What do movies always get wrong about DMT entity encounters?
I’m a filmmaker, and I recently made a psychological horror film centered on grief and a DMT experience.
The basic premise is that a grieving man uses DMT hoping to reach his dead father, and the experience becomes increasingly difficult to separate into memory, grief, hallucination, spirituality, and something that may feel genuinely external to him.
While making it, one of the things I kept thinking about was how hard psychedelic experiences are to portray without turning them into either generic “trippy visuals” or a very literal supernatural event.
For people here who have had intense psychedelic experiences, especially entity encounters or experiences involving deceased loved ones:
What do movies and television usually get wrong about them?
Is it the visuals? The emotional tone? The sense of time? The feeling of encountering another presence? The certainty or uncertainty about whether what happened was “real”? The way the experience stays with you afterward?
I’m especially interested in the parts that are difficult to communicate to someone who hasn’t experienced anything like it.
Not looking for advice about obtaining or using anything. I’m interested specifically in how these experiences are represented in storytelling and what feels authentic or inauthentic to people who have actually had them.