Sweet Home Under White Clouds by tipiro

Today’s discussion question is a great one and touches on the sneaky relationship between different states of consciousness.

Here’s the big Q:

“Is dreaming like tripping?”

I think the answer is simple:

yes, there are definitely similarities between the two states.

In my own experience studying and working with my dreams, including taking drugs (mushrooms, etc) inside a dream in order to “dream trip”, and my own experience with taking drugs, I can say with certainty that yes, in my own experience at least, there is a strong parallel between dreams and tripping. So yes, I would say the dreaming is like tripping and vice versa.

This is an experience that many people have confirmed. I’ve even talked about it some here before. In my interview with friend and fellow psychonautic explorer Chad Watts, he discusses the relationship between entheogens and lucid dreaming. (And it’s fascinating stuff – please check out this interview!)

Some drugs lend themselves very much to the dream world experience. My experience taking diphenhydramine years ago was incredibly dream like (and not in a positive way, BTW) and many psychonauts have long noted the relationship between various substances such as LSD and mushrooms and dreaming, as well as the more recently popularly entheogen, Salvia Divinorum, and it’s similarly dream-like effects on the brain.

What does this all mean?

For one, it doesn’t mean that taking any of the aforementioned substances should be taken lightly since it’s “just like dreaming.” Dreams can’t kill you…. but putting substances into your body can kill you at worst, and reasonably put you at risk both in a mental sense and physical sense if you’re being foolish about it. <steps of soapbox>

Secondly, it’s doesn’t mean that the experiences are the same. It’s just that, yes, there are parallels!

SO what are some of the parallels? How is dreaming like tripping?

In my own experience, I’ve noted the following:

1) The ability to think of something and have it happen. In a dream, this meant making something appear when lucid because I intended for it to appear. While tripping, it meant hallucinating (and not realizing I was doing so) after thinking about something. (Kind of scary, in retrospect.)

2) The fluid nature of both reality and time in both circumstances. And by this I mean the general disconnect between “scenes” in dreams and the disconnect between one minute to the next when tripping.

3) The amazing ability to trip within a dream by taking drugs only in the dream. So-called “dream tripping” fascinates the hell out of me and it’s something I’ve done a few times in my dreams. In every instance, taking the substance had a big effect on me and resulted in an altered state of consciousness, very much like tripping for real, yet it all occurred in the dream. (For more on this phenomenon, watch this fascinating Neurosoup video on dream tripping.)

4) An absence of logical thinking, as well as the ability to intuit importance and emphasis on situations and feelings beyond their ordinary meaning.
This is hard to put into words. Maybe a pointer here is that dreams can seem more “real than reality” and when taking a psychedelic, the resulting experience can seem “more real” than every day reality. This is certainly a common theme to both the psychedelic experience and the dream world – especially vivid dreams and lucid dreams. Somehow, the user feels the experience is “more real” than their normal experience of reality.

What Do You Think?

Those are 4 points I can see where there’s a consistency or blending of experiences in regards to tripping and dreaming. What about you? What you have experienced? What do you think about these ideas?

Please share your own thoughts and experiences as it relates to dreaming and tripping in the comments below. Thanks!

Photo bytipiro.

Well, it’s not true as I sit here writing this, but, it begs the question: how far away are we from such a headline?

My best guess is we’re looking at a few years.

I’d say even as early as 2010, Salvia will be illegal everywhere or nearly everywhere in the States.

Just last month 3 more states – Virginia, Kansas, and Florida – banned this unique plant, used traditionally in Mexico for something in the vein of oh – a few thousand years – and more recently since the mid 19990′s by psychoactive seeking westerners.

There is definitely some sensationalist hype floating around the media on Salvia, yet I can’t help but blame some of the people – some of them clearly idiots – filming themselves on Salvia, and releasing it on the net.

I was at a bar a few months ago when one of the Salvia segments came on TV. With no sound but only a view on the TV of person after person hitting a pipe or a bong, and then zoning out, or laughing, or doing something embarressing – this caught my eye quickly. What the fuck were they talking about? Crack?

OHHHH – wait, it must be on Salvia Divinorum!

Dammit!
And I was hoping it was about a new crack epidemic sweeping America, because at least crack is already illegal.

Seriously though, watching these pieces on the news about Salvia, it’s pretty frustrating. These films people are making are being used against Salvia, and it’s just too easy to do so, especially when you’ve got rather immature kids smoking the stuff and filming it.

I’d also say you can shoot some blame for it becoming illegal on certain vendors; Salvia is definitely not a marijuana substitute, and I’ve heard that it’s sometimes marketed as such. (Can you imagine expecting to get a nice weed high and then – wait – oh god, what is happening.) 

But mainly it’s just going to get banned because we have no sensible relationship to drugs in this country, and as a whole, we are not interested in changing that relationship, only reinforcing it. (Heck, take a look at Loiusiana State Act 159, which recently banned dozens of plants, most noticable Salvia Divinorum, but also so wide reaching as to ban Calea Zacatechichi, AKA dream herb! WTF…)

Is there anything to be done to keep Salvia from becoming illegal soon in the USA?

My somewhat pathetic but realistic answer is: I think not.

The more sensible counter attack would be to purchase plants from vendors like Bouncing Bear or I Am Shaman, keep them growing, and spread the plant-love amongst your friends.

This might mean goodbye to quality extracts, but at least this would keep natural plants readily available for their caretakers and their friends.

He’s not simply having a subjective journey inside his mind; DXM actually takes him to an objective realm with other beings – some of which are the souls of recently departed friends and associates!

Yes – he’s talking about meeting the dead!

Along the way, he has out of body experiences, witnesses the seat of dreaming and memory, interacts with strange beings, lost souls, and other characters, and of course, has some seriously ego-crushing experiences, forever messing with the idea of the “I”.

Dan writes that DXM takes him to the Hive Mind.

What is this place? Who is there? What’s going on in here?

Dan likens the term Hive Mind to Terrence McKenna’s idea of the OverMind, which is a living Super Mind created through pooling the consciousness of the dead into one group mind. (I find it interesting that he does not see the Hive Mind as an omnipotent God, stating that although it is self-aware, it has problems, learns, grows and changes.)

Once inside, he met with a friend who had recently died. He also saw a friends father who had died in “real life” – yet this fact was unknown to Dan while he was tripping. He sees this as proof to the idea that he is visiting the same realm of the dead.

Within the Hive Mind, he also met Buddhist Monks, who he believes were dead or possibly alive and meditating (!!), and Native Americans. He met people who seemed confused, trapped, unable to move or grown on – hinting at the idea of purgatory.

And he also met the infamous “elves” that also pop up in other psychedelic literature.

….

It’s a bit hard to pin down the more abstract run-ins he had in the hive mind, but Dan describes an amazing encounters with dreams, or, a he describes it, the seat of dreaming.

After seeing what he calls The Dream Chamber, Dan recorded the following into a tape recorder:

“I’m flying over a scene that looks like an elaborate model train set. Amazing… what it is is a dream landscape. It’s a three-dimensional scene of every dream I’ve ever had. I can at this point remember/see every dream I’ve ever had. Now I’m drifting down into it. People, animals, archetypes, childhood monsters…they’re all here! And this is not a memory, but a place! Everything still happening – alive – a living hologram.”

Reflecting on this, he later writes: “It seems I was looking at a sentient world of thought – my thoughts! – being the dreams “thought up” by me over a lifetime. I must emphasize: everything in this place was ALIVE still…moving, happening.” What would it mean if our dreams actually existed in some place? And more than that, they permanently existed, living in three dimensions and existing forever?

The only way I could take in something like this would be with the perspective of parallel universes and a holographic universe.

And even then, the idea is baffling and far out.

Psychedelics are known for the ego-crushing properties, and Dan’s experiences with DXM are no exception. He discusses this at various points in the book, trip by trip, stating such things as:

“Initially, my personality was revealed to be not an “I” but an orchestra of “I’s” working in unison to create a sense of one “I.”

I find this interesting because, from what I understand, this notion of multiple selves working together to create the illusion of a single “I” is understood to be true by mainstream neuroscientists and others who study consciousness.

His descriptions of the self get creepy, reminding me of what others write about DMT, when he says things like:“The psychedelic had held a door open into one “me,” allowing another “me” to see in…and “I” was a squirming electric flesh-chemical ant colony.”

And later, almost reassuringly, he writes about what part of him moves on after death, saying that witnessing “these tiny knowing bits of me, by deduction, the “I” in the Anti-Ego state doing the watching, must be incomplete.” Therefore, he concludes that the state he is currently in feels stripped down “because it is existing as a partial self.” This essence, the part that’s left over after everything else is stripped down…”must be the “real” me – the me that crosses into death.”

This brings up the questions I wrote about in this post on reincarnation and what it is that actually carries on after death. Unfortunately, it doesn’t answer them.

……