The Machine Elves: A Phenomenological Report

“Many people who report DMT entity encounters describe features like McKenna's machine elves. A self-selected survey can show that the reports are similar. It cannot show what they are, or how common they are.”

The machine elves, 'merry elfin, self-transforming, machine creatures, looking like self-dribbling Fabergé eggs on the rebound', are McKenna's most famous contribution to the psychedelic literature. They are also his most empirically interesting one.

McKenna first described the entities in 1965, from his own DMT experiences. He described them in public lectures through the 1980s and 1990s. His description became widely available before the internet made all descriptions widely available.

What happened when the internet made all descriptions widely available: entity contact reports resembling McKenna's description multiplied. The 2020 Johns Hopkins online survey (Davis et al., J. Psychopharmacol. 34(9):1008-1020) collected reports from 2,561 people who had already had an entity encounter after inhaling DMT (mean age 32; 77 percent men). Because every respondent was recruited for having had an encounter, it cannot show how often encounters happen, and because it did not compare cultures, it cannot show that the reports are the same across cultures. It shows that many self-selected respondents described similar features.

This is the important data point. McKenna was not the only person to encounter what he described. He was the first to describe it in language that entered wide cultural circulation. Whether those later reporters already knew his description is not known, so the reports cannot rule out culturally shared expectations.

What it is remains open. McKenna held it as an open question. No published brain-imaging study has isolated entity contact; a 2023 EEG-fMRI study (Timmermann et al., PNAS) mapped DMT's overall brain effects only.

Sources

• McKenna, True Hallucinations (1993)
• Sexton et al., J. Psychopharmacol. 33(9) (2019) [Source not found; under review]
• Davis et al., J. Psychopharmacol. 34(9):1008-1020 (2020)