TheExtendedState
A film by Heath Cozens
Stealing fire from DMT hyperspace
I felt like I was on the other side of the universe, but I was home.
A film about DMTx—extended-state DMT
Drug, medicine or …portal?
For decades, DMT has offered even the hardest psychonaut a fleeting glimpse beyond the veil: a terrifyingly intense blast-off into what feels like a head-slappingly bizarre, higher-dimensional realm that, somehow, is stable. Stranger still, its visitors report inhabitants.
Again and again, even the uninitiated report eerily familiar encounters: hyperintelligent entities, jesters, mantid sentinels, alien intelligences. And then the door slams shut.
DMTx changes that. A slow, continuous IV drip holds the door open. The ambition is to reach it reliably. Explore it. And map it.
It’s like going from scuba diving to deep-sea diving when you’ve got a line to the boat. You can go a lot deeper and you can spend a lot more time down there.
Gratitude, gratitude, gratitude.
The film
The Extended State follows a small network of scientists, nurses and psychonauts attempting to map the DMT realm.
Filming began in 2019. Andrew Gallimore had just released his first book, Alien Information Theory. In his spartan Okinawa flat, he cooked curry and drank beer with a young Japanese colleague, preaching the DMT gospel. DMTx was but a glint in his eye and a theoretical framework back then.
In Colorado, biochemist Kevin Thorbahn was pulling his belongings out of a snowbound storage locker, having just moved back.
In California, nurse David was preparing for another journey. He and Kevin would end up working hand in hand on extended-state exploration.
Now Gallimore is on Joe Rogan. Kevin and partner Hayley are so busy at DreamMind Labs they barely know what to do with themselves.
David, meanwhile, has been in Africa studying iboga in the Bwiti tradition. Now he’s coming to stay with Kevin, to support the work.
Heath Cozens keeps returning to film with them as this little network grows, branching out like mycelium.
It’s like a 5-year-old child suddenly switching from speaking English to some obscure dialect of some South African click language, but fluently.
Why now
Transcendence on tap
Since filming began, the approach Gallimore proposed has been tested in human trials at Imperial College London.
Outside the lab, things are moving fast. Aaron Vanden’s The Discovery, about Danny Goler’s laser-and-DMT experiment, has pulled millions of views on TikTok ahead of its world premiere this fall.
DreamMind Labs is developing new protocols, including with other drugs. Eleusis is offering what it calls the world’s first legal extended-state immersion, on a private Caribbean island. A rich ecology is emerging.
Psychonauts are staying in the state for hours, and paying four- and five-figure sums to visit hyperspace. A trickle of interest has turned into a torrent.
Are DMT entities real?
Andrew Gallimore, Donald Hoffman and Niffe Hermansson are proposing ways to test whether DMT encounters might involve other conscious beings. Their preprint, Traces of the Other, asks what evidence could distinguish such encounters from hallucinations.
Could one explorer leave a message that another retrieves in a separate session? Could an entity relay information the person encountering it couldn’t otherwise know?
And would they play along?
If they’re real, we can do hard-nosed experiments and show it. And if they’re not real, we’ll find that out as well… You have to be really hard-nosed so that you don’t get pulled into stuff that’s nonsense. And you can’t be so hard-nosed that you miss the stuff that’s real.
Entities
Psychonauts explore the mind from the inside. Psychopomps, in the old myths, guide souls across the threshold. The Extended State follows both.
We’ve locked ourselves within this little prison of reality—this tiny little slice of this much broader and more complex and beautiful reality.
The filmmaker
Heath Cozens
Multiple award-winning director. Trans-dimensional smuggler.
Heath makes films about people who defy the status quo and define reality on their own terms. He has been in the room since the early days: in Okinawa with Andrew Gallimore, and in Colorado with some of the first people attempting it outside a clinical setting.
Documentary FilmJapanese Agency for
Cultural Affairs
Film Awards
Fearless, challenging, and touching in ways you will never see coming.
Always involving and sometimes deeply moving.
One of the most powerful blasts of empathy and humanity I’ve ever experienced.
- Doglegs — Best Director, Fantastic Fest. World premiere at Hot Docs. Runner-up for the Golden Kapok, Guangzhou. Also Cleveland, New Zealand and Nippon Connection. Six months in Japanese cinemas, then broadcast on Japanese TV.
- Only I Can Hear — Grand Prize for Documentary Film, Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs Film Awards. Jury’s Special Award, Breaking Down Barriers. World premiere at Hot Docs; also Doc Edge, TokyoDocs and ReelAbilities. Broadcast on NHK.
- Family Strong — Five Tellys, four Communicators.
- Ex Luna — Co-directed with seven-time Emmy winner Michael Werner. From Apollo to Artemis, with a national PBS broadcast commitment.
I agree to let you come and film with me because psychedelic medicine saved my life.
Make contact
Calling all fellow entities.
If you’ve experienced plant healing, or explored these realms yourself, you may feel as I do: the healing and growth that can come from them deserve to be shared.
We’re only on this material plane for a short, short while. So before I depart this mortal coil, I’d love to connect with people and organizations who can help get this film made.
I make entertaining, layered films that traverse the gritty and the transcendent, and highlight the hidden connections that bind us all. If that sounds like your kind of thing, and you can help accelerate this work, I’d love to talk.
Heath