I believe whats happening at a certain level all brains encode an abstract conscious reality-stream in a similar way, and as such distortions to the brain manifest in similar ways for everyone. The fact that DMT entities are so common tells us that the perception of other consciousness's is a primitive attribute in however our world-state is managed by the brain. Flip a few random bits in an image, you get pixels. Flip a few random bits in the brain, you get conversations with entities. The error mode tells you about the data format.

So here's my conjecture. The brain attributes a "spirit" to every object the same as it attributes color and size and shape. Linguistically we use it all the time to reason about cause and effect. "The piston wants the wheel to turn, but it is too tired". Some cultures literally believe in these spirits.