The book A Demon Haunted World: Science as a candle in the dark by Carl Sagan goes in depth as to the origin of peoples propensity to believe that they have indeed encountered such creatures. I would highly recommend reading it.
I saw them a few days after taking DMT. I was sitting on a sofa, reality paused, some tube-limbed harlequins stepped out sideways into it, cut a few things up, looked inside them then put them back together, then they fucked off and reality restarted.
I have seen them doing an ultra marathon on the second night of no sleep. It's weird how you brain fills so much detail in. The creatures I could see were like gollum from LoTR but with reptilian skin..they were either smoking pipes or playing elaborate music on instruments I have never seen before..
I've done DMT quite a few times and I can totally see why religious people make this a religious experience. Or as in this case use aliens or other 'mythical' creatures instead of God figures.<p>There is this very strong feeling of being connected to more and just being able to get a short glance to a different world that is always there but hidden from you.<p>Most people will explain it like this, but everybody also ads 'graphics' or concepts based on their own believes in order to even comprehend the experience.<p>I love DMT but I also highly believe that we are seeing some kind of natural process in our brains here and not some kind of deeper connection.<p>In other news I saw genesha dancing for me on a rainbow of thousands of never seen colors and I had a fox helping me getting back from something I can only describe as lost in my own head. Dmt is strange but beautiful
If I had to hypothesize, I'd say that most hallucinogens generally stimulate lower-levels of the neocortex's sensory perception hierarchy, resulting in a distorted and more vivid experience of basic things like colors, textures, etc. But DMT is somehow particularly able to stimulate a higher-level representation that corresponds with the perception of a fellow intelligent creature. This is combined semi-randomly with one or more high-level representation of animals and objects to create the perception of intelligent "aliens" with a bizarre form.
Every few years I get stuck for a few moments in the state between sleep and waking up. Always manifested the same way. In the middle of a dream environment a gateway with a totally alien, totally inexplicable intelligence would appear. I'd be paralyzed by it for a few seconds. As I got older a realized the terrifying alien world/intelligence was waking consciousness intruding into the dream state. Always interesting after I wake but true Lovecraftian horror as it happens.
It seems like an anonymous internet survey won't solicit very high quality data... I suppose even a rough idea of how common these experiences are is a start.