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McKenna's first published mention of the machine elves in his and his brother [[Dennis McKenna|Dennis]]' book ''The Invisible Landscape'' (published 1975):
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We especially refer to the apparently autonomous and intelligent, chaotically mercurial and mischievous machine elves encountered in the trance state, strange teachers whose marvelous singing makes intricate toys out of the air and out of their own continually transforming body geometries.<ref>''The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens and the I Ching'' Terence McKenna, 1975</ref></blockquote>
Later, McKenna describes the experience in more detail. The following is a partial transcription of a workshop titled ''"Time and Mind" - The Tykes''.<ref>[http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/dmt/dmt_writings3.shtml Larger transcript available at erowid.org. Fetched 2013-01-13.]</ref><ref>[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvRCE-KtZ2o Audio recording, youtube. Fetched 2013-01-13.]</ref> At about minute one or two of a DMT trip, according to McKenna, one may burst through a [[chrysanthemum]]-like [[mandala]], and find:
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There's a whole bunch of entities waiting on the other side, saying "How wonderful that you're here! You come so rarely! We're ''so'' delighted to see you!"
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They're like jewelled self-dribbling basketballs and there are many of them and they come pounding toward you and they will stop in front of you and vibrate, but then they do a very disconcerting thing, which is they jump into your body and then they jump back out again and the whole thing is going on in a high-speed mode where you're being presented with thousands of details per second and you can't get a hold on [them ...] and these things are saying "Don't give in to astonishment", which is exactly what you want to do. You want to go nuts with how crazy this is, and they say "Don't do that. Pay attention to what we're doing".
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What they're doing is making objects with their voices, singing structures into existence. They offer things to you, saying "Look at this! Look at this!" and as your attention goes towards these objects you realise that what you're being shown is impossible. It's not simply intricate, beautiful and hard to manufacture, it's impossible to make these things. The nearest analogy would be the [[Fabergé egg]]s, but these things are like the toys that are scattered around the nursery inside a U.F.O., celestial toys, and the toys themselves appear to be somehow alive and can sing other objects into existence, so what's happening is this proliferation of elf gifts, which are moving around singing, and they are saying "Do what we are doing" and they are very insistent, and they say "Do it! Do it! Do it!" and you feel like a bubble inside your body beginning to move up toward your mouth, and when it comes out it isn't sound, it's vision. You discover that you can pump "stuff" out of your mouth by singing, and they're urging you to do this. They say "That's it! That's it! Keep doing it!".
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We're now at minute 4.5 [of the trip] and you speak in a kind of [[glossolalia]]. There is a spontaneous outpouring of syntax unaccompanied by what is normally called "meaning". After a minute or so of this the whole thing begins to collapse in on itself and they begin to physically move away from you. Usually their final shot is that they wave goodbye and say "[[Deja vu]]! Deja vu!".
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==Other mentions of the DMT elves==
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