N, N-dimethyltryptamine, often known as DMT, is a very potent, transient tryptamine psychedelic that occurs naturally in a wide range of animals, fungi, and plants.

If you smoke DMT, it's very short acting. If taken in an Ayahuasca brew, it can last up to 8-10 hours.

Powerful visuals and ground-breaking experiences—including, and this is the most intriguing—contact with a variety of beings—are characteristics of DMT encounters.

Machine elves, also known as "self-transforming machine elves," "technicolor elves," and "technicolor elves," are a phenomenon and common theme reported by many individuals who have used the psychedelic drug DMT.

"The DMT experience is like being shot out of a rocket into some other dimension, and the machine elves are the inhabitants of that dimension." - Terence McKenna

These entities are described as being small, brightly coloured, and often mechanical or robotic in appearance. They are said to interact with the person experiencing them in a variety of ways, such as communicating with them, showing them visions, or even participating in seemingly impossible physical activities.

The "machine elves" are well-known, even across cultures, as are other DMT creatures that are frequently mentioned during DMT trip reports.

Machine Elves and other DMT entities

"The machine elves are the guardians of the mushroom and the DMT experience." - Rick Strassman

Most DMT trip reports from the West (and many non-Western cultures), include contact with entities. 

Numerous names have been given to them over time, such as "tykes," "DMT elves," "clockwork elves," and "fractal elves".

People report having vivid and intense experiences with DMT machine elves, often describing them as being highly intelligent and possessing a distinct personality or consciousness. These entities are said to communicate with the person experiencing them in a variety of ways, such as through visual or auditory hallucinations, or even telepathy.

At the University of New Mexico in the early 1990s, the psychiatrist Rick Strassman conducted the first human DMT study in the West.

60 subjects received roughly 400 doses of DMT during the course of the five-year trial. In his book DMT The Spirit Molecule, Strassman describes these encounters in detail.

"I was neither emotionally or intellectually prepared for the frequency of interaction with creatures in our research, nor for the sometimes absolutely odd character of these encounters."

In fact, half of the 1,000 pages of notes that Strassman made while doing his study include contacts with DMT entities.

Similar to this, in 2005 Philip Mayer gathered and examined 340 DMT trip reports. Mayer discovered that 226 of them, or 66% of them, made references to autonomous, deliberate, and intelligent interactions.

Strassman claims that the research participants spoke about encounters with "entities," "beings," "aliens," "guides," and "helpers." The volunteers frequently came into contact with "life-forms" including clowns, reptiles, mantises, bees, spiders, cactus, and stick figures.

It's interesting to note that the DMT beings behave in a sentient and autonomous manner, as though they were inhabitants of a stand-alone realm.

Who came up with the Name Machine Elves?

The concept of machine elves was first popularized by the writer and ethnobotanist Terence McKenna, who had extensive personal experience with DMT and wrote about his encounters with the entities in his books and lectures. Terence is also the guy that came up with the idea of the stoned ape theory.

According to McKenna, the machine elves are a manifestation of the "other," the realm of the non-ordinary, and are thought to be a representation of the human mind's ability to process and interpret information in new and unusual ways. 

Mckenna refers to them as "self-transforming machine elves" in his book Archaic Revival. They are DMT dimension residents,  and they frequently want to impart knowledge to everyone who comes to visit.

In order to explain his encounters with machine elves (and the DMT experience in general), McKenna frequently uses a variety of metaphors, highlighting how challenging it is to translate such ineffable experiences into the more limited realm of words.

Terrence said ‘You pass through a membrane of some sort, and you're in a place. You're pushed through, and you see the tykes, as I call them. The self-transforming machine elves that are singing in a hyperdimensional language. They surround you and say, “Welcome, we're so glad to see you.”

According to McKenna, reality is stacked with many other dimensions; DMT just makes some of them visible to the user. McKenna said the machine elves appeared and invited him into a reality they had created in a lecture titled Psychedelics Before and After History: 

The machine elves, according to McKenna, "were communicating in a colourful language that condensed into revolving machines that were like Fabergé eggs but made of luminous superconducting ceramics and liquid crystal gels."

In quest of Oo-koo-he, a DMT-containing plant preparation used by the indigenous people to enter the spirit worlds, Mckenna journeyed to La Chorrera in the Colombian Amazon with his brother (Denis, who we interviewed on the podcast) and a few companions, as described in his book True Hallucinations. Mckenna observed similarities between their accounts of entity contact and his personal encounters with machine elves.

The only tribe in the Upper Amazon that understood how to make this visionary plant preparation, the Witoto, utilised it to communicate with and learn from "small men"—which made the description of it particularly intriguing.

Trip reports usually present machine elves as kind, amusing, prankish, and occasionally ornery. They often welcome guests with an innocent, childlike curiosity, frequently changing their forms, and singing very complex items into existence. The DMT world visitors are frequently urged to attempt to concentrate on what is being shown to them, or even to emulate what they are doing.

How do Machine Elves appear? What do they look like?

Depending on the individual, machine elves can take many different shapes. In part because their energetic shape could change constantly, many people find it challenging to recollect the exact appearance of the machine elves. However, numerous painters have portrayed mechanical and fractal-like images of machine elves.

Terence McKenna first came into contact with machine elves in 1965 while a student at Berkeley. Mckenna describes his first contact with machine elves in his book True Hallucinations from 1989:

“During my own experiences smoking synthesized DMT in Berkeley, I had had the impression of bursting into a space inhabited by merry elfin, self-transforming, machine creatures. Dozens of these friendly fractal entities, looking like self-dribbling Faberge eggs on the rebound, had surrounded me and tried to teach me the lost language of true poetry…”

The machine elves are like "jewelled self-dribbling basketballs" that "come hammering at you and they will halt in front of you and vibrate," as Mckenna describes them in another firsthand story in the Invisible Landscape. He describes everything as occurring at a tremendous rate, like being inundated with hundreds of details per second.

Do Machine Elves Talk?

Anecdotal stories indicate that encounters with machine elves can vary greatly. Thought telepathy is the primary method of communication with machine elves, subtle movements and gestures may also be used. A quick, incomprehensible amount of information is uploaded in a matrix-style during direct thought transference in the DMT world.

A form of geometric hyperspace synesthesia, machine elf interactions are frequently characterised in terms of visual language, where things heard become things seen. The machine elves may talk in song, either conceptually or in "translinguistic glossolalia," as Mckenna has described it (i.e. in a nonsensical manner with no clear meaning).

The prima materia of the DMT universe, where everything is comprised of the components of visible language, is voice energy, according to Terence Mckenna. According to Mckenna..

“It is a language, but not made of words—a language which becomes and which is the things it describes. It is a more perfect archetypal Logos.”

They are able to communicate anything through this medium, including complex fractal things that have no chance of being conjured within the constrained parameters of imagination in mainstream reality.

As to the nature of these contacts, many trip reports state machine elves are kind, playful, and benign guiding entities, capable of providing significant insights. They can occasionally be apathetic about guests, trick-playingly mischievous, or even outright aggressive.

Regarding the latter, for some people, the intention equates to the teaching of challenging lessons, while for others, it appears to be cruel and torturous. This involves being reprimanded, having faults assessed, and advised how to develop as a person.

In a collected sample of 149 trip reports from Erowid, psychologist Jennifer A. Lyke of Stockton University classified the types of interactions with DMT entities. She discovered that out of these 149 reports, 180 total entity encounters had been shared, and 75% of the reports had described at least one entity.

She categorised the types of encounters according to their relative frequency as follows:

• Showing/teaching guiding (25%)
• No interaction (10%)
• Unfriendly (10%)
• Heat (9%)
• Welcoming (9%)
• Assurance or inspiration (8%)
• Observation or neutrality (7%)
• jovial (4%)
• Power or control (3%)
• Personal (3%)
• Interrogation (3%)
• ambiguous encounters (3%)
• Educating (2%)
• Different (2%%)

Machine elves commonly show awareness of individuals entering the DMT world, regardless of the type of contact. They are said to greet DMT visitors with open arms. According to Terence Mckenna,

When you suddenly enter this area, they exclaim, "How great that you're here; you come so infrequently! We are very happy to see you!

Others respond to first touch with aloof detachment, and occasionally with surprise or horror as though an unwanted invader has arrived. The overall attitude that the machine elves project may be influenced by the emotional state of the person receiving the encounter, which is governed by set and location.

Machine Elves; Subjective Trip Reports and experiences

“They were also definitely in the house. It may be that Terence McKenna has simply seeded the meme-space that surrounds some tryptamines with his famous tales on self-transforming machine elves that proffer various alien objects/machines/languages with an almost malignant glee. But I certainly know what he is talking about, and these fellows now haunt the tryptamine realm for me. Tonight they leaned in quickly: “Oh you are back. We suckered you in here once again!” And they proceeded with their mischevious chittering bee-dance, as if they were coaxing me into some kind of hyperdimensional circuit that would leave sanity far behind. I never “gave in” though, whatever that means, and by the end of the trip, I was utterly tired of their cavortings. There was nowhere to hide in the world fringed by these characters—everywhere was consciousness, was their consciousness of me, playing close attention to me. I became the apocalyptic subject at the end of time, all narratives of catastrophe and emergency (plane crashes, fires, eco-doom) ending in me. It seemed as if it were time to die and be phased into an infinite-math space of mind and machines. No jaguars or bejeweled jungle temples here—this was the Alien Impersonal, running the assembly code of creation. It may be that I did not take enough (unlikely) or hold it down long enough (quite possible), but I actually found the whole show growing rather tedious despite its strength. I was “me” enough to sometimes yearn to return to the human realm, to quit these cycles, which did not seem to lead anywhere, or rather, were so outside of the space-time frames I am used to that I could not assimilate or understand. I felt as if I were seeing into DNA, even if this thought, like the machine elves, may simply be an artifact of my reading. Nonetheless, I perceived a realm of constantly folding and unfolding units, creating forms out of the liminal zone between abstract code and material molecule. This fecund and hyperactive generation of basic forms and patterns seemed to set the stage for “higher,” more “conscious” forms of thought, intention, and memory—in other words, for the human spirit. But despite flashes of mudras and shamanic methods, I never felt I could climb up that ladder. Unlike my previous experience, where I was drawn up into a kind of Buddhaspace, this time I remained pretty enmeshed in a roiling matrix of multiplicities, which was frankly as idiotic and mechanical as it was profound. Creation is a blind wonder; we are in it, but not quite of it."

"Elves? They could well be children playing with strange devices of celestial calibration, laughing like the Buddha. Deeply inhaling the heavy smoke I laughed out loud, my old friends were back, this time more vivid, incredibly large and spinning and levitating in and around me. The same kaleidoscopic-geometric forms appeared. The carnival theme carried over from my first time, the black and white checkerboard with a memorable harlequin design motif. Self-replicating? Yes, or embedded in the very fabric of the universe yet eternally creating themselves. Machine-like ? Yes, playful in robotic way (?) but nonetheless sentient."

Top Quotes about Machines Elves from the people researching them

These are verifiable quotes by real people and researchers who have studied the effects of DMT and the machine elves phenomenon.

"The DMT experience has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning is a rush of abstract, rapidly changing, brilliantly colored geometric shapes. The middle is the world of the machine elves." - Terence McKenna

"The machine elves are hyperdimensional beings that are able to manipulate the fabric of time and space." - Rick Strassman

"The machine elves are like a bridge between the conscious and unconscious mind. They can help us to access and understand the deeper aspects of our psyche." - Stanislav Grof

"The machine elves are not just hallucinations, they are real entities that exist in a parallel reality." - Alexander Shulgin

"The machine elves are like a window into the mysteries of the universe, and they can help us to understand the nature of consciousness and reality." - David Nichols

"The machine elves are not just hallucinations, they are real entities that exist in a parallel reality." - Graham St. John

"The machine elves are a reminder that there is more to reality than what we can see and touch." - James Fadiman

"The machine elves are like a bridge between the conscious and unconscious mind. They can help us to access and understand the deeper aspects of our psyche." - Rick Doblin

"The machine elves are a reminder that we are all connected and that we are all one." - Dennis McKenna

"The machine elves are a symbol of the infinite possibilities that exist beyond our everyday reality." - Ralph Metzner

Machines Elves mentioned in Interviews 

So, are Machines Elves actually Real?

There is no scientific evidence to support the existence of machine elves, and the phenomenon remains largely a topic of speculation and personal experience. Regardless, Machines Elves are a common element in DMT experiences.

Scientists, philosophers, theologians, and psychonauts have been debating the ontological character of DMT creatures for decades. It is unclear if the DMT realm and its inhabitants are a byproduct of human consciousness or an independent reality.

Many people who have experienced entity contact describe it as being more real than actual, the complete opposite of a mind-altering hallucination. In other words, a DMT experience leaves a person with the same mental state as before, allowing them to remain true to themselves while being driven into a whole other universe.

The concept of parallel universes inhabited by independently existent intelligent creatures is intuitively generated by the clarity of these encounters and the great degree of congruence between people's experiences.

Terence Mckenna held that these creatures are separate beings and that the several realities are a "ecology of souls" embedded in a "raging world of active intellect that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and highly alien."

After his DMT research, Strassman was compelled to critically reevaluate his materialist ideas about the nature of reality, despite his rigorous scientific training. Jeremiah, one of Strassman's DMT research participants, described how remarkably independent and enduring his DMT-related experience was:

“DMT has shown me the reality that there is an infinite variation on reality. There is a real possibility of adjacent dimensions. It may not be so simple as there are alien planets with their own societies. This is too proximal. It’s not like some kind of drug. It’s more like an experience of a new technology than a drug. You can choose to attend to this or not. It will continue to progress without you paying attention. You return not to where you left off, but to where things have gone since you left. It’s not a hallucination, but an observation. When I’m there, I’m not intoxicated. I’m lucid and sober:”

It's plausible, from a more materialist perspective, that DMT entities are symbolic representations of the unconscious mind. In this instance, the one having the experience's psychological and spiritual growth may play a role in determining how they seem and how the interactions go.

James Kent takes a more materialist stance when discussing machine elves in his piece The Case Against Machine Elves. He asserts that they result from the interaction of DMT with the serotonin 5-HT2A receptor, which causes "an aberration of the brain's perceptual mechanics."

Kent argues that psychedelic visions and DMT entity contact might be the result of overlapping chaotic visual patterns and dream-like imagery. In this sense, it is assumed that internal information, rather than external stimuli.

According to Rick Strassman's theory in DMT The Spirit Molecule, the connection between the brain and consciousness may be similar to that between a television and a television broadcast. The brain can now comprehend information pathways that it couldn't in regular waking awareness after receiving DMT (that is, within the narrow frequency of Channel Normal).

When seen in this light, DMT enables us to see something true that is maybe all around us but is ordinarily inaccessible. Therefore, the spirit molecule may be compared to a technological device, such as a telescope or a microscope.

Different cultural influences could also be at play and influence the peculiarities of the experience. Terence Mckenna outlines the cultural lens that is used to the DMT experience in a workshop from 1990:

“I took this stuff to Tibetans, to the Amazon. I gave it to Tibetans, they said “this is the lesser lights, the lesser lights of the Bardo. You cannot go further into the Bardo and return. This takes you as far as you can go.” When I gave it to shamans in the Amazon, they said “It’s strong – but this is, these are the ancestors. These are the spirits that we work with. These are ancestor souls. We know this place.”

Are Machine Elves Extraterrestrials?

Many psychonauts believe that machine elves are real, autonomous entities that exist in some sort of parallel reality or dimension, while others believe they are simply a product of the mind, created by the brain in response to the effects of the drug.

McKenna said the elves' true nature was unknowable, so he could only hypothesize about what their reality was like. He believed they could have been aliens, ghosts, beings from another dimension, or even humanity from the far distant future:

“I mean if you take the content of the experience seriously and say, ‘I am apparently in contact with diminutive English-speaking creatures of some sort,’ well then, they have got to be either intelligent beings from another part of the universe, or humans from some extraordinarily advanced future world where human beings are now made of language and are only two and a half feet tall, so I would put it rather far in the future.”

Strassman suggests that endogenous DMT production from the pineal gland may be responsible for experiences of extraterrestrial abduction in light of tales like these.

According to some psychonauts, the visions represent fictitious proof of highly developed alien intelligence, maybe genetically enhanced sophisticated people from the distant future who are striving to change the course of humanity's present.

According to Terence Mckenna's insightful and entertaining perspective on this subject:

“If an extraterrestrial wanted to interact with a human society, and it had ethics that forbade it from landing trillion ton beryllium ships on the United Nations plaza – in other words if it were subtle – I can see hiding yourself inside a shamanic intoxication. You would say ‘let’s analyze these people, okay they’re kinda hard-headed rationalists, except they have this phenomenon called “getting loaded” and when they get loaded they accept whatever happens to them. So let’s hide inside the load and we’ll talk to them from there and they’ll never realize that we’re of a different status than pink elephants…”

Is DMT a chemical key that activates specific "programming" in the brain that an extraterrestrial species may have left there for human development?

Other Types of DMT entities

Jennifer A. Lyke, a researcher, also looked at the many kinds of described entities in the DMT world. She grouped the items and their frequency in her analysis as follows:

• Entities with ambiguous definitions (29%)
• Human-like creatures (22%)
• The divine (10%)
• Unknown (8%)
• Fairies and elves (7%)
• creatures (6%)
• geometric objects or machines (6%).
• Voices (4%)
• Faces (4%)
• entities of unknown kind (3%)

People often could not adequately describe the entity in their trip reports. Certain creatures don't seem to fit any kind of identifiable mould. Additionally, the entities could be challenging to verbally or visually depict.

Humanoid creatures

One typical archetype of the DMT experience is humanoids. This could include regular people, shadow people, hooded figures, clowns, goblins, ancestors, cartoonish creatures, stick figures, light beings, elementals, and shamans, but it's not restricted to them. Some trip reports refer to entities that have taken the form of departed loved ones or relatives. They are frequently viewed as "guides" or "helpers" who provide instruction.

Divine Beings

DMT excursions are frequently associated with encounters with the Godhead, the source of all creation, or all-powerful superior entities. Along with Gaia (Mother Earth), demigods, goddesses, demons, angels, souls, spiritual elders, and religious leaders like Buddha, Jesus Christ, Krishna, and Muhammad, others claim to have seen these things as well.

Aliens

The sensations of being subjected to probes, implants, or procedures in future circumstances frequently accompany entity contact with aliens. Aliens that resemble those described in science fiction, such as Pleiadians, Arcturians, Grey aliens, and Blue aliens, as well as anthropomorphic reptiles and insectoids, may be encountered.

Animals

Seeing a lot of animals has been recorded during DMT trips, and it seems to be an ayahuasca experience that is prevalent. Reptiles, mantises, bees, spiders, cats, jellyfish, and insects are among the common creatures mentioned. Trip reports state that animals may not always be communicating with humans directly and that some, like as spiders and reptiles, may make people feel uneasy.

Geometric objects or Machines

Using trip reports as a basis, people have talked about, to mention a few, robots, mechanoids, androids, and biomechanical intelligence. Geometric objects might seem as enormous, multicoloured spheres that are undulating or as other forms, or more broadly as morphing, multicoloured structures with different textures that resemble fractals.

Final Thoughts

In summary, machine elves are entities reported by some individuals who have used the psychedelic drug DMT. They are described as being small, brightly colored, and often mechanical or robotic in appearance. The concept of machine elves was first popularized by Terence McKenna, who believed that these entities are a manifestation of the "other," the realm of the non-ordinary.

Although many people believe that machine elves are real, autonomous entities, there is no scientific evidence to support their existence.

As with any Psychedelic, the use of DMT should be approached with caution and people with a history of mental illness or other health conditions should avoid it.

if you're looking for professional assistance with a DMT experience, you can search for a provider in our directory.