I agree that DMT visions are not dreams, but suspect they utilize the same brain organs and neural circuitry that dreams do to produce the internal imagery. Psychedelic visuals are generally kinetic geometric matrices (2-D or 3-D depending on substance and level of trip, DMT being very good at producing 3-D matrices) with "embedded images" which emerge from the matrix, morph, and fade along with the user's own train of thought or subconscious inclinations. The geometric matrices are a result of the visual processing system falling into a chaotic state, thus causing sensory feedback, overlapping frames and trails, and frame-translation errors such as visual flanging, perspective distortion, etc. The eye receives light on the retina in a series of concentric circles with the highest concentration in the center. We only receive about 80%-90% of the actual picture of what's in front of us on the retina, and the rest (like the stuff left out on the periphery and in the blind spot) is "added in" by our brain's ability to fill in the missing pieces of reality. This "fill in the blank" aspect of the brain is not perfect, and sometimes causes us to mistakenly see something "out of the corner of our eye" which on closer inspection is not actually there. Along the pathway from the retina to the prefrontal cortex, the sense data must be translated from a series of concentric rings of dots to a concrete image of outlines, fills, and shading that we perceive as reality. This process is called "frame translation." Hard lines are etched out on our retina by a process called "lateral inhibition", which allows one retina to take priority over the retina next to it if it perceives a hard line or shift in shading that infers depth or outline. If lateral inhibition is inhibited, the edges of what we see tend to drift and blur, causing perspective distortion, creeping light and shadows, and patterns that seem to crawl. At more dramatic levels of this kind of activity, the "frame" of reality actually begins to rotate and twist, and if you have "trails" on the outlines of an image that is rotating in space, you create a complex 2-D geometric lattice. If this lattice twists forwards or backwards it produces depth of field, thus a swirling 3-D matrix appears.
Okay, so that is part one. These shifting lines and shadows and geometric lattice imagery I have described should be familiar to anyone who has taken a psychedelic tryptamine. Now when you add an over-active "dream engine" trying to impose patterns and order on these morphing kinetic matrices, (not to mention visual synethesia) an infinite number of patterns and visions can emerge. They are unlike dreams in that they do not appear as a alternate version of hard reality, but this is because dream data comes from the hippocampus (compressed memory), which stores data from everyday stuff. DMT data comes from the brain's own pattern-matching systems trying to impose order on a chaotic patterns, thus "filling in the blanks" and trying to piece together what is going on. This is probably why "visuals" become more elaborate on the periphery (i.e. in the corner of the eye where there is more capacity to extrapolate missing data) and become less-so when examined front and center. For example, "elves" tend to hang out and bounce around in the periphery, and tend to disappear or "drift" with the visual field when you try to focus directly on them.
Since the patterns and imagery we see in the psychedelic state are so "alien" to our normal sensory input, it is no wonder that the landscapes and visions that our brain imposes on them are likewise very alien. That said, I have seen all kinds of mundane stuff in DMT visions: toasters, faces of people I know (usually family), people copulating, scenes of human suffering and warfare, clowns and harlequins, trains, skulls, trees, oceans, sunsets, animals, dancing cartoon rats, silken sand-dunes, spider-webs, strands of DNA, rotating atomic and molecular structures, etc. This is all very terrestrial stuff. So DMT visuals can be pieced together from bits of memory and imagination. The basic difference between dreams and DMT visuals is that dreams are snippets of incongruous memories forced into a consistent narrative by the pre-frontal cortex; DMT visuals are chaotic geometric patterns forced into a consistent narrative by the prefrontal cortex. The source of the data is different (though sometimes overlapping), but the process of turning random data into "contextual meaning" happens in the same place in the brain, whether we are awake, dreaming, or tripping.
The entire article, The Case Against DMT Elves(http://www.tripzine.com/articles.asp?id=dmt_pickover) is quite interesting and primarily argues against the idea that the "elves" seen in DMT visions have an autonomous existence. The author mentions that he is quite experienced in lucid dreaming and is clearly open to the idea of sacred or transpersonal dimensions to such experiences, but approaches the subject from a refreshingly skeptical perspective that takes brain science into account.
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