The Golden Egg
How one dose of changa and fifteen minutes became the bedrock beneath five years of inner work.
The Pipe
I smoked changa on my 39th birthday, over five years ago now.
The house smelled of blue lotus and something sweeter underneath it, the passion flower herbs warming in the pipe bowl, smoke wafting in gentle spirals. I sat against a mound of pillows on my bed, the room sparkling clean, the bubbler on the nightstand beside me, and the birthday cake still on the kitchen counter.
Someone I was with at the time prepared the pipe, and that’s the only sentence she gets in this story.
DMT is a controlled substance in most countries. What I’m writing here is testimony. Set, setting, preparation, and company matter as much as the molecule, probably more. I had all four. I was lucky.
Changa is an “enhanced leaf” form of DMT: mine was a handcrafted mix of blue lotus, mullein, and passion flower, soaked in a solution of the same active molecule as ayahuasca. Once the solvent evaporates, you have magic ready for your pipe.
Julian Palmer designed it as smokeable ayahuasca. The herbs aren’t just for decoration, they have specific roles to play in the experience:
Passion flower calms the ride, its flavonoids bind to the same sites as benzodiazepines, and its trace beta-carbolines extend the duration to something you can actually inhabit.
Blue lotus modulates the serotonin signal at the same receptor DMT agonises, softening the edges, dream-coating them.
Mullein protects the lungs so you can inhale deep enough for the rest of it to work.
The whole blend shapes the experience the way a kiln shapes a firing: temperature, atmosphere, time.
I started with a few small puffs to get used to it.
The visuals come on strong immediately, geometric patterns, colour behind closed eyelids, the room shimmering at the edges, a strange hum in the ears. Sub-breakthrough territory.
Someone I know smoked a small amount once and stayed right there: visuals in the here and now, the wormhole visible but not entered. A postcard from the other side.
I emptied my lungs, took a huge draw through the bubbler and held it. Two more.
Gone.
The Tunnel
Sucked down a kaleidoscopic tunnel to elsewhere.
Gone. I don’t know where my hands went. The room, the pipe, the weight of my own body, all of it fell away like scenery struck from a stage.
What replaced it was so much more vivid, more saturated, more structurally present that this — the right here, right now — felt like a rough sketch, a prototype. Something with the capacity to be worked up into a masterpiece, but nowhere close to finished, nowhere near achieving its potential.
The changa gave my body a minute or two to say yes to it. Freebase DMT fires you from a cannon, but the herbs slowed the launch just enough that there was a beat between the room dissolving and the arrival.
A breath where the last threads of ordinary reality thinned and snapped, one by one, and I knew I was going somewhere and I couldn’t stop it and I didn’t want to.
Then fractal geometries, acceleration, expansive travel and a destination. Somewhere that made every room I’ve ever walked into look like an artist’s impression of what a room really is.
The Impossible Room
I met conscious entities who occupied impossible spaces, rooms that reminded me of the staircase scene from the old film Labyrinth, or Escher’s etchings. Walls that were also ceilings. Doors that opened onto the insides of other doors. Steps that lead nowhere and everywhere at once.
The entities were mechanical, jester-like beings. The closest popcult reference I can reach for is the Dwemer from Skyrim, a blend of ancient craftsmanship and impossible engineering, but alive with personality.
Playful. Mischievous. Cheeky. A slight undertone of something more... malevolent.
If you know Alex Grey’s work, or the band Tool, you’ve seen a painting of the neighbourhood. But even that isn’t it, that’s just a sliver, an impression. Nothing from here is it.
You have to go there to experience it.
They spoke without words. Telepathic, instantaneous, already laughing before they started.
“At last, you are here and you see! We’ve been watching and waiting for you. Now you see! He he heh.”
They showed me the records they’d been keeping of my entire life, all stored and playing back as a hologram inside a golden egg of glorious light. The egg sat at the centre of a room dedicated to me, in a vast complex containing an infinite number of rooms, one for every being who has been, who is, and who will be.
The closest frame I’ve found for that place is the Akashic Records, a universal library of all experience, referenced across Hindu, theosophical, and mystical traditions. Other frameworks I’m sure map the concept differently.
I had no idea what any of that even was at the time, but there I was inside it.
The whole thing was terrifyingly ecstatic and incomprehensibly vivid and there isn’t a way I’ve found of putting the essence of it into words, though I’m trying! I’ll give you the closest thing I have.
In a study of 3,778 DMT experiences, almost half involved entity encounters, and the beings people describe — jesters, mechanical entities, feminine archetypes, insectoids — recur with uncanny consistency across thousands of unconnected individuals.
93% of the entities were perceived as conscious and self-aware. In 98% of cases, the entity initiated contact.
I don’t know what that means.
I know what I saw. I also know other people saw things they wish they hadn’t, experiences that fragmented them rather than ground them, that take months or years to process.
The Void
After the jester Dwemer and their show, the golden egg, the hologram life records, the impossible architecture, after all of it, the vision didn’t end. It changed.
The ecstasy drained out of the experience like water pours from a jug and what remained was space.
Infinite, featureless, alive.
I spent aeons floating in it.
No walls, no floor, no body to speak of, and no grief about its absence. The void held nothing and asked for nothing and I hung there inside it the way a single star hangs in deep space, neither lonely nor waiting, just present in a stillness so total it had its own texture.
I didn’t experience fear, or even thought as we know it. There was no edge where the emptiness ended and I began, just a vast, warm dark that breathed when I breathed and was me and is still inside me.
Blissfully peaceful.
Then I came back to my body and fifteen minutes had passed.
I opened my eyes and the room was the same as I had left it. The candles had barely moved. My body felt like it had been gone for centuries but had returned in the time it takes to blink.
Fifteen minutes. I’d lived geological time in fifteen minutes.
An aeon in a breath.
The Return
That was one dose. One. There is no going back from it.
Once you’ve been somewhere that makes this place look like a mock-up, ordinary reality never quite sits the same again. The researchers call this ontological shock, a word that sounds clinical until you’ve felt it behind your ribs.
In the largest survey ever conducted on DMT entity encounters, 80% of 2,561 people said the experience permanently altered their fundamental conception of reality. More than half of those who identified as atheist beforehand no longer did afterwards.
I am one of those.
I understand those numbers from the inside. Dick Khan, a documenter of the DMT experience who smoked it over 600 times across three years, put it better than any researcher:
“I already believed in something beyond humanity. That was faith, because I had no knowledge of it. But having seen what I’ve seen, I am now certain.”
Faith is a word for what you hope is true; certainty is what happens when the hoping stops because you’ve been there.
The changa mattered and the pharmacology mattered. Rick Strassman administered DMT to sixty volunteers in a clinical lab in the early nineties — hundreds of doses, extraordinary experiences, entity encounters that left people shaking with conviction.
In follow-up interviews a year or two later, almost none of them had changed their lives. The molecule in a sterile room with no container around it was fire without a kiln, a flash without the slow burn.
The container makes all the difference.
The harmala alkaloids carry their own weight — a dream-coated grounding, a medicinal warmth that experienced users describe as healing you from the bones outward. Smoked DMT users talk about alien hyperspace — mechanical, electric, cerebral. Ayahuasca users describe something visceral and embodied.
Changa lives in the space between the two. Palmer called the blend “more integrated, connected and relevant to the human form.”
The experienced users on the DMT-Nexus forums, hundreds of them, say the same thing: once you’ve done it, you don’t go back to freebase alone.
Grounding changed the experience for me. I came out of it knowing something had shifted, the way you know the weather has turned before you open the curtains.
Everything I’ve done working on myself since — the self-enquiry, the authentic movement, the yoga... the shadow work: five years of pulling myself apart and putting myself back together differently, this experience is underneath all of it.
It is the bedrock.
It all came back in a casual conversation once. Someone asked what I believed in and I opened my mouth to say something reasonable and what came out was the golden egg. The whole thing. I hadn’t planned to say any of it.
The 2025 research on ontological shock found something I recognised in my bones: the people who shattered from these experiences and the people who grew from them had the same molecule in their blood.
The difference was in the grounding. Yoga, bodywork, cold water, walking barefoot, creative expression: 22 out of 26 people in that study named body practices as what pulled them through. The ones who tried to think their way through it got worse. The body had to hold what the mind couldn’t contain.
I want to be clear about something I’ve circled around long enough:
These substances can break people. Psychosis, depersonalisation, spiritual emergencies that last months or years. If you are on SSRIs, if you have a personal or family history of psychotic episodes, if you are in crisis: this is not for you. Not now, possibly not ever. The research is unambiguous on this. I’m writing about what I experienced, and I would not change it. I am not writing a permission slip.
I’m still doing that integration, honestly. Five years on and the work hasn’t finished. It’s not supposed to. The experience rewrites all the questions you thought you were asking.
My bones stopped asking some of those questions after that night.
I stopped wondering whether the world is as thin as it looks from in here. I stopped wondering whether what I can see from my ordinary vantage is all there is to see.
What’s there is bigger, more complex, more beautiful, more coherent than the version my head is built to hold.
I don’t need to argue for it. I was shown.
One day I will go back again.
What does your body know that you haven’t found words for yet?
What is the difference, for you, between believing and knowing?
What threshold has your name on it that you haven’t crossed yet?
This letter has travelled landscapes of:
*Truth: 🌀 Spiral Passage*
*Aspect: 🔥 Catalysis / 🔑 Unlocking*
These are words from the road less-travelled. If they speak to a truth that you’re walking, then I invite you to subscribe:
Hamish
This was very interesting and I have never heard of this herbal blend before. How wonderful!
Thanks for sharing your personal experience.