Atlas ✦ Evidence ✦ How often each being is reported
✦ PREVALENCE ✦
Every source gives a different number, and most pages quote whichever one suits them. This page ranks the one set of figures that can honestly be ranked, shows the others beside it labelled with what they measure, and names the archetypes that no survey has ever counted.
Content analysis of 3,778 experiences drawn from 3,305 r/DMT posts (2009–2018). This is the only source that sorts each encounter into a single entity type, so it is the only one whose figures can be put in order. The six named phenotypes account for 81.6%; the remaining 18.4% was not assigned to any of them.
| Phenotype | Share | n | In the Atlas |
|---|---|---|---|
| feminine | 24.2% | 416 | The Divine Feminine · Fairies, sirens & seductresses · The Hive Queen |
| deities / divine beings | 17.0% | 293 | Deities & god-like presences · Light beings & angels · Animal-headed figures · Aztec & Mayan-styled beings |
| aliens | 16.3% | 281 | Alien & 'Grey' forms · Robotic drones & automatons · The Operators · The Surgeons |
| creature-based (incl. reptilian, insectoid) | 9.2% | 158 | Mantis & insectoid beings · Reptilian beings · Octopoid & tentacled beings · The Cosmic Serpent · Plant spirits & devas |
| mythological beings (incl. 'machine elves') | 8.4% | 144 | Self-transforming machine elves · Child-sprites · Hooded & cloaked figures · The Dream Wizards |
| jesters / clowns | 6.5% | 112 | The Jester / Trickster / Clown · The Harlequin · The Ringmaster |
Bars are drawn to the share column. ‘In the Atlas’ lists the entries this study’s bucket contains — a phenotype is a coarse bin, and the Atlas splits it further wherever the reports do.
These are not contradictions. They are different denominators, and no other page states them side by side.
Davis let people tick every word that fit, so his figures sum past 100%. Lawrence sorted each encounter into one bucket. Neither is wrong; they answer different questions.
The famous name is rarer than the category it belongs to. Quoting 8.4% as ‘machine elves’ inflates the icon; quoting 2.9% as the whole mythological class deflates it.
A self-selected archive of written trip reports and a supervised field study are not the same population. The 36-person figure is precise and tiny; the 3,778-report figure is broad and self-selected.
Lawrence 2022 is the only rankable set on this page, and it is a content analysis of 3,305 r/DMT posts. It measures what people wrote down. Whether that is the same thing as what people experienced is a real question, and no other page asks it.
Here is why it is worth asking. We read the titles of 71,580 discussion threads from the largest public DMT forum and counted how often the community actually names each kind of being. If forum writing tracked experience, the two columns would agree. They do not:
| Phenotype | Reported | Named in threads | Mentions per point |
|---|---|---|---|
| jester / clown | 6.5% | 52 | 8.0 |
| creature (mantis, reptilian) | 9.2% | 25 | 2.7 |
| mythological (machine elves) | 8.4% | 21 | 2.5 |
| feminine / goddess | 24.2% | 46 | 1.9 |
| deities / divine beings | 17.0% | 29 | 1.7 |
| aliens | 16.3% | 21 | 1.3 |
The rank correlation between the two is +0.09 — effectively none. The rarest phenotype is discussed about six times more, per unit of occurrence, than one two and a half times more common. Across the forum’s entire fifteen-year life, entity talk holds flat at roughly 1.2% of all threads.
The likeliest reason is mundane, and visible in the same corpus: the single largest thing people post is a request for help — “need help”, “please help” and “need advice” are the most common phrases in the whole set. A forum does not collect experience. It collects unresolved experience. A benevolent, coherent encounter gives you nothing to ask. A menacing trickster you have no word for gives you a thread title.
What we are not claiming. We tested whether scraped corpora report more menace than surveys do, and they do not: the negative or menacing share is 8% in a supervised field study (Michael 2021, n=36), 11.4% in the scraped corpus (Lawrence 2022), and <15% in a recruited survey (Davis 2020, N=2,561). The scraped figure sits between the other two, so there is no clean instrument effect in that direction and we do not assert one. What stands is narrower: the ranking above comes from written posts, written posts demonstrably over-represent the disturbing and the unnameable, and the size of that distortion is unmeasured. Read the percentages as the shape of what gets written down.
16 of the Atlas’s 40 entries have no survey figure at all. They are documented in community lexicons, Effect Index’s archetype list, or clinical narrative — which is weaker evidence, and is said plainly on each page rather than dressed in a borrowed percentage.
The single most-reported figure is not the famous one. A feminine or maternal presence leads at 24.2%; the self-transforming machine elves that gave the subject its vocabulary are a minority percept. If what you met was ordinary-shaped, wordless, or simply present, that is closer to the centre of the distribution than the icon is.