Open theories
Theories are not evidence. They are explanations that people have offered for what could account for the reported DMT code phenomenon. Read them as candidate hypotheses to be tested, not as findings.
Entries here are either curated from the public record (published, attributed positions) or submitted by the community and reviewed before appearing. Votes on this page are never seeded or fabricated; every count reflects real reader activity.
Theories
The Simulation Source Code Hypothesis
From the public record
Proponent: Danny Goler and the Code of Reality community
The glyphs are read as characters of an underlying informational layer, the code of a simulated or computed reality, made briefly visible when DMT shifts perception and a coherent 650 nm beam gives the visual system a stable probe.
Full argument
This is the reading that started the protocol. Proponents point to reports of consistent, language-like symbols appearing on and around the beam, apparent surface independence, and overlap between independent observers. The claim is strong and so is the burden: it predicts that properly blinded observers should describe matching symbols at rates far above chance. The registry and the planned convergence experiments exist to test exactly that prediction.
Source: Detailing a Pilot Study: The Code of Reality Protocol (IPI Letters, 2025) (academic)
Tags: simulation, code, laser-protocol
Autonomous Entities and Visible Language
From the public record
Proponent: Terence McKenna
The DMT space is inhabited by intelligences that present self-transforming visual objects which behave like language. In this reading the symbols are not code but communication.
Full argument
Terence McKenna described machine elves offering objects that were simultaneously visual and linguistic, and argued the state points to a genuinely other order of mind. Applied to the laser phenomenon, this reading treats recurring glyphs as vocabulary from a sender rather than structure from a substrate. It predicts symbols should behave socially, responding to attention and intention, which observers sometimes report and skeptics attribute to projection.
Source: The Archaic Revival (1991) (book)
Tags: entities, communication
The Brain as Receiver
From the public record
Proponent: Rick Strassman
Endogenous DMT may retune the brain to channels of experience it normally filters out. Consistent symbol reports would reflect a shared channel rather than shared imagination.
Full argument
Rick Strassman ran the first modern clinical DMT studies and was struck by how often unconnected volunteers reported structured encounters rather than chaotic noise. His receiver framing does not require a simulation: it proposes that the brain constrains a wider field of experience and that DMT changes the tuning. Under this reading, convergence across observers is expected and measurable, which makes it unusually testable for a consciousness-first theory.
Source: DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2001) (book)
Tags: receiver, clinical-research, entities
Alien Information Theory
From the public record
Proponent: Andrew Gallimore
The brain is an information processing system that normally renders the consensus world. DMT reliably switches it to render a different, equally structured world.
Full argument
Andrew Gallimore argues that DMT is best understood as a technology that alters which world the brain builds, and that the alternate world has stable informational properties worth mapping. Notably, Gallimore has also published a detailed skeptical analysis of the laser protocol specifically, which appears separately on this board. Holding both positions at once is a useful model of how this field should work: big frameworks and sharp criticism from the same mind.
Source: Alien Information Theory (2019) (book)
Tags: information, neuroscience, simulation
Analytic Idealism
From the public record
Proponent: Bernardo Kastrup
Reality is mental at its foundation and brains are what dissociated mental processes look like from outside. Altered states thin the boundary.
Full argument
Bernardo Kastrup argues that consciousness is the one thing we cannot coherently doubt, and that physics describes the behavior of mind at large rather than a world of standalone matter. Applied here, shared symbols would be structures of the wider mental field briefly seen from inside when the dissociative boundary loosens. The reading predicts overlap between deep states of different people, which is exactly the kind of claim a convergence registry can put under pressure.
Source: The Idea of the World (2019) (book)
Tags: consciousness, idealism, philosophy
The Interface Theory of Perception
From the public record
Proponent: Donald Hoffman
Evolution built perception as a user interface that hides the true structure of reality. Some read persistent nonordinary forms as glimpses behind the desktop.
Full argument
Donald Hoffman argues from evolutionary game theory that veridical perception is outcompeted by fitness-tuned perception, so ordinary experience is icons, not truth. Hoffman himself is careful about what psychedelics show, but the interface frame is widely borrowed by the community: if the desktop can be perturbed, what appears may be closer to the machinery. The frame does not by itself predict symbol convergence, which keeps it honest as philosophy rather than evidence.
Source: Lex Fridman Podcast #293 (2022) (interview)
Tags: perception, interface, philosophy
The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Space
From the public record
Proponent: Andres Gomez Emilsson, Qualia Research Institute
DMT phenomenology follows describable geometry, with visual space curving away from the flat metric of ordinary perception.
Full argument
Andres Gomez Emilsson of the Qualia Research Institute has argued that DMT states show consistent geometric signatures, including hyperbolic surfaces, impossible tilings, and symmetry groups that can be named. Under this reading, recurring lattices and glyph-like forms are signatures of the state's geometry rather than messages from anywhere. It is one of the few frameworks that makes fine-grained phenomenological predictions, and it can coexist with both skeptical and expansive ontologies.
Source: The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences (2016) (essay)
Tags: geometry, phenomenology
Form Constants and Cortical Architecture
From the public record
Proponent: Heinrich Kluver; Paul Bressloff and Jack Cowan
Geometric hallucinations mirror the wiring of the visual cortex itself. Similar brains produce similar forms, no external source required.
Full argument
Heinrich Kluver catalogued recurring hallucination geometries in the 1920s, and Bressloff, Cowan and colleagues later showed mathematically how lattices, tunnels, spirals and cobwebs fall out of the architecture of the striate cortex. This is the strongest mechanistic account of why unconnected observers report similar patterns. Its open question is specificity: cortical geometry predicts classes of pattern, and the debate is whether reported symbol detail exceeds what the mechanism can supply.
Source: Geometric visual hallucinations, Euclidean symmetry and the functional architecture of striate cortex (2001) (academic)
Tags: neuroscience, form-constants, skeptical
Laser Speckle and Amplified Pattern Recognition
From the public record
Proponent: Andrew Gallimore and community skeptics
Coherent light produces real interference microstructure on any surface. Under DMT the visual system may lock onto that texture and elaborate it into glyphs.
Full argument
Laser speckle is physically real, observer dependent, and moves with the eye, which makes it a plausible seed for structured percepts under a pattern-hungry state. Andrew Gallimore's analysis of the laser effect works through this and related prosaic mechanisms in detail and argues the current evidence does not yet require anything exotic. This is the critique the protocol most needs to answer, and blinded surface and sham-laser controls are the way to answer it.
Source: On the DMT laser Code of Reality Effect (2025) (essay)
Tags: skeptical, speckle, methodology
Expectation and Priming
From the public record
Proponent: Community skeptics; anonymous replication author
Once a person has heard that others see code, seeing code becomes far more likely. Culture writes the caption before the experience arrives.
Full argument
Psychedelic states are exceptionally suggestible, and the code framing is now globally famous, which means new observers arrive pre-loaded. A published attempt reports code-like percepts with no laser and no DMT at all, which puts real weight on expectation as a driver. The honest response is not to dismiss the phenomenon but to design studies where priming is controlled, including naive participants and free-report formats scored blind.
Source: Detecting Code of Reality with No Lasers and No Dimethyltryptamine (2026) (academic)
Tags: skeptical, priming, expectation
Relaxed Priors and the Anarchic Brain
From the public record
Proponent: Robin Carhart-Harris and Karl Friston
Psychedelics relax the brain's high-level beliefs, letting lower-level generative structure surface. Recurring glyphs may be shared building blocks of the visual grammar.
Full argument
The REBUS model from Carhart-Harris and Friston treats the brain as a prediction machine whose top-down priors normally smooth experience into the ordinary. Relax those priors and deeper layers of the generative model show through. Because human visual systems share architecture, this reading expects cross-observer similarity without any external channel, and it suggests the interesting measurement is where reported detail exceeds architectural expectation.
Source: REBUS and the Anarchic Brain (2019) (academic)
Tags: predictive-processing, neuroscience
Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
From the public record
Proponent: Carl Jung and the depth psychology lineage
Cross-observer symbol overlap reflects archetypal content from a shared substrate of the psyche.
Full argument
In the Jungian lineage, deep symbolic material is not invented by individuals but inherited as structure, which is why myth, dream and vision rhyme across cultures. Applied to the registry, glyph convergence would be the archetypal layer made unusually legible. The reading is hard to falsify directly, but it makes a soft prediction that recovered symbols should echo motifs already present in the human symbolic record, which the catalogue can actually check.
Source: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (book)
Tags: archetypes, psychology
Entoptic Imagery and the Ancient Record
From the public record
Proponent: David Lewis-Williams; popularized by Graham Hancock
Paleolithic rock art worldwide repeats the same geometric signs that altered states produce. People may have been recording these forms for tens of thousands of years.
Full argument
David Lewis-Williams argued that the recurring dots, grids, zigzags and lattices of cave art are entoptic forms carried out of trance states by early practitioners. Graham Hancock popularized the extension of this argument to visionary encounters generally. For this project the reading matters because it supplies a deep-time comparison set: if the registry's glyphs are real and stable, their families should be findable in the archaeological record.
Source: The Mind in the Cave (2002) (book)
Tags: archaeology, rock-art, entoptic
The Near-Death Terrain
From the public record
Proponent: Chris Timmermann and colleagues
DMT phenomenology overlaps measurably with near-death experience reports. Glyphs and entities may belong to a general cartography of liminal states.
Full argument
Timmermann and colleagues showed structured overlap between DMT experiences and near-death experience questionnaire profiles. This reading treats the symbol space not as a code but as terrain that consciousness enters near its boundaries, by molecule or by crisis. It predicts that NDE reports should occasionally contain registry-family forms, which is a searchable claim as the catalogue grows.
Source: DMT models the near-death experience (2018) (academic)
Tags: nde, phenomenology
Ontological Pluralism about Entities
From the public record
Proponent: David Luke
Hallucination, psi, and genuinely other minds all remain on the table. The data does not yet force a verdict and pretending otherwise is bad method.
Full argument
David Luke has spent two decades cataloguing entity encounter research and argues for keeping multiple ontologies live while the evidence is immature. This is less a theory than a discipline for holding theories, and it is close to this project's own stance: radical neutrality with real data collection. Luke's public comments on the laser phenomenon are catalogued in the research library.
Source: Discarnate entities and dimethyltryptamine (2012), Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (academic)
Tags: entities, neutrality, parapsychology
Structured Imagination with Stable Attractors
From the public record
Proponent: Benny Shanon
Visionary content is generated by cognition but not randomly. The imagination has stable attractors that different minds fall into.
Full argument
Benny Shanon's systematic phenomenology of ayahuasca visions documented recurring cross-cultural themes without concluding anything supernatural: the mind's generative processes simply have preferred shapes. Applied to glyphs, convergence reflects the attractor landscape of human visual cognition under tryptamines. This sits between the cortical account and the archetypal one, and it predicts family resemblance rather than exact symbol matches.
Source: The Antipodes of the Mind (2002) (book)
Tags: phenomenology, cognition
The Console Reading
From the public record
Proponent: Community writers on the phenomenon
Whether or not reality is simulated, the experience behaves like accessing a console or debug view. That regularity deserves mapping on its own terms.
Full argument
Some community writers deliberately bracket the metaphysics: they note that the phenomenology is console-like, stable enough to describe, and shared enough to catalogue, and they treat that as the actual finding so far. This reading fits the registry's method exactly: collect first, interpret later. It converts an unanswerable question into a mappable one.
Source: Beyond the Screen: Danny Goler's DMT Laser Experiments and the Console of Reality (essay)
Tags: simulation, phenomenology, console
Virtual Reality Rendering
From the public record
Proponent: Thomas Campbell
Reality is a computed information system and consciousness is the player. Anomalous percepts are readings from the larger system, not malfunctions.
Full argument
Thomas Campbell's framework treats the physical world as one rendered dataset among others and altered states as access to the wider computation. Under this reading the code experience is close to literal. Its weakness is that it can absorb any observation, which is why this board pairs it with entries that stake falsifiable claims.
Source: My Big TOE (2003) (book)
Tags: simulation, virtual-reality
It from Bit
From the public record
Proponent: John Archibald Wheeler, applied in community discussions
If physics is informational at root, a perceptual state that exposes structure could in principle expose informational structure.
Full argument
John Archibald Wheeler's it from bit proposal holds that every physical thing derives its existence from yes-no questions, information before matter. Community discussions borrow the phrase as the physics-respectable backbone for code readings. The borrowed version goes far beyond what Wheeler claimed, and the distance between the two is itself worth seeing clearly.
Source: Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links (1989) (academic)
Tags: information, physics
Hypnagogia and Phosphene Elaboration
From the public record
Proponent: Community skeptics
Glyph-like percepts occur at sleep onset and from pressure phosphenes. DMT may intensify a normal mechanism rather than open a channel.
Full argument
Everyone has hardware for spontaneous geometric imagery: closed-eye visuals, hypnagogic forms, and phosphenes need no molecule at all. This reading treats the laser protocol as a vivid amplifier of ordinary visual noise plus meaning-making. It is the most deflationary entry on the board, and it earns its seat because any convincing positive result has to beat it.
Source: Hypnagogia (background reading), plus recurring community arguments (community)
Tags: skeptical, hypnagogia