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ABOUT THIS WALKTHROUGH
What “Through” is, and what it is not
Through is a procedural, first-person interpretation of the reported DMT journey. It is not a recording, not a reconstruction, and not a prediction of anyone’s experience — nothing in it is a witness image. Each scene is a designer’s reading of recurring language in the corpus behind The DMT Atlas: 103 cited sources and 14,309 tagged reports, indexed across 172 mapped nodes — 40 entities, 44 themes, 31 realms, 24 geometries, 22 motifs and 11 phases. The route, scale, colour, architecture, ordinary room and character designs are all editorial choices. The evidence is what is cited; the picture is an interpretation.
The route: eleven scenes, about four minutes
The paced journey follows a fixed route. Ten scenes are timed and total 221 seconds — about three minutes forty — and the closing scene is left open, which is where the “about four minutes” comes from. Turning off Carry me through lets you walk the same route at your own pace.
- The familiar room — Inhalation / Onset · 18s
- The room falls away — Inhalation / Onset · 18s
- The chrysanthemum — The Chrysanthemum · 22s
- The rush — The Rush · 16s
- The threshold — Through the Membrane · 17s
- The waiting room — Arrival · 26s
- Under an impossible dome — Breakthrough · 32s
- They seem to be expecting you — Entity Contact · 27s
- A language made visible — The Download / Lesson · 25s
- The way back — The Return · 20s
- Here, again — Afterglow / Integration · open
Those durations are editorial reading and exploration time. They are not corpus-derived timings for the experience itself, and free exploration, pauses and the accessibility modes all change them.
The four optional paths
From under the dome you can leave the main route for one of four side spaces instead of continuing through the central arch. The Workshop holds jewelled makers — the phenotype the corpus tags as elf, which it also associates with the cathedral, contact and download stages. The Garden holds a maternal presence, the single most-reported figure in the literature. The Clinical room holds a tall insectoid or mantis presence. The Void has no required encounter at all: architecture simply gives way to near-darkness. Encounters and their order vary between accounts, and this is not a frequency-weighted simulation — choosing a path is not evidence that the path is common.
How often is any of this actually reported?
Most per-scene numbers in this project are lexical candidate matches — reports whose text matches a stage’s vocabulary — not verified prevalence, and vocabulary matches can be metaphorical or negated. On that basis contact draws 5,225 candidate reports, onset 3,622, the return 2,895, the download 2,848, the membrane 2,779, geometry 2,634, the rush 2,097, the afterglow 1,653, the waiting room 1,600, the void 697 and the cathedral 395. Only three scenes rest on a hand-validated sample: the chrysanthemum (50 reports), the workshop (28) and the garden (4). Archive counts are not population prevalence.
Where real frequencies exist they come from named studies, and they cut against the popular image. “Machine elves” are iconic but a minority percept — roughly 2.9% of one report set, about 10% by one researcher’s estimate — while a feminine or maternal presence is the most-reported figure at roughly 24%. Encounters skew benevolent at about 78%, but a menacing minority persists: around 8% are described as malicious and 41% of people report fear at some point. And “more real than real”, the phrase everyone quotes, appears in those exact words in only about 0.6% of the 3,778 accounts analysed by Lawrence et al., Scientific Reports (2022). The feeling is pervasive; the literal phrase is rare. See also Davis et al. (Johns Hopkins, 2020) on entity-encounter phenomenology and Timmermann et al. (2018) on the near-death overlap.
Where this walkthrough knowingly departs from the Atlas
- The waiting room is placed before the breakthrough, inverting the Atlas’s own phase order. It is kept that way because it works as the exploration hub, not because accounts follow it.
- Geometry gets its own scene, although it subdivides onset rather than being a distinct measured phase.
- The peak is optional — reachable as the Void — rather than a required throne encounter.
- Optional realms return to the dome for navigation. That is a convenience, not evidence of a loop in the reports.
- Corpus connections behind the scenes are adjacent tag mentions in narratives, not verified travel chronology.
Its own realism audit does not pass
The project grades itself against one question: would someone who has had this experience recognise this, or does it read as a game? The threshold is 0.8 and the suite does not currently pass. Of nineteen inspection targets, eighteen are pending fresh review and the one carrying a live grade — the chrysanthemum — reads GAME rather than RECOGNISE. That is adversarial visual judgement of a procedural interpretation, not witness validation, and the failing verdict is published rather than hidden. Treat the picture as a sketch under revision.
Frequently asked
Do I need to have taken anything to walk this?
No. Through runs in the browser, needs no substance, and is not a guide to obtaining, making or taking one.
Is this what DMT actually looks like?
No — see the realism audit above. The honest answer is that one graded scene currently reads as a game and the rest are awaiting inspection.
Is it safe to watch if I am photosensitive?
There is flashing light and sustained motion. Reduced motion holds every scene still and Detail can be lowered separately; both sit in the footer. If you are photosensitive or prone to seizures, switch on Reduced motion before you begin, or do not begin.
Are the machine elves the main thing people meet?
No. They are a minority percept at roughly 2.9% of one report set; the most-reported figure is a feminine or maternal presence at roughly 24%, which is why the Garden exists as a path.
What if the walkthrough lands hard?
Support is free and confidential — Fireside Project on 623-473-7433, 988 in the US, and Find A Helpline for 175+ other countries. The Atlas also publishes grounding guidance for after an experience.
Start the journey — walk it now ✦
Read the cited material instead: the 40 entities · the 31 realms · the geometry · the journey arc · every quantitative claim · the 103 sources · questions from hyperspace · this walkthrough’s evidence trail