>There is no scientific evidence that endogenous DMT is involved with
>naturally-occurring visions, dreams, end-of-life visions, or visual
>disturbances of any kind,

This is really sort of a non-statement. It is equally true that there is no scientific evidence that DMT is not involved. An unbiased statement about our state of knowledge on the topics mentioned is simply:

“the psycho-physiological mechanisms involved in the production of naturally-occurring visions, dreams, end-of-life visions, and many types of visual disturbances are currently unknown.”

It is certainly premature to focus exclusively on DMT (there are a number of other compounds which either definitely occur in the human brain or likely can be produced by the brain which might trigger visionary experiences). Visionary experiences that are not triggered by an exogenous drug clearly still have some sort of psychopharmacology underlying them. Endogenous tryptamines appear to be as likely a candidate as anything.

Out of curiosity, what mechanism do you favor to explain the very dramatic visions that occur in prolonged total light deprivation?

Lux, can you send me some pointers on the Cottonwood research you alluded to,

Thanks
Ryan

PS
Many light deprivation studies have been horribly flawed in that they don’t make any attempt to exclude all sources of light…

>There is no scientific evidence that endogenous DMT is involved with naturally-occurring visions, dreams, end-of-life visions, or visual disturbances of any kind, much less that DMT is released into the blood stream at 3 am. Happily the Cottonwood Research Foundation is investigating these hypotheses.

I guess it depends on how one defines "scientific evidence." To me it appears that there is some pretty compelling "scientific evidence" to support the notion that endogenous DMT may be involved in naturally-occurring visionary-type experiences and dreams. The evidence comes from Rick Strassman's studies at the University of New Mexico. There are some very uncanny similarities between naturally-occurring mystical experiences, near-death experiences, and non-human entity contact experiences, and what the subjects in Strassman's study reported after injections of DMT. As someone mentioned, DMT is always present in our brains. It's a neurotransmitter, probably produced by the pineal gland, although we're not sure. But we do know that the levels of DMT in our brains change throughout the day, and they tend to be highest in the middle of the night--around 3:00 am--when people are asleep and dreaming. Elevated DMT levels have also been found in the cerebral spinal fluid of some schizophrenics. All this, to me, adds up to a some to some pretty compelling evidence that endogenous DMT may be involved in mediating our interpretation of the signals that we define as reality.

~David Jay Brown