symmetry, something stern and intelligent and beyond human but utterly aware of me. Not a hallucination in the flimsy sense of the word. A presence. An encounter. It felt more real than my own body.

And it said, with absolute seriousness:

And you know you shouldn’t be drinking at all.

Not just tonight.

Not just here.

At all.

The words struck somewhere deeper than thought. Deeper than shame. Deeper than fear.

And then I was gone.

Or rather, I was back.

It felt like being pulled backward through a vortex, sucked out of that impossible dimension and slammed into my body all at once. The patio came back. The humid air. The railing. The parking lot. The ordinary trees. The music still playing. The room behind me. I was standing there breathing hard, staring out into the night, knowing with complete certainty that something had happened to me that was beyond explanation.

But the strangest part was that I was sober.

Not less drunk. Not sobered up in the ordinary way. Not gradually coming down.

Completely sober.

It was as if whatever had met me in those trees had burned the alcohol right out of my system. My mind was clear. My body steady. The whole night of drinking had vanished from me like a switch had been flipped.

I didn’t stay much longer. I left the apartment, stepped into the warm Florida night, and walked back to my hotel. I remember the sound of my shoes on the sidewalk and how strangely quiet everything felt. I remember looking at passing cars, streetlights, motel signs, and feeling like I had returned from a place nobody around me even knew existed. I didn’t see Brian or his girlfriend the next morning. I got in my rental car, drove to the airport, and flew home with the sense that something fundamental in me had shifted.

I didn’t talk about the experience much.

But I did stop drinking for a while.

Maybe three or four months.

Long enough to feel the absence of alcohol, but not long enough to understand the depth of the thing I was dealing with. In those months I told myself different stories. Maybe it had scared me straight. Maybe I just needed a break. Maybe I had learned my lesson. But underneath all of it was restlessness, a kind of unease in my own skin. Sobriety, when it isn’t supported by anything deeper, can feel less like freedom than deprivation. I wasn’t healed. I was paused.

Then one evening my friend Shawna invited me to the Hollywood Bowl.

She had an extra ticket to see Florence and the Machine. It sounded perfect—one of those quintessential Los Angeles nights that feels almost too cinematic to belong to real life. The Bowl, warm air, music, the city spread out below. I told myself if there was ever an acceptable time to drink again, this would be it. It had been months. I had proven I could stop. I wasn’t some guy falling apart in an alley. I was just going to a concert.

That was the lie.

The truth was I was already looking for relief before the first sip. I was uncomfortable in my own skin. That old agitation was back, the familiar hum of wanting out of myself. I didn’t say any of that to Shawna. I just had a couple of drinks before the show.

We found our seats. The opening band was Wet Leg, young and loose and charismatic, a little punk, a little pop, and they were excellent. For a while I was genuinely into it. The crowd energy, the music, the beauty of the place—it all landed.

Then I drank more.

And the old switch flipped.

That’s the thing about me and alcohol. Once the switch flips, the event itself becomes secondary. The obsession takes over. It stops being about music or friendship or atmosphere. It becomes about maintaining a feeling, chasing the next degree of relief. And relief is greedy. It never arrives and says, That’s enough. You’re good now. It only points to the next drink.

I kept getting up and going down to the beer garden. Every time I had to squeeze through the tight benches and make people stand. I could feel myself becoming a nuisance, but once I’m in that mode, embarrassment never quite outruns appetite. Eventually I decided it was easier just to stay down there and listen to the show from the beer garden where the alcohol was uninterrupted. That choice says everything.

I was smoking cigarettes. I think I had a couple of joints in my pocket. People were crowded together the way they always are at a concert—half social, half feral, bathed in stage spill and beer garden light. Near me was a couple having what looked like a quiet drink and a private conversation. Because I was drunk and expansive and suddenly convinced of my own charm, I started talking to them.

At first I was telling stories. The kind of stories drunk people think are magnetic. I told them I was from Canada. I told them my dad had been in the RCMP. I said wild things in that half-boastful, half-confessional way drunkenness encourages, stories about my father having to go onto reservations and fight people off. They humored me politely at first. Nods. Tight smiles. But I could tell after a while that the patience was draining from their faces. They had that look: Who is this guy? Why is he talking to us?

And still I kept going.

Somehow a little crowd formed around me. Maybe because I was loud, maybe because I was gesturing, maybe because drunk people create gravity for other drunk people. Suddenly I was in the middle of a small cluster of strangers, performing, rambling, trying to entertain my new accidental audience.

Then from the corner of my eye I saw someone moving through the crowd.

They came directly toward me.

To this day I can’t tell you if it was a man or a woman. I was too intoxicated to know. All I remember is the eyes. The look in the eyes.

They stepped right in front of me, close enough that everything else seemed to mute around them.

And they said:

I thought we told you you shouldn’t be drinking.

The world stopped.

In an instant I was thrown back to that patio in Florida. The trees. The leaves. The face emerging from another dimension. The voice. The warning. I hadn’t done DMT in the five months since that night, but none of that mattered. What mattered was the recognition. The same force. The same message. It was as though the boundary between those two worlds had thinned just enough for the warning to follow me into ordinary life.

I wish I could tell you that was the end of my drinking.

It wasn’t.

That is not how addiction works. Revelation is not always recovery. Sometimes it is just more evidence that you ignore until the suffering becomes too loud to outtalk.

I struggled for another ten months.

Ten months of knowing and not changing.Ten months of feeling warned and still reaching for the bottle.Ten months of trying to manage something that had long since proven it could manage me.

I knew where AA was. I joke that it was in the front of the phone book, but the truth is I didn’t even need the phone book. I already had the app on my phone. I had been in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous most of my life. I knew the chairs, the coffee, the readings, the slogans, the stories. I knew how to sit in a meeting and nod as though I were absorbing something. I knew how to leave and go right back to the life that was killing me.

But eventually a day came when something in me was different.

Not more dramatic.Not more broken.Just more honest.

I didn’t go back to AA because someone forced me.I didn’t go because I thought I was about to get in trouble.I didn’t go because I was trying to look better or buy myself time.

I went because I didn’t want to live like that anymore.

That was the difference.

Not fear of consequences.Not performance.Not a temporary surrender to circumstance.

A real surrender.

These days I’m fourteen months sober.

I know enough now not to declare victory too early. I know I am not out of the woods yet—or maybe, given the shape of my story, not quite out of the trees. But something in my inner life has changed in a way I had never known before. For most of my life, my mind felt like a room with too many radios on, every station bleeding into the next. Even in moments that looked successful from the outside, I was usually either escaping, anticipating escape, or recovering from escape. Peace was something I imagined other people had.

Today, for the first time in my life, I have some peace of mind.

Not every day.Not perfectly.Not in some grand enlightened way.

But enough to know it is real.

Sometimes I still think about that night in Florida. About the humid patio and the ordinary line of trees holding an entire hidden world inside them. About the bass from Brian’s dubstep vibrating through the air like a summons. About the faces in the leaves and the one that came toward me. About the blunt clarity of the message.

You can’t be here.

You shouldn’t be drinking at all.

For a long time I didn’t know what to do with that experience. Was it a hallucination? A spiritual encounter? My subconscious, dressed in cosmic costume? I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Whatever it was, it told me the truth before I was willing to live it.

And if I have learned anything since, it is that truth has patience.

It will wait for you in the trees.It will find you in a crowd.It will speak again and again until one day, exhausted and humbled, you finally answer.

And when you do, the world doesn’t become perfect.

It just becomes real.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dd8lJlzBR_E

banned from DMT

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