I was told “the source code” is a cascading Matrix-style hieroglyphic stream of katakana-esque characters lurking beneath the veil of our material world. Definitive proof at last that we live in a simulated, holographic reality in which we are more like computer game players than sovereign humans. 

To witness this code with one’s own eyes, and crucially have all the accompanying “downloads” about the nature of consciousness, it is said that one must smoke DMT and stare into the reflection of a diffracted red laser off a wall. But alas, despite following the protocol under the guidance of the psychonaut behind the growing phenomenon, I saw nothing except the cross-shaped laser reflection. I squinted. I pored. I even smoked a bit more DMT. But alas, nada, rien, nothing but a laser shadow that wobbled slightly.

Now, the wallpaper it reflected off of was distracting, ridged almost like a shredded wheat cereal. Also, I don’t generally tend to have particularly vivid open-eye psychedelic visions (though I certainly do not have aphantasia, a cognitive condition where a person cannot voluntarily form mental images, either). Plus, lots of people were watching me, and it had been a very long day. But look, I don’t have to apologize for not seeing the code either, OK? 

It almost feels like modern life has become so surreal, so fantastical, that you have to excuse yourself for not seeing hallucinatory Matrix glyphs if other people, including in a recent CNN documentary, claim to see them with great fanfare. Still, as preposterous as the idea that this “code” exists outside the mind may be, it might also be a welcome tonic to learn that if all the code of reality lore around this bizarre experiment were true,  then whatever damage we do to the world might only be happening inside a game. 

Still, the DMT code guru Danny Goler is clearly perturbed by the “inconvenient fact” that many people do not see the code under his procedure — despite his impassioned claim (along with trip reports of others who have seen it) that it is somehow objectively there. “You need to basically look beyond the surface,” says Goler, who has long hair, round features, and a beard with a goatee emphasis. The Russian-born former mandatory-service Israeli soldier, who now lives in Florida, claims to have racked up more than 7,000 personal DMT trips since 2010. “Some people understand how to do it easily, and others don’t. Some people can move their ears, others can't, even though it's just a simple movement of a particular muscle.”

At this point, you’re probably wondering why on earth 43-year-old Goler started his outré experiment in the first place. It all began when he made alliances with extraterrestrial beings from DMT hyperspace and set out on a mission to prove they are real, rather than mere visions. Goler’s guiding principle, he says, was that he “was looking for ways to communicate between the realms, if in fact the realms are real.” So he pored over cutting-edge physics studies looking at dark photons and proton-proton collisions and went down innumerable Google search rabbit holes as he started giving regular lectures on X — even acknowledging at one point that the visionary beings could be “fucking with me.” Then, at a Thai restaurant in Boulder, Colorado, in August 2020, the penny dropped: He must smoke DMT, point a certain kind of laser at a wall, and stare into the reflection. 

What he saw was remarkable, and the far-reaching movement he has since created has drawn hundreds of people reporting similar visions. The trailer for a forthcoming documentary on his work, called “The Discovery,” has 4.8 million views on TikTok. 

“What we see in the laser seems to be some kind of a field contrived of a very large number of what I describe as buckyballs, or truncated icosahedrons, if you want to get geometric, that themselves are made out of what seems to be some kind of characters,” Goler tells DoubleBlind. “The characters are extremely coherent when they come into view in full. They have a super-HD property and are extremely stable in space. So it's clear when you're looking through the microscope that there's some reality to what you're seeing.”

It was a surprise for tech executive Eric, who did not want to use his last name because of his work, when he smoked DMT and gazed almost beyond the laser’s reflection, seeing “an interdimensional space that seemed to go on forever.” He has the rare genetic disorder Ehlers Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disorder, and says that, for him,  most drugs, including DMT, produce little to no effect upon him, regardless of the dose.

Despite not experiencing a discernible physical sensation, he describes the experience as entering the Holodeck on “Star Trek,” a holographic simulation room used by the Federation Starfleet to create interactive virtual reality worlds, and instructing it to generate the universe itself, Eric says. “The red light laser is disrupting the hologram, and what you're seeing is the nature of the universe behind that hologram,” he says. “It looks like a combination of hardware and software, and code in a technology 100 years from now.”

Colin Harrington, a consciousness research PhD student specializing in brain-computer interfaces, recalls taking three large inhalations from a DMT vape and gazing at the reflection of the diffuse red beam. “As I looked into the laser band, it was a cityscape,” he says. “But instead of the buildings having windows, the windows were errors and symbols that were kind of falling slowly, as you would imagine something stuck in molasses slowly moving down the structures that I was seeing.” This he likes to the brain making sense of “the math of reality”, with the DMT “thinning the veil a little bit so we can push our minds through to that extrasensory perception.”

But I’m certainly not the first person not to have seen the code. Neuroscientist Zeus Tipado, a PhD candidate at the University of Maastricht, tried four times to no avail. “The reason why some people see the code, and some don’t, is that they are more susceptible to suggestion,” he says. “At the end of the day, it's an optical illusion, and some people can perceive them better than others. It's not like some people have a key to this different dimension. For some people, if they’re being told you’ll see code, then they’ll probably see code.” In any case, he says it is “pretty ordinary” to see such visions during DMT trips. 

Andres Gómez Emilsson, the founder of the Qualia Research Institute, says that he saw a “speckle pattern” which he reasons is the result of the laser's light waves interfering with each other as they scatter off the surface, creating a stable pattern of bright and dark nodes. “The visual system is finding ways to compress the speckle pattern using the symmetries and vibrations unlocked by the [DMT] state,” he says, “though true compression isn't really possible given the pattern's complexity, which is part of what makes the process so generative.”

David Luke, a professor of exceptional experience at the University of Exeter, says he “started to get a glimmer of a possibility of something code-like emerging on the edge of my perception if I were to fixate on it hard enough.” But he acknowledges that he was “frontloaded with expectation” and that, in addition to varying levels of suggestibility, people’s psychedelic visions are also influenced by visual, perceptual, cognitive, and psychological factors.

“Since Danny has removed the possibility of anyone doing the laser challenge in a blind way—having vigorously announced what to expect in fine detail from the highest hill he could find on the internet—it is impossible to rule out the real possibility that it is all down to priming,” Luke says. “As it stands, the ‘evidence’ is not a red pill moment for the red laser.”

But two of my fellow heavily-primed acquaintances who underwent the DMT experiment at the same time as me had compelling visions of something approximating a code. Neurobiologist Andrew Gallimore, the author of Death by Astonishment: Confronting the Mystery of the World’s Strangest Drug, says that the question of why some people have more vivid open-eye hallucinations than others on psychedelics is almost entirely unexplored.

“Unfortunately, we know almost nothing about the reasons for individual variations in visual intensity during a DMT trip,” he says. “We only know that variation exists. This can be extreme to the point of someone experiencing no effects whatsoever after ingesting DMT — whether by vaporization or injection.” Around 5% in Strassman's 1990s study experienced no effects even at the highest "breakthrough" dose level. This could be due to genetic differences in serotonin receptor structures that reduce sensitivity to DMT, Gallimore explains. 

In our motley research group, as Goler intently guided each participant like a psychedelic prophet in a race against time, one person apparently witnessed a biological world beneath the code. Another made a hastily abandoned attempt to sketch what she was seeing. Meanwhile, two others were unable to look into the laser because they were so overwhelmed by the effects of the DMT. I would have liked to have seen the code, but maybe I’m one of the least suggestible people out there, and I simply saw what was actually there. Accordingly, the wallpaper remained stubbornly real. But if I close my eyes and imagine the code, even without DMT, it somehow miraculously comes into view.

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