Irvine Welsh has said that experimenting with a hallucinogenic drug had made him “less of an atheist”.
The Trainspotting author took Dimethyltryptamine, also known as DMT, as part of the feature length documentary Irvine Welsh: Reality Is Not Enough, released last year.
Speaking live from his home in Miami to an audience at Muirhouse Library in Edinburgh, Welsh said he was raised to believe there was nothing after death.
But his experience with DMT – in which he took a supervised dosage during a trip to Canada – changed his outlook on life and death and gave him a glimpse of what else might exist.
He said: “Most DMT is like a kind of post-life experience and you meet the little gnomes and they take you into a kind of antichamber before the afterlife and you see all these amazing kinds of Biblical-type things.
“Whereas the 5-MeO one is like a pre-birth experience to me… so you feel like you’re in this womb-like place and you go into this big, internal sort of disc of barnacles, like shimmering, cosmic barnacles.
“And it felt very homely. I mean, it’s made me less of an atheist basically. It’s challenged by belief in atheism.
“My mum used to say, ‘there’s nowt else, when you’re deid you’re deid and that’s it’, and I kind of internalised that sort of belief. I’m very empirical about these things, like, show me something then I’ll believe it.
“Through all my years, until I’d done DMT, I’ve never been shown anything that indicated there was an afterlife.
“And now, with DMT, I had, for the first time, kind of had a real experience of something beyond our kind of mortal existence – a real experience of my own existence and the existence of other people beyond this limited kind of three score and 10, or whatever time we have here.”
Welsh, 67, speaking as part of the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s Paper Trails initiative to support libraries, added: “It’s astonishing, but the thing that’s really completely amazing is how natural it feels… particularly with the standard DMT.
“You’re just sitting there with your eyes shut and thinking I should be blown away.
“I’m seeing all these little gnomes, I’m walking into this burning light, I’m being shot off into space, I’m looking down into earth and all this kind of stuff. Why is it seeming like I’ve just gone down to the shops for a pint of milk? Why is it not freaking me out or overwhelming me?
“And the only thing is it’s in your emotional vocabulary. It has to be, because there’s no way you can experience that – and experience it very vividly – and not be completely freaked out by it, unless you’ve done it before in some other form.
“It just feels like you’ve opened up a side of your mind, albeit briefly, and it’s experienced all this kind of stuff before.”
