This book is mad
It's called 'Threshold' by Rob Doyle
I first heard of DMT during the Great Pill Phase of 2013. A friend of a friend had smoked it. We will call him Dusty. I remember asking him, “So what’s it like taking DMT?”
“Aliens come and take you away,” answered Dusty. “But it’s grand ‘cus it’s only for like, 10 minutes.”
Quite possibly an understatement, but I didn’t probe further as I didn’t know Dusty too well.
In the years since, I had rarely thought about DMT. The main reason was that I didn’t believe Dusty and his aliens, so I dismissed his trip as something he made up on the spot to sound interesting. Also, no one was smoking DMT in the cubicles of clubs or casually consuming this thing at parties and whatnot. So DMT was never on my radar after that.
Last summer, DMT resurfaced via Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind. I have a history of reading self-help books until about halfway through and then abandoning them, and even though this one was about colourful psychedelic things (fun!), I thought it would be too sciencey for me. Or just boring.
However, I read ~most~ of it because I was in a different country, had nothing else to read and a battered copy at my disposal.
While How to Change Your Mind is very sciencey in parts, I read it in small chunks so I could understand what the hell Michael Pollan was writing about and get my head around the past, present and future of psychedelics, of which I had very little knowledge before reading. And I’m a bit embarrassed about that now.
There’s a chunk in the book where Michael smokes DMT, aka The Toad, which he sourced from a therapist called Rocío, who goes out to the Sonoran Desert at night and snatches a few Sonoran toads as they emerge from their burrows. Rocío squeezes the toad’s venomous spray (rich in 5-MeO-DMT, aka DMT) onto a piece of glass before releasing these warty specimens back into the desert.
Grand.
Overnight, the venom dries on the glass and morphs into flaky crystals, which are then volatilized, thus destroying all toxins and leaving behind 5-MeO-DMT, ready for smoking.
In the book, Michael Pollan smokes The Toad and partially describes his trip. Some parts include a deafening noise as if he’s being blasted out somewhere, like “being on the outside of a rocket after launch”, amongst other antics. It all sounds horrendous, TBH. But he wrote that “words fail” to describe the overall experience. Language is the limit when describing a DMT trip (all the more feeding my curiosity about this spindly molecule).
There’s no mention of aliens anywhere, though.
But what’s all this got to do with Threshold?
This fiction/non-fiction/memoir/genre-fluid book freaked me out in so many ways I don’t know where to start, so in that case, I won’t start anywhere. Instead, I’m going in on the bits I can’t stop thinking about. And also how DMT is involved. Without giving too much away.
But first, a quick shoutout to my pal Lucie for the recommendation, who also flung The Grass Arena by John Healy and When God Was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman my way, but I have yet to read these mysterious titles.
Anyway here are some unsolicited thoughts as they happened while I read Threshold:
Throughout the book, the narrator, Rob (I guess it’s the same Rob who wrote the book, but it’s still not quite a memoir or is it???), often refers to philosophers and writers, namely Nietzsche and Georges Bataille. I had never heard of either and briefly wondered if I was thick before accepting that it’s probably okay not to be aware of such people…?
Some parts of Threshold are quite funny. For a few minutes, you’re enjoying the read, engrossed, and the narrator grows on you. He’s a grower. Then, a few pages later, he’ll make a comment that icks you out completely, a literal ick of a thought or a comment. Repulsive, revolting, reeling. But at the same time, it’s kind of admirable, to an extent, to write with such candour. So I kept reading anyway.
I was ready to hate every word of the narrator’s description of Berghain. “Ha!” I thought haughtily. “Good luck writing about that without sounding cliché.” But it was a fairly accurate account of the various happenings inside the club. However, an encounter with the guy who drinks the piss is possibly a bit cliché, but it was still a beautifully written and weird segment in the book, which I appreciated.
There’s an extremely graphic scene in an unspecified sex club in Berlin. It’s very…detailed. Shakespearean, but the dark room version.
Rob’s descriptions of hangovers, and scag in general, are worthy of the Booker Prize if such a prize existed for writing only about hangovers and scag. I especially loved this one: “The day ahead seemed unendurable—trains and stations, pain and nausea.” I shed a tear.
Then there’s a load of DMT stuff in the final chapter which led me down all sorts of rabbit holes, trying to find drawings of Machine Elves and other such creatures and also wondering if we’re in a simulation. I’m still wondering about that.
So in the last chapter, Rob recalls his first encounter with DMT in South America and later in London via Casper Noé’s new (at the time) arthau5 film Into The Void. Here, he describes the character Oscar’s DMT trip in the opening scene, which I Googled immediately after reading.
“Oh I think I’d quite like that,” I thought. I mean, it’s nice CGI! But the comments underneath are freaky deaky.
What eyeballs!!!! Oh my god, what eyeballs?
What waiting room! Abused by entities? What!!!
Interesting. But then also…
But back to Threshold.
Michael Pollan’s chapter about smoking The Toad was a good primer for Rob’s DMT experience. Rob provided a detailed history of psychedelics, which I probably would have glazed over if I hadn’t read How To Change Your Mind. There are endless chemists, ethnobotanists, psychologists and various mystics (a lot ists) involved in psychedelics from the 1930s onwards, listed in both books. A lot of people, plants, and animals are involved in this naturally occurring compound.
Anyway Rob and his friend Matt smoke DMT in Rob’s kitchen in Rosslare, gradually increasing the doses from 20 mg to 60 mg over the course of a couple of nights.
Matt’s 60 mg doses sent him to a realm with “jesters” and other such beings. Could these have been the same yokes Dusty mentioned over ten years ago?
When Rob smokes the same dose, he writes about how language fails to describe his experience (just like Micheal Pollan). It is “as futile as describing music to someone who was born deaf.” I’m ill with curiosity at this point.
There is one paragraph, though, that freaked me out to no end, and again, it’s loosely related to those darned aliens that I was so quick to dismiss from Dusty.
Rob says he is generally a “sceptical person” who is “allergic to deluded and wishful thinking”, amongst other New Age-y stuff. So when he writes how he found himself considering “the most outré speculations” after smoking DMT, like how the drug possibly “allows us to perceive dark matter or parallel universes”, I did have a small existential spiralling moment that lasted for a day or two, so actually not that small, but yeah.
I recommend Threshold even though I feel like I shouldn’t, mostly because of the narrator’s inner Sleaze & Seed (to put it lightly) in other chapters. But the way he’s conjured up those intriguing glimpses of DMT-land, even with the limitations of language…well, I’ve never read anything like it before (the whole chapter is a trip in itself).
I’d give it 🥬🥬🥬🥬/5.