SHAMANIC PLANTS, PSYCHEDELICS, AND MIND-BODY HEALING
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
It seems that there is a deeply intertwined yet largely unexplored relationship between psychedelic states of mind and lucid dreaming. In this opening chapter I will summarize the important scientific research into psychedelic drugs and plants and show how these valuable studies shed some light on the fascinating connection between lucid dreaming and other shamanic states of consciousness.
Strictly forbidden and severely criminalized by almost every world government, and long demonized, ridiculed, or ignored by the mainstream media, psychedelic drugs are now finally receiving the serious scientific attention they have long deserved. New research confirms the promising results of earlier studies, which suggested that these strange and controversial substances actually have a broad range of useful medical applications, and even the mainstream media has finally embraced the scientific truth about the potential benefits and considerable safety of these remarkable substances.
After eighteen years in which no clinical studies involving psychedelic drugs appeared anywhere in the world, there is now an explosion of research occurring all over the globe, such that we’re currently living in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance. Over the past decade a growing number of clinical studies have begun to explore the potential therapeutic benefits of mind-shifting drugs like LSD, MDMA, psilocybin, DMT, ayahuasca, ketamine, and ibogaine. Articles now appear regularly in mainstream publications like the New York Times (“LSD, Reconsidered for Therapy”1) and Newsweek magazine (“Psychedelic Drugs ‘Safe as Riding a Bike or Playing Soccer’”2).
Much about the precise biological mechanisms governing how these unusual drugs produce their visionary effects, and their profound healings, remains mysterious. Nevertheless, they often produce similar psychoactive and perceptual experiences, such as the suspension of conventional belief systems, immersive visual imagery with closed eyes, and ego and personal boundary dissolution, while engendering an openness to new ways of thinking. This makes these drugs potential therapeutic agents.
THE WEST AWAKENS AND THE JOURNEY BEGINS
Scientific research into the effects of psychedelic drugs began in 1897, when the German chemist Arthur Heffter first isolated mescaline, the primary psychoactive compound in the hallucinogenic peyote cactus. Half a century passed before the next milestone occurred when, in 1943, Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann discovered the psychedelic effects of LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Basel while studying ergot, a parasitic fungus that grows on rye. Initially, Sandoz Laboratories thought that the powerful psychedelic drug might have two possible applications: to enhance the healing potential of psychotherapy and to instruct medical professionals in what it might be like to be temporarily psychotic, although to their credit Hofmann and others quickly recognized LSD’s valuable potential for fostering mystical experiences and enhancing creativity.
In 1954, Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception was published. It poetically described the author’s spiritual awakening while using mescaline. This short, sixty-three-page gem of a book, written by one of the most respected literary figures of the twentieth century, brought greater public awareness of the knowledge that mescaline could sometimes produce visionary or mystical experiences. Then in 1958, Albert Hofmann became the first scientist to isolate psilocybin and psilocin, the psychoactive components of the Mexican “magic mushroom,” Psilocybe mexicana.
Between 1943 and 1972, a significant amount of research was conducted with LSD, psilocybin, DMT, and mescaline. Before a global research ban was instituted in 1972, close to seven hundred studies with psychedelic drugs took place. This research suggested that psychedelics offer significant benefits: they help alcoholics stop drinking, ease the anxieties of terminal cancer patients, and alleviate the symptoms of many difficult-to-treat psychiatric illnesses such as post-traumatic stress disorder. For example, studies conducted between 1967 and 1972 with terminal cancer patients by psychiatrist Stanislav Grof and colleagues at the Spring Grove State Hospital in Baltimore showed that LSD combined with psychotherapy could alleviate symptoms of anxiety, depression, psychological withdrawal, tension, insomnia, and even extreme physical pain. Many researchers believed that they had stumbled on a safe and effective, near-miraculous treatment for a whole spectrum of medical disorders. During this era other investigators found that LSD and mescaline may have potential applications as a means of enhancing the imagination and facilitating creative problem-solving abilities. A small number of creativity studies with psychedelics were done by the late psychiatrist Oscar Janiger and psychologist James Fadiman, both of whom wrote books that summarized this important research.3
Then came the dark years, from 1972 until 1990, when there were no government-approved human studies conducted with psychedelic drugs taking place anywhere on planet Earth. Their complete disappearance from clinical research was the result of a political backlash that followed the promotion of these drugs by the 1960s counterculture. This political reaction not only made these substances illegal for personal use, it also made it extremely difficult for researchers to get government approval to study them scientifically.
Fortunately, things began to change during the last decade of the twentieth century, when “open-minded regulators at the FDA decided to put science before politics when it came to psychedelic and medical marijuana research,” said public-policy expert Rick Doblin*3 when I interviewed him. It wasn’t long after these changes in the FDA occurred that the doorway into new dimensions opened again.
DMT RESEARCH AND THE INTERDIMENSIONAL PORTAL
In 1990, a portal into new dimensions of the mind (and possibly reality) opened at the University of New Mexico when the FDA and the DEA granted approval for psychiatric researcher Rick Strassman to study the psychoactive effects of dimethyltryptamine (DMT) in healthy human volunteers. DMT is a mysterious psychedelic neurotransmitter, a chemical that’s naturally found in the human body4 and in many species of animals and plants, although no biochemist knows precisely what biological function it serves in any of these places. In fact, DMT is so commonly encountered in the natural world that the late American biochemist and psychopharmacologist Alexander Shulgin wrote, “DMT is, most simply, almost everywhere you choose to look. [It] is . . . in this flower here, in that tree over there, and in yonder animal.”5 Trace amounts of DMT are even found naturally in every glass of orange juice.6
However, when smoked, snorted, or injected in sufficient quantities, DMT becomes one of the most powerful psychedelic substances known, on an order of magnitude more intense than a strong LSD experience. The experience completely overwhelms one’s senses, separating awareness of the body from the physical world and transporting one to a magical realm beyond belief. This enchanted realm, described as “hyperspace” by DMT voyagers, appears to exist with the same consistency as waking reality or a lucid dream, and it is seemingly populated by swarms of spirits and noncorporeal beings. DMT has thus been called the “spirit molecule” and the “ultimate metaphysical reality pill.”7
Why is this chemical naturally found in our bodies? No one knows for certain. Because our body’s endogenous DMT levels are highest at around 3:00 a.m., when most of us are sound asleep, it has been hypothesized by some neuroscientists that DMT may play a biochemical role in dreaming. Notably, many people consider 3:00 a.m. to be the best time to communicate with spirits, reporting an increased frequency of paranormal activity (as well as alien abductions), which is why this time has sometimes been referred to as “the witching hour” or “the Devil’s hour.” Could this be related to our naturally elevated DMT levels? Filmmaker and writer Mike DiCerto has had some interesting experiences around this time of night. He wrote me to say that “every so often—around 3:00 to 4:00 a.m.—I get what I call the ‘video feed.’ I am awake— basically—but when I close my eyes I am peering into hyperreal worlds/ images, as if a video feed has been attached to my eyes. Sometimes it is mundane, like looking at a warehouse from the POV of a security camera, and other times super-rich and colorful psychedelic images.”
However, it is just speculation that DMT plays a role in dreaming, and even if this is true, it may do more than that. Rick Strassman and others have suggested that naturally elevated DMT levels in the brain may be responsible for such unexplained mental phenomena as near-death experiences, spontaneous mystical union, nonhuman entity contact, alien abductions, and schizophrenia. There is also evidence to suggest that DMT levels rise in the urine of psychotic patients as their condition worsens.8 Strassman suspects that DMT is likely produced in the pineal gland, and studies have confirmed that it can be found there.9 He and others have speculated about the possibility that elevated DMT levels in the brain may be responsible for ushering the soul into the body before birth and out of the body upon death.
I think that Strassman’s landmark five-year study may be some of the most incredible scientific research ever conducted by our species. Over half of the subjects in his study reported experiences wherein they described entering an astonishing new world, one in which they were “sensing and/or interacting with external intelligences or beings.” These were not reported as hallucinations, but rather as allowing a person to have a greater sense of reality than our experience of normal waking consciousness.10
So our species has discovered a reliable means for consistently creating experiences that sane and healthy people can only describe as contact with alien beings, and this hasn’t made headlines on every news outlet around the world? Somehow this “secret” for making contact with an alien intelligence is accessible to anyone who looks into the matter, yet it remains invisible to the masses—the sleepwalkers, so to speak—who stumble through life as though in a (nonlucid) dream. But it seems that this secret was actually discovered long ago, and it was never lost to those carriers of the surviving Amazonian shamanic traditions who use the DMT-containing brew ayahuasca, which we’ll be discussing later in this chapter.
Many people describe the beings that they encounter on DMT or ayahuasca as insectoid. For example, they might look like huge praying mantises. I suspect that the reason why DMT experiences often involve insectoid beings is because they are representatives of our future selves. Our future selves will undoubtedly evolve into much more complex organisms, with far more sophisticated sensory organs, with, perhaps, telepathic antennas, multiple eyes, psychic abilities, additional brain lobes, nanotechnological self-transforming abilities, and genetic blends of animal and plant characteristics. Perhaps this type of highly evolved being appears insectoid or incomprehensible to our present larval forms. But regardless of who these mysterious beings are or what DMT does in the body, since Strassman’s study was approved in 1990 dozens of other scientific studies of psychedelic drugs have been approved, and a number of them have already been completed.
THE NEW WAVE OF PSYCHEDELIC DRUG RESEARCH
The new scientific studies have much more immediately practical, down-to-earth medical applications than Strassman’s out-of-this-world DMT research. This flourishing body of research suggests that there is highly promising medical potential for a wide variety of these drugs: for the psychoactive drug MDMA to help treat post-traumatic stress disorder;11 for psilocybin to relieve the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder; for LSD to ease the anxieties around dying; for ketamine to treat severe depression; and for ibogaine to effectively treat drug addiction.12 Additionally, new studies with psilocybin, the active component in magic mushrooms, have replicated earlier findings that it can promote mystical, religious, or spiritual experiences.13 In other words, not only can psychedelics help to heal people when they’re sick, they can also help healthy people optimize their potential. Other studies show that psilocybin can promote neurogenesis, or the birth of new brain cells and growth in the nervous system.14 Perhaps most fascinating of all are the new studies that allow us to observe the inner workings of the brain in action.
DREAMING WHILE AWAKE: YOUR BRAIN ON PSILOCYBIN
Functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) studies with psilocybin are allowing researchers to map out the patterns of activity that occur in the brain while people are under the influence of psilocybin. In one 2012 study, researchers were surprised to discover that psilocybin’s effects were associated with decreases in activity in a number of key brain areas, rather than the expected increase.15 The areas that showed a decrease in activity are the medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulated cortex, which play important roles in the regulation of self-awareness, as they tend to become activated when people are asked to think about themselves. This may help to explain the sense of ego-transcendence that many people report using this drug. Notably, the more that brain activity in these areas decreases, the more vivid the psychedelic experience. Certain regions of the brain, particularly in the left hemisphere, may have a dominating effect on brain function as a whole, suppressing creative, psychic, or unknown abilities of the more intuitive, whole system–thinking right hemisphere of the brain. This could help explain why most people tend to be right-handed: because the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body, and it appears to be the dominant hemisphere.
In other words, perhaps psychedelics temporarily shut down dominant parts of the brain that usually suppress the hidden talents of our dormant brain centers. This new understanding is consistent with the notion that Aldous Huxley put forth in his book Doors of Perception— that the brain normally acts as a “reducing valve” for consciousness, that it actually constrains what we normally experience so that we’re not overwhelmed by the chaos of stimuli around us.
These insights may also help to explain acquired savant syndrome— when people suddenly develop powerful new mental abilities such as extraordinary mathematical or artistic talents—after traumatic brain injuries. For example, Jason Padgett, author of Struck by Genius, began seeing fractal geometry patterns as an intrinsic part of the world and developed extraordinary mathematical abilities after his traumatic brain injury inflicted by muggers at a karaoke bar. Perhaps the injuries are allowing previously suppressed parts of the brain to express themselves and develop?
Additional brain scanning research in 2014, at Goethe University of Frankfurt, Germany, revealed that psilocybin activates a primitive network in the brain that is linked with emotion and dreaming. Several parts of this primitive neural network, including the hippocampus and the anterior cingulate cortex, become simultaneously activated with psilocybin; this is strikingly similar to the brain-activation pattern observed when people are dreaming.16
According to Celia Green, a philosopher and psychologist best known for her pioneering research on perceptual phenomena such as lucid dreams and for philosophical and social commentaries, there is evidence that “during a lucid dream there may be a relative depression of function in the left hemisphere of the brain and relative activation of the right.”17
Could this be why reading words in lucid dreams is notoriously so difficult? According to Green, “The left hemisphere of the brain is thought to be preferentially involved in the processing of information in a sequential, as opposed to a global, holistic fashion . . . and reading letters and words would seem to be an example of such serial processing.”18 We’ll be discussing these reading difficulties more in chapter 4. In any case, if this is true, then what happens when the left and right hemispheres of the brain are isolated from each other?
SLICING BRAINS AND SPLITTING MINDS
Neuroscientists Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga demonstrated that the right and left hemispheres of the brain are relatively independent in their functioning. Although not quite as black and white as many pop psychology texts might suggest, there are measurably distinct processing differences between the left and right hemispheres, with the left having more aptitude at verbal-analytical ways of thinking and the right hemisphere being more equipped for visual-spatial processing.19
What’s most curious is that although we can measurably demonstrate that brain hemispheres operate relatively independently and that they influence our actions in ways that our conscious mind remains unaware of, we tend to rationalize why we make the choices we do. In other words, we often create reasons to explain why we’re doing what we’re doing that have nothing to do with the real cause. We know this because of studies of people who have had what are called “split-brain” operations, or commissurotomies. In some cases, people who suffer from severe temporal-lobe epilepsy require this extreme form of surgery, where the bundle of nerve fibers that connects the right and left brain hemispheres, known as the corpus callosum, is surgically severed so that an epileptic seizure won’t spread from one hemisphere of the brain to the other. These surgeries have been relatively successful with regard to treating epilepsy, but there have been some very strange consequences from them too. Initially the patients didn’t seem any different; however, with time the difference became strikingly apparent. I’ve seen absolutely bizarre videos of people who have had the split-brain operation, where it seems like two people are now residing in their brain. Sometimes one part of the body is trying to pull up a pair of pants to get dressed, while the other side is trying to pull them down!
A window into how split-brain patients see the world was discovered in a landmark experiment by Roger Sperry, which took advantage of the fact that the right side of the body is controlled by the left hemisphere and the left side of the body by the right hemisphere. Within the human eye, our visual field is equally split as well, with the left half of the image going to the right hemisphere and the right half of the image going to the left.
Sperry cleverly designed an apparatus that allowed him to project an image to one half of the eye at a time, so that the visual information signals just went to one side of the brain (and couldn’t be shared between the two brain hemispheres, due to a severed corpus callosum). When a subject saw the image with his right visual field, the image went to the left hemisphere of his brain, where the language center is located. Then, when asked what he saw, the subject could easily and correctly say what it was. However, when the image was projected onto his left visual field and the visual information traveled to the right hemisphere of the brain, the subject would indicate that he had no memory of seeing anything.
Surprisingly, when the subject was asked to pick the object that he saw out of a pile of different objects before him with his left hand (which was controlled by the right side of his brain), he could do so easily. The strangest finding of all came when the subject was asked why he had chosen that object from the pile when he said he didn’t see a flashing image. All of the subjects came up with reasons that had nothing to do with the reality of having perceived it with their right hemisphere. “It reminded me of a toy from my childhood” or “it just seemed interesting” were typical responses.
The implications of this remarkable research on our notions of the soul and our personal sense of self are, of course, profound, and they deepen the vast mystery of who we are, as it seems that once we cut off communication between the two major brain hemispheres each becomes what appears to be a separate person!
One might wonder, at this point, how does splitting the brain affect the way we dream? Since we know that the right hemisphere of the brain is associated with visual-spatial processing, one has to wonder if split-brain patients can even recall any visual dreams at all. According to neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga and colleagues, who studied dreaming in split-brain patients, the answer is yes, they do have visual dreams. Gazzaniga e-mailed me saying that the 1977 study that he participated in was the only study of dreaming in split-brain patients that he was aware of, but it directly answered this question:
This paper addresses the question of right hemisphere involvement in the visual components of dreaming. The rationale derives from an observed relation between reports of visual agnosia accompanied by dream cessation and the literature on right hemisphere specialization for visuo-spatial processes. All night sleep EEGs were recorded from subjects with partial or complete section of the corpus callosum and anterior commissure. Upon entering a EEG-, EOG- and EMG-defined REM episode, the subjects were awakened and questioned about dream content. All subjects examined in this fashion were able to recount some visual dream content. This result fails to support any notion of selective right hemisphere visual dream mediation.20
However, we need to remind ourselves that when we receive dream reports from people who have had split-brain surgery we are only hearing the reports from their verbal left hemisphere. I know from working with people who suffer from multiple-personality disorder that the different personalities may have different dreams at night, so it’s conceivable that after a split-brain surgery each hemisphere could be having different dreams. Consider the following:
Split-brain patients also have taught us about dreaming. Scientists had hypothesized that dreaming is a right hemisphere activity, but they found the split-brain patients do report dreaming. They found, therefore, that the left hemisphere must have some access to dream material. What was most interesting was the actual content of the dreams of the split-brain patients. Klaus Hoppe, a psychoanalyst, analyzed the dreams of twelve patients. He found that the dreams were not like the dreams of most normal people. The content of the dreams reflected reality, affect, and drives; even in the more elaborate dream, there was a remarkable lack of distortion of latent dream thoughts. The findings show that the left hemisphere alone is able to produce dreams. . . . Patients after commissurotomy reveal a paucity of dreams, fantasies, and symbols. Their dreams lack the characteristics of dream work; their fantasies are unimaginative, utilitarian, and tied to reality; their symbolizing is concretistic, discursive, and rigid.21
Celia Green and Oxford psychologist Charles McCreery have suggested that lucid dreaming may be a state of activity in which the right hemisphere tends to dominate the left hemisphere,22 which would seem to be the opposite of what we tend to experience in our waking state. They give four good reasons for suspecting this:
First, there is the nature of lucid dreaming considered as a cognitive “task.” . . . A lucid dream seems to us to be much more naturally viewed as a task involving the manipulation of visuo-spatial imagery than as one involving the serial processing of verbal or similar symbols, and the former is an activity which tends to be correlated with greater RH [right hemisphere] activity. Secondly, there is the remarkable realism achieved by the visual imagery of some lucid dreams. Thirdly, there are the intellectual deficits displayed by some, such as the reading difficulty. Finally, and perhaps more speculatively, there are the extreme positive emotions sometimes displayed, amounting on occasion to “ecstasy.”23
Research by Stephen LaBerge demonstrates that within lucid dreams the brain specializes in right and left hemisphere functions— just as it does when awake.24 Because people tend to count with their left hemispheres and sing with their right hemispheres, LaBerge was able to show, using EEG recordings, that when people are singing or counting in lucid dreams, then alpha brain-wave activity is inversely correlated to cerebral activity in the relatively underutilized hemisphere. In other words, singing and counting in a lucid-dream state have the same EEG accompaniments as when performing those activities while awake. However, this finding doesn’t invalidate Green and McCreery’s theory, as there could still be hemispheric specialization within a system where the relative dominance of each hemisphere can shift.
Curiously, studies with patients who have undergone right hemispherectomies—i.e., in which the entire right side of the brain is removed—have shown that they dream in the same way as people with intact brains.25 However, other studies have shown that there are some differences in dream content among right- and left-handed dreamers.26 And our dreams may be influenced by more than hemispheric specialization of the brain, as different bodily organs may actually contain personal memories that enter into our dreams. The dreams reported by people who have had organ transplants often provide them with knowledge of the donor’s name, appearance, and some behaviors.27
Some psychologists describe lucid dreaming and shamanic states of consciousness as hybrid states of awareness, an unholy blending of mental states that were meant to operate discretely. It seems that psilocybin experiences are like waking dreams, almost the opposite of a lucid dream. In other words, if lucid dreams bring waking consciousness into the dream realm, then psychedelic experiences appear to bring dreaming consciousness into the waking world.
PSYCHEDELICS AND DREAMING
I was eager to speak with psychophysiologist Stephen LaBerge about the relationship between psychedelics and dreaming because he had told me that his own use of LSD had partially inspired his interest in studying the mind.28 When I asked LaBerge about the seeming correlation between psychedelic consciousness and lucid dreaming, he said, “There’s a lot in common between the two states. In fact people can, in the dream state, take a dream ‘psychedelic’ and have it produce an effect.” I replied by telling him that when my partner and I interviewed the late ethnobotanist Terence McKenna, he had told us that when he smokes DMT in his dreams he then has a full-blown psychedelic experience (which I’ll be describing in detail later in the chapter). LaBerge then said to me:
And what that shows is that what prevents us from having these experiences is not the chemical, it’s the mental framework. So in a way psychedelics can be a kind of guide in revealing some of the potential in the mind. I think they have limitations in terms of taking us to the visions they show us. One can take the mistaken path of saying, well, since I had a taste of it with the substance, if I keep taking it I’ll eventually get the whole thing because more of the same should help. It doesn’t seem to work that way.
I also mentioned to LaBerge, as well as to numerous people online, that I found it interesting that so many people report having lucid dreams in the nights that follow a psychedelic experience. Almost every time I’ve ever done a psychedelic, within a couple of days I’d usually have a lucid dream. I wondered if he and others had noticed this too. Many people replied that that they had experienced this too, and LaBerge said,
Yes, that is probably due to biochemical changes. Taking psychedelics will produce changes of neurochemical levels, which will intensify REM sleep. Basically, what you’ve done is you’ve altered the regulation of the system, and so you’ve pushed it away from the equilibrium, and it’s going to come back and perhaps oscillate for a while until it gets back into its new equilibrium. So it’s not surprising that in the next couple of nights you’re going to have variations in REM sleep.
But I suspect that it’s more than just variations in REM sleep. For example, drinking alcohol initially suppresses REM sleep and later causes a rebound effect with increased REM, but it seems that fewer people report that this REM-rebound effect with alcohol consumption also increases the frequency of dream lucidity. There’s something different about psychedelics. I think they awaken the mind in a similar way as lucid dreaming does, by making normally unconscious regions of the mind conscious, and in so doing open up a portal or a pathway in the mind to greater possibilities. Intriguingly—and central to our discussion—both lucid dreaming and psychedelic awareness are recognized across cultures as aspects of shamanic healing.
PSYCHEDELIC PLANTS AND SHAMANIC HEALING
While scientific research into psychedelic drugs may have officially begun in 1897 with German pharmacologist Arthur Heffter’s discovery of mescaline, the use of shamanic healing techniques and rituals to reach psychedelic states of mind by indigenous societies around the world stretches all the way back to prehistory. For example, ayahuasca has been used by indigenous Amazonian shamans in healing ceremonies for at least four thousand years.
During the 1960s, when people in the West first began experimenting with psychedelics on a mass scale and modern psychology failed to offer adequate models to explain the experience, many people looked to the East to find philosophies that better resonated with their experience. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism offered models of reality that appear to provide some insight into the psychedelic experience. The West had yet to discover its ancient shamanic roots, which lie in the jungles of South America and Africa, where ayahuasca, San Pedro, peyote, sacred mushroom, and iboga shamanism ceremonies are practiced to this day.
Just fifteen years ago, hardly anyone outside of the Amazon jungle or Central Africa, or a small group of anthropologists and psychedelic enthusiasts, was even aware of the existence of ayahuasca or iboga. Now the influence of these profound healing plants pervades popular culture. This is especially the case with ayahuasca, as drinking the visionary tea at retreat centers in Peru has now become as fashionable for hip travelers as spiritual pilgrimages to India and Nepal were during the 1960s.
Ayahuasca has been mentioned or discussed quite a bit in the mainstream media in recent years. It has appeared in a number of Hollywood movies and on the popular television show Weeds (where the protagonist, Nancy Botwin, takes part in an ayahuasca ceremony). Famous musicians like Sting and Tori Amos have praised ayahuasca’s benefits. In the 2012 movie Wanderlust, a character played by Jennifer Aniston drinks the brew made from what the Peruvians refer to as the “vine of souls.” Although the Aniston character’s ayahuasca experience in Wanderlust was grossly misportrayed in the movie, I think the fact that the sacred visionary tea was in the film at all is significant. Another example, which isn’t terribly accurate either, comes from actor Ben Stiller, who does ayahuasca in the 2014 comedy While We’re Young. A more accurate portrayal of the ayahuasca experience is found in Jan Kounen’s less-known 2004 film Renegade, which has some wonderful scenes with uncannily accurate visual effects that are reminiscent of ayahuasca visions. However, what’s important here is that ayahuasca and psychedelic shamanism are seeping into Western culture. Many people suspect that in James Cameron’s popular 2009 film Avatar, the Na’vis’ “tree of souls” was symbolic of ayahuasca.29
As well, relatively positive articles about ayahuasca have appeared in Marie Claire, the New York Times Magazine, Elle, and many other mainstream publications over the past few years. Yet regardless of the recent media hype and tourist attention, ayahuasca is the real deal. Many people report profound healings from using it, and it has a long track record of safe use.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that the sacred Amazonian brew can be used in the United States as a legal sacrament by the União do Vegetal (UDV) church in New Mexico, and in 2009 by the Santo Daime Church in Oregon. For everyone else it’s a schedule 1 drug, in the same category as heroin and LSD. This is because ayahuasca contains DMT. In the Amazon, DMT is naturally found in a number of plants and in the shrub Psychotria viridis, or chacruna, which is often used in ayahuasca brews. Notably, the chemical structures of psilocybin and DMT are almost identical. The only difference is that the psilocybin molecule has an oxygen atom and a phosphate group attached to it, which makes it orally active and less susceptible than DMT to breakdown by enzymes in the body.
DMT, on the other hand, is not active orally because it’s destroyed in the digestive system by the enzyme monoamine oxidase (MAO). But shamans have discovered a clever way around this obstacle. Although every shaman has his own personal recipe for making the ayahuasca brew, which includes different adjunct plants, the mixture always contains plants with two key chemical elements: DMT and the psychoactive indole alkaloid harmaline. Harmaline, found in the Banisteriopsis caapi (ayahuasca) vine, is a substance that deactivates the body’s release of MAO and is thus known as an MAO inhibitor (MAOI). This allows the DMT in ayahuasca brews to become orally active. It also slows down the experience and renders it much more comprehensible or psychologically digestible.
Of special note here is that the icaros of the ayahuasca shamans, i.e., the songs and melodies hummed during ayahuasca ceremonies to invoke the presence of particular spirits, often come to them in their dreams. According to anthropologist Charles Laughlin, dreaming has been an integral part of the “calling, selection and empowerment of shamans . . . since perhaps the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic some 40,000 years ago.”30
The process of becoming a shaman is often not the most pleasant of experiences, and it appears that traditionally one isn’t offered much of a choice in the profession. Many shamans believe that they are called to their healing roles through initiatory dreams during childhood or adolescence. According to Stanley Krippner, “Most shamanic traditions take the position that refusal to follow the ‘call’ will result in a terrible accident, a life-threatening sickness, or insanity. Common themes in initiatory dreams are dismemberment, death, and rebirth.”31
There are also striking connections between ayahuasca-based shamanism and lucid dreaming on a neurological level. California Institute of Integral Studies clinical psychology professor Frank Echenhofer collaborated with anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna to perform EEG measurements of the brain while under the influence of ayahuasca.32 They discovered a strong synchrony in the frontal lobe over multiple frequency bands, specifically in the high beta and gamma range, which is similar to what has been found during EEG studies with lucid dreaming33 and meditation.34 Additionally, using fMRI scanners, research by Fernanda Palhano-Fontes and colleagues at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, in Brazil, found that ayahuasca modulates the activity of a brain region known as the default mode network (DMN).35 This region of the brain is known to be more active during rest than during the execution of goal-directed behavior. The results of this study support the notion that the states of consciousness induced by ayahuasca—like those induced by psilocybin, meditation, and sleep— are linked to the modulation of the activity and the connectivity of the DMN. In particular, ayahuasca intake leads to a decrease in the activity of core DMN structures, which is also decreased during meditation and sleep.
I’ve personally experienced what appears to be “spirit encounters” during the nights following an ayahuasca ceremony, and I often have lucid dreams during this period as well—an experience confirmed by others. These spirit encounters (for lack of a better term) often happen as I’m falling asleep, while looking around my dark room. I’ll see moving, morphing energies and feel presences that seem to enter my dreams. Many people report these same types of spirit encounters, as well as other shamanic states of consciousness and lucid dreams, after drinking ayahuasca. For example, my Facebook friend and freelance writer Guy Crittenden wrote me, saying:
My drinking ayahuasca for the first time in Peru led to my having incredible visions while I was on the medicine. . . . What I didn’t expect was that about two months after my return to Canada I would begin having shamanic-type lucid dreams and full-on ayahuasca visions while NOT on the medicine. These usually occurred at about 4:00 a.m. . . . I would wake up yet remain in the dark with eyes closed, experiencing the most incredible journeys. This is an ability or phenomenon I have since cultivated and actively seek out. The experiences include clouds of intense psychedelic color, white light that fills my entire visual field for a prolonged period . . . complex geometric patterns and three-dimensional tableaux and dream scenarios rich in symbolism. I believe the entheogen opened up my “third eye” . . . and removed some filters that normally keep us trapped in consensus reality. I no longer view dreams as mere hallucinations of the unconscious mind, but now think of them as visions into another dimension of reality that actually exists and is connected to the afterlife from which we emerged and to which we all will return. They never told me any of this was possible on the travel brochure to Peru!
My own experiences with ayahuasca have led to many lucid dreams and powerful visions as well. However, that wasn’t the reason why I first drank ayahuasca. I went to the ayahuasca spirit initially for healing. I can personally attest to the medicinal powers of this sacred shamanic brew, as drinking it in the Peruvian Amazon healed me from childhood PTSD and cured me of the symptoms of an early trauma that haunted me for decades.
HOW AYAHUASCA CURED ME OF CHILDHOOD PTSD
At the age of three I was sexually traumatized over a period of several months by a teenage babysitter. Although I never forgot that this had happened to me, it took me over forty-five years to figure out that this was the primary reason for many of the psychological problems that had plagued me throughout my life. The earliest dream I can remember occurred when I was around the age that the trauma occurred. The dream was very vivid and extremely frightening:
I was in a room in our New Jersey apartment (that didn’t really exist in waking reality) with my dad and my cousin. In the dream my dad had somehow transformed my cousin into a giant spinning toy top. She looked like a huge Hanukkah dreidel, with flat sides; it was her size, the size of a small child. The toy top was pinkish, composed of her flesh, and I could see her distorted face in the structure of the toy as it was spinning around. My dad was laughing, and I was terrified that he was going to turn me into a meat-made toy top next . . .
It’s basic psychology to know that parts of us can be aware of things that remain hidden from other parts, and so despite years of studying psychology and neuroscience, years spent in introspection and meditation, years spent writing reflectively in journals, and years spent experimenting with psychedelics, I never saw the connection between my own trauma and many of the problems I was experiencing in life. It was a genuine psychological blind spot. Even in a year of psychotherapy with one of the best psychiatrists in the world, Oscar Janiger,*4 during a time when I was suffering from acute depression, my sexual trauma as a child never even came up in our discussions, not even once.
The realization finally hit me at the age of forty-nine, after a close friend made some revealing observations about me and I read up on the characteristic symptoms. This sent me into deep reflection; so many of the personal challenges I had faced throughout my life suddenly became instantly understandable. It was the missing puzzle piece that illuminated the dynamics behind maddeningly confusing aspects of my life, despite the fact that this realization seemed like such a psychological cliché. Soon after reaching these insights I had a nonlucid dream that struck a deep chord within me:
I was at a large family gathering in a huge building. I kept getting lost and separated from everyone else in my family, and kept trying to find them. It was scary and frustrating. Later in the dream I found myself sandwiched between two teenage boys in a pickup truck. We were driving down a dark road, and I was scared and confused about what was happening. I asked the guy sitting to my right who he was. He said, “Don’t you recognize me? I’m Roger.”
Roger was the name of the teenage babysitter who had sexually molested me as a child. However, after realizing this insight, I was still at a loss about how to treat the primary symptoms of my trauma: having the fear circuit in my brain hypersensitized such that I overreacted with acute anxiety or near-total dissociation to stressful stimuli; being prone to clinical depression; and repeatedly reacting inappropriately in romantic relationships by being too emotionally needy or too aloof. I also had great difficulty expressing anger, suppressing it for many years, as well as problems with eating and sleeping. This emotional hypersensitivity resulted in wide mood swings, which my psychiatrist and I mistook for bipolar 2 disorder. I read around a dozen books about treating childhood sexual trauma after I figured this out, but I didn’t feel like more psychotherapy would have helped me much at this point. I also tried searching for greater insight into what had happened to me during a lucid dream, without much success:
Soon after becoming lucid in a dream I tried questioning the mysterious agent orchestrating those aspects of the dream that I’m not in control of.*5 I was in a large department store or warehouse with no other people. I raised my head to the ceiling and asked my unconscious mind to show me the details of what had happened to me when I was traumatized at the age of three. There was no verbal response from the dream, except that I saw a large, luxurious, empty bed in front of me, with all these fluffy white covers that were messed up a bit, and the blankets were bunched up, like people had been using it for sex. The dream never spoke back in words as I was expecting or hoping. I woke up soon after that, disappointed that I didn’t get a clearer message.
Around this time the memory and insights into the consequences of my trauma became a wide-open wound, and I spoke with many people who had had similar childhood experiences. For several months it was hard for me to speak about anything else. I was searching for answers, and in time my intuition urged me to treat my trauma with ayahuasca. From the stories I had heard about it helping people heal from virtually every malady from inoperable cancer to treatment-resistant PTSD, I was most intrigued. I had great trust in the sincere, sacred powers of psychedelic healing as a result of using LSD, cannabis, and magic mushrooms. Most impressively, I once had a serious foot injury miraculously heal completely overnight during a psilocybin mushroom trip. So while I was in Peru to speak at the annual Amazonian Shamanism Conference in Iquitos, I decided to try ayahuasca made from the traditional jungle plants in an attempt to heal myself from childhood PTSD.
My subsequent personal journeys with ayahuasca in the Peruvian Amazon convinced me that this magical medicinal brew can provide the most valuable and healing of all psychedelic experiences. While undergoing a series of shamanic ayahuasca journeys, I realized that the intelligence and the intention of the plants themselves play a vital role in the healing that occurs, and that they can serve as a both a doctor and a teacher—or so it appears, and it sure seems pretty convincing. One can actually feel the spirit of the plants scanning one’s body, finding wounded areas that need to be healed. One simply observes in spellbound fascination as this spirit then performs the necessary adjustments with a kind of ultraprecise and painless astral surgery that provides almost instant relief and understanding. It appears that the ayahuasca brew, as well as shamanic cacti, iboga, and enchanted fungi, contain a living spirit, an intelligent being that will communicate with you directly as she heals you. Understanding whether or not these wise and powerful beings are genuinely external to our own minds will surely remain one of the great philosophical questions for a long time to come, but wherever these wise and helpful beings come from, and whatever they are, they certainly seem to know us much better than we know ourselves.
During an ayahuasca journey this ancient intelligence often speaks to us through vivid and fluid imagery, in scenes that combine into a kind of metalanguage, the voice of dreams and even spoken words and spelled-out letters. It seems that she will use every sensory channel and symbolic medium possible, sometimes urgently so, to make absolutely sure that you get her message. Her superintelligence and profound healing abilities simply cannot be denied once they’ve been experienced.
The healing process for me began with that first journey using traditional ayahuasca at the home of a friend in Iquitos, Peru, where the shamanic brew is not only legal but long-respected by the culture there as a sacred medicine. Although I was geographically situated in the Amazon Basin, I did my first dose of the traditional plant brew in a completely nontraditional setting. And my first experience on ayahuasca was almost entirely sexual.
My Peruvian girlfriend and I did it alone together, in a bedroom upstairs in my friend’s home, and we spent the night mostly in bed. The air was thick and muggy, and we were naked the whole time. My girlfriend purged a few times at the beginning of the journey, but I never got nauseous once, and she was fine after the first hour or so. Then we made love for hours under the influence of the ancient shamanic brew, as lights sparkled in the air and our bodies shimmered with pulsing vibrations that trailed with each movement. Spirits flew around the room, and thousands of iridescent, bejeweled snakes slithered between us, inside of us, intertwining with our blending bodies. It was an extraordinarily magical night.*6
Doing this was expressly forbidden! Almost every shamanic tradition in the Amazon stresses that one should abstain from sex for several days before and after an ayahuasca experience, and most certainly not have sex while on it! But the spirits didn’t seem to disapprove of what we were doing, and as I say, it was the beginning of my healing process. This experience was beyond amazing, and the next day we both felt great. My personal feeling is that this restriction on sex before or during an ayahuasca ceremony is an unnecessary, lingering Christian influence. I know that others may disagree, but I can’t argue with what worked for me.
In any case, after this first journey whirling around in heaven, I proceeded further into more difficult stages of the ayahuasca healing process, facing the amplified difficulties of my early trauma. I ended up doing the traditional plant brew around thirty-five times over a period of several months, mostly alone, and with progressively stronger and stronger doses. I welcomed the spirit into my body and asked her to heal me.
During the most significant of these experiences with ayahuasca, I approached the spirit of the Amazon with a request: to be liberated from all the unreasonable fear I had experienced in my life as a result of my early trauma. The ancient psychedelic spirit’s response? “Hey, dude, no problem—teaching humans how to overcome fear is one of my specialties! C’mon, I’m taking you to warrior school!” Then for the next four hours I was subjected to every one of my deepest fears, over and over, at horrific intensities, as the frightening dimensions of them diminished more and more, and I could feel the ayahuasca spirit making adjustments deep in my brain as this was happening. Or so it seemed.
I was simply ecstatic at the end of that particular session, feeling genuinely fearless, but also skeptical that I had really been cured of my anxieties and fears. I expressed my skepticism to the ayahuasca spirit, and she responded, “Dude, we cured your foot last year. You don’t think we can heal your head too?” In any case, I waited six weeks, testing this new mental state out as my personal secret before I told another person about my experience. I truly wanted to make sure that it was real before I said anything to anyone about it. At the time of this writing it’s now been over two years, and I haven’t felt any unreasonable fear or anxiety since that experience. It feels like a miraculous healing. However, there were sometimes unexpected consequences to this healing that required additional psychological work, as many layers of my personality over the years had been structured around the trauma, and, once corrected, I had to work through unanticipated and sometimes difficult dynamics with people, such as those that resulted from my newly liberated ability to express anger more easily. Although difficult at times, the process was profoundly healing on many levels—physically, emotionally, mentally, socially, and spiritually.
Then, during the process of writing this book I had the following lucid dream, where it seemed that I finally got an answer to the question I had posed in the lucid dream that I described previously in this chapter:
An attractive young man from a previous lucid dream was sitting next to me in a classroom where we were both students, when I became lucid. Ever impulsive with my sexual experimentations in lucid dreams, I reached over and started fondling his penis through his pants, which he didn’t seem to mind. I somehow knew that this was wrong or forbidden in the dream, but I was lucid and continued to do it anyway—because it was fun, and I figured, well, it was just a dream, right? Then I could see this very stern and angry-looking, androgynous-seeming teacher walking toward me—just asmy friend had an orgasm and ejaculated all over his pants. The menacing, androgynous teacher came right up to me, looked me in the face, and was really angry. Being lucid, I wasn’t afraid, but I also realized that I couldn’t fully control what was happening either, and I could see how a lucid nightmare happens. The androgynous teacher (who, most disturbingly, had the face of a gay woman that I actually know in waking life, and who was also sexually traumatized as a child) whips out this humongous penis, the size of an anaconda,*7and immediately forces it down my throat! Despite being lucid, I couldn’t stop this from happening, and “she” forcibly raped my mouth with this giant penis—to punish me for what I was doing to the other boy. It wasn’t really painful or scary, as I was lucid and mostly just fascinated, although it was disturbing, and I could certainly see how an experience like this could be absolutely terrifying for some people. I didn’t try to wake myself up during the dream, but instead reached my hand out and simply wiped it over the androgynous teacher’s face. I started to do this repeatedly, and as I did so it transformed “her” face to become like moldable clay or putty. Each time I moved my hand over her face it became more pliable, less roughly defined, and less threatening-looking. Soon her whole face and body turned into an ornately designed carving or statue of a bird in a cage, with elaborate and Gothic designs around it, as her giant penis dissolved, and then I awoke.
This dream felt profoundly healing for me, and it was clearly related to my childhood trauma. Most significantly, I was able to reexperience my childhood trauma without fear, and I transformed the androgynous rapist of my unconscious mind into a caged bird. But I don’t think I could have achieved this level of psychological and emotional resolution without having done ayahuasca.
As anyone who has read my previous book The New Science of Psychedelics knows, I’m no newcomer to psychedelic drugs and plants. There was something truly special, utterly sacred, and unusually healing about doing ayahuasca made from traditional plants in the Amazon basin that made these experiences far more healing than any other psychedelic experiences I’d ever had. But maybe that’s because of my expectations.
THE POWER OF BELIEF
Like dreaming, ayahuasca experiences are largely influenced by what we believe and expect, and both experiences appear to share the common factor of elevated DMT levels in the brain. Ayahuasca and other psychedelic agents appear to amplify what medical science calls “the placebo effect,” or the power of the mind to affect the health of the body. This is why it’s important to approach both dreams and psychedelic experiences with particular questions and intentions, to help guide the healing process. You can ask questions or direct your intentions to the awareness behind the dream or the spirit inside the shamanic experience. This may be the key to understanding their broad and mysterious healing effects, as they appear to act directly on our sense of belief, how we determine what is real and what isn’t. In other words, the enormous healing power of psychedelics may lie in their extraordinary ability to affect what we actually believe to be true about reality and ourselves.
Like psychedelic agents, lucid dreaming has the ability to amplify and manifest the contents of the mind. For example, a study by psychologist, visionary artist, and professor Fariba Bogzaran found a statistical correlation between the different concepts of what an encounter with the divine might be like and those lucid dreams later recorded by subjects after they experienced them.36 Along with psychedelic experiences, lucid dreaming has also been an important part of a number of shamanic healing traditions around the world.
SHAMANISM, SPIRITS, AND LUCID DREAMING
In numerous shamanic-healing systems lucid dreaming has been used traditionally for locating hidden information, building physical or psychological strength, contacting spirits, communicating with the dead, and providing healing treatments for those who are sick or wounded.37 The domains of lucid dreams are the same as those for shamanism in general—it is used for healing, guidance, and power.
One of the core beliefs that connect shamanic traditions the world over and provides a model for understanding lucid dreaming is the notion that there are other realities veiled from our five senses, higher and lower worlds that coexist with our own, parallel with our waking reality and overlapping with it to some degree. Shamans can access these “spirit realms” through “journeys of the soul,” made available through dreams and altered states of consciousness.
Anthropologist Erika Bourguignon has shown how cultures that use dreams in an attempt to “control supernatural forces” correspond to the institutionalized practice of entering “hallucinogenic trance” states, and that the two states are so closely allied with the motivation to control supernatural forces that it is hard to tell where trance leaves off and dreaming begins.38
The ancient Egyptians appear to have practiced a form of conscious dreaming. Their written records reveal that they believed that the soul, or Ba, could travel outside one’s body during sleep, and amazingly their word for dream is resut, which translates as “awakening”39 and was depicted in hieroglyphs as a wide-open eye! Ancient Egyptians were the first to construct temples specifically designed for the practice of dream incubation, used for healing or receiving divine messages.
Another fascinating cultural form of disciplined dream practice can be found in Russian psychiatrist Olga Kharitidi’s book The Master of Lucid Dreams. Kharitidi describes her extraordinary experiences with a teacher from a mysterious shamanic tradition in Siberia that has no other written record. The story takes place in Samarkand, the ancient capital of Uzbekistan, in Central Asia, where Kharitidi meets an enigmatic, perceptive, and persuasive man with unusual mental abilities who takes her on a healing journey. What’s most interesting about her story is that the primary tool used by these shamanic practitioners is lucid dreaming, which they equate with death and use as a technique for removing the influence of past traumas from the mind. In chapter 10 we’ll explore the idea that dreaming offers insight into what happens to one’s consciousness after death as well as possibly allowing for communication with those who have passed on.
In ancient Mexico, members of the Mesoamerican Toltec culture in Tula are reported to have used lucid-dreaming practices and “power plants” such as peyote to promote healing,40 and like the shamanic tradition that Kharitidi describes in Samarkand, it appears that the Toltec culture also equates lucid dreaming with death. In Mexican healer Sergio Magaña’s book about the dreaming practices of the ancient Mexicans, The Toltec Secret, the author states that “you will know when you have overcome your fear of death when you start lucid dreaming regularly, because that is like dying.”41
According to Carlos Castaneda and others, within the Toltec culture there exists a clan of “sorcerers” who have mastered the art of conscious dreaming and secretly exist to this day. Although Castaneda’s wonderfully described accounts are largely dismissed by many anthropologists as fiction, there may be some truth to his reports, and he clearly had sophisticated knowledge of psychedelic and shamanic states of consciousness. Shamans among the Chontal people in Mexico are known to have used the psychoactive herb Calea zacatechichi*8 for dream enhancement and for divinatory and healing purposes, a subject we’ll be discussing again in chapter 5.
Among the Mekeo people of Papua New Guinea, shamans supposedly heal other people by “traveling in their dreams to power places in search of their patient’s lost souls.”42 The Mekeo shamans appear to be lucid-dream masters, capable of focusing their dreams on specific intentions for healing the ill or injured. Anthropologist Charles D. Laughlin describes how shamanistic traditions in eastern Peru, among the traditional people known as the Yanesha, use lucid-dreaming techniques to treat frightening dreams. In particular, Laughlin provides a striking example of a Yanesha boy who was experiencing nightmares about his dead father chasing him and trying to kill him. The boy was relieved of these frightening nightmares by advice from his mother, who told him to recognize in his dreams that his father was dead, that he should fly away from him and eventually confront and “kill him”—after which he was never haunted by nightmares of his father again.43
According to Laughlin the whole notion of “lucid dreaming” is an ethnocentric concept. He writes, “There is a lot wrong with this definition of lucidity from an anthropological point of view, not the least being its inherent ethnocentricity. It assumes a culture in which waking states and dreaming states are distinct, one being associated with active awareness and the other not. We would hardly expect that kind of distinction to be made by folks brought up in a fully polyphasic culture.”44
Laughlin makes an important point here when he says that not all cultures make the distinction between waking reality and dreaming that we take for granted in the West. “Oh honey, that was just a dream—go back to sleep now,” Western parents routinely say to their children in an attempt to get them to disregard their dreams as having any significance. This is an example of what Laughlin calls a “monophasic culture.” In contrast, “polyphasic cultures” like those found in many preindustrial societies as well as in other industrial societies such as Japan, China, and Brazil are cultures wherein dreams and their interpretations are highly valued. According to Laughlin, Western European societies aside, there are over four thousand cultures on the planet today, and around 90 percent of them seek out and value experiences had in altered states of consciousness, and especially in dreams.45
As I mentioned in the introduction and will discuss at length in chapter 10, lucid-dreaming practice is an important part of several Eastern philosophical systems, including Vajrayāna Buddhism as well as the ancient Bön religion, the latter of which appears to have shamanic roots and utilizes sacred healing plant medicines. Like psychedelic mind states, lucid dreaming has great potential for physical and psychological healing. But that’s not all that these two states of mind have in common.
LUCID IN THE SKY WHILE DREAMING: PSYCHEDELICS, NIGHT FLIGHTS, AND DREAM LUCIDITY
In a discussion about the relationship between dreaming and shamanism, Charles Laughlin states that “when lucidity of dreaming and visions exceed a certain point, it is hard to tell the difference between a dream report and a vision report.”46 Additionally, Laughlin says that many anthropologists “just assume that what is being depicted [in shamanic rock art] are shamans in trance states, whereas there is ample evidence from ethnographic sources that San [Bushmen] shamans are adept lucid dreamers as well.”47
Laughlin makes the important point that lucid dreaming and visionary states of consciousness have a lot in common. Consider the following lucid dream by English writer and occultist Oliver Fox (1885–1949),*9 which sounds a lot like an ayahuasca or mushroom vision:
Eventually we left the carnival and fire behind us and came to a yellow path, leading across a desolate moor. As we stood at the foot of this path it suddenly rose up before us and became a roadway of golden light stretching from earth to zenith. Now in this amber-tinted haze there appeared countless coloured forms of men and beasts, representing man’s upward evolution through different stages of civilization. These forms faded away; the pathway lost its golden tint and became a mass of vibrating circles or globules (like frog’s eggs), a purplish-blue colour. These in their turn changed to ‘peacock’s eyes’, and then suddenly there came a culminating vision of a gigantic peacock, whose outspread tail filled the heavens. I exclaimed to my wife, ‘The Vision of the Universal Peacock!’ Moved by the splendour of the sight, I recited in a loud voice a mantra. Then the dream ended.48
Or consider the following lucid dream that was had by “Keelin” and reported by psychologist Fariba Bogzaran, which also sounds a lot like an ayahuasca or mushroom vision:
I become aware of being in a vast, limitless darkness that is at the same time brilliant with countless stars and very much alive. Something emerges from the darkness. It looks like some kind of living, molecular model/mathematical equation—extremely complex, three-dimensional. Fluorescent, neon-orange in color—very thin lines, very clear and sharp visually. It seems to unfold itself, multiplying, constantly changing, forming more complex structures and interrelationships. It is filling up the Universe. This growing movement is not erratic, but consistent and purposeful—rapid but at the same time determined. . . . This is the best way I can describe the space. It is rapid, yet there is a feeling that the knowledge or reality of it already exists, or that it is being born, exists in its entirety and visually manifest all in the same one moment.49
Similarly, journalist Damon Orion personally told me about the psychedelic lucid dreams he has: “The deeper I go into the lucid-dream state, the more beautiful the colors get. For example, in one lucid dream I looked out the window of a train I was in and saw the trippiest, most gorgeous sunset I’d ever seen (in dreams or in waking life). The swirls and blotches of color in these kinds of lucid dreams are really close to the ones you see while tripping.”
Like a psychedelic experience, it can be challenging to describe what lucid dreaming is like to someone who has never experienced it. Because I’ve been having lucid dreams for much of my life, and because so many people I know have had them too, and because I knew that it has been scientifically verified in the sleep laboratory, it didn’t even occur to me until after I started writing this book that there are quite a few people who don’t believe that lucid dreaming is genuinely real, or think that it’s been greatly exaggerated. I was truly surprised to speak with people who thought that lucid-dreaming reports are fabrications or exaggerations.
For example, American philosopher Norman Malcolm (1911–1990) pointed out that the only criterion we have for determining the truth of a statement about someone having a particular dream is the dreamer’s own words. Malcolm says that lucid dreaming is absurd and impossible, providing this mocking example: “I dreamt that I realized I was dreaming, dreamt that I was affecting the course of my dream, and then dreamt that I woke myself up by telling myself to wake up.”50
Charles Laughlin helps to explains why some people have trouble understanding the reality of lucid dreaming: “Without, I hope, sounding patronizing, if one has not experienced a lucid dream, then one will have little idea of just how ‘real’ a dream experience can be. This is no different than saying that if one has not been on a magic mushroom trip, one cannot say what it is like—or a high altitude gas balloon flight, or scuba diving, and so forth. In lucid dreaming one often has the sense of being more awake and aware in the dream than in waking life.”51
Yes, people often report feeling more awake while lucid dreaming than they generally do during the daylight hours, and this is likely why psychologist Charles Tart has suggested that lucid dreaming can recreate the experience of many psychedelic drugs.52 Tart found that some subjects who participated in LSD research subsequently had similar psychedelic experiences in their dreams, and some of the subjects experienced the altered state continuing for a few minutes after they woke up. This implies that a drug is not necessary to create the experience.
As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, when I asked Terence McKenna about his experience with lucid dreaming, he told me about the times when he smoked DMT in the dream state and had full-blown shamanic journeys, which agreed with Tart’s hypothesis. McKenna said:
I have dreams in which I smoke DMT, and it works. To me that is extremely interesting because it seems to imply that one does not have to smoke DMT to have the experience. You only have to convince your brain that you have done this and it then delivers this staggering altered state. How many people who have had DMT dream occasionally of smoking it and have it happen? Do people who have never had DMT ever have that kind of an experience in a dream? I bet not. I bet you have to have done it in life to have established the knowledge of its existence, and the image of how it’s possible; then this thing can happen to you without any chemical intervention.
However, Ann Faraday, author of Dream Power, thinks differently about this. She describes having had an LSD experience in a dream before ever having taken the drug. Although she experimented with the drug later, she had her first psychedelic experience within a lucid dream. She writes, “The most extraordinary feeling came over me. Surges of energy pulsated throughout my body and I entered a ‘high’ in which I was completely transported on the kind of internal journey only those who have experienced psychedelic drugs would understand.”53 Additionally, several online articles tell of people having psychedelic drug experiences in lucid dreams although never having had such experiences in waking life.54 Later, when some of these people did try the actual psychedelic drugs, they reported having similar effects to what they experienced while using their dream psychedelics. For example, my friend Heather shared the following with me:
Last night I had a dream about taking DMT. I have not taken DMT before. It started off with me being in this empty shop, and there was a guy in there. I didn’t know who he was, but he knew who I was. He asked me questions about psychedelics. I said I have always wanted to try DMT. He told me to be very careful because of my traumatic past and to take it in small doses. Anyway . . . He told me to look in my hands, there was a black box saying“eat me.” He told me to tap it. So I did, and out popped gold nuggets. They were very solid. He then told me to eat them, which I did. Then he told me it was DMT. I paused, and all of a sudden I started to go dizzy and fell to the floor. There were people walking around me, blurry, as I was about to pass out. It felt so real. And then it went black. Then all I could see were twins dancing in sync. More like robots. It was beautiful, and as I moved toward them they started to duplicate over and over again until I crashed. I had broken through a hole into another world. Everywhere was surrounded by grass. Even the sky. There was no free space. But there were animals, happiness, freedom. I could jump as high as I wanted to and fly through the fields. Then I noticed I was losing vision and I started to go back into the other dream, where the guy was waiting for me. He had asked me how I felt. It was as if I were not in a dream at all. I find it strange how I dreamed of going into another dream and then leaving it, going back into the original.
If Heather ever does try DMT I’d be most curious to hear how her dream journey compared. When I was first inspired to write this book I contacted Stanley Krippner and asked him what sort of connections and parallels he had noticed between the state of lucid dreaming and psychedelic awareness. Being an expert on dreams, shamanism, and altered states of consciousness, Krippner, I was sure, must have had a whole list to send me, but I was surprised by his response: “Frankly, I have never given the topic much thought. I think there are more differences than similarities between lucid dreaming and psychedelic experiences. But the problem is that there is no ONE psychedelic experience and no ONE lucid dreaming experience. So making a comparison would really be stretching it.”
Since I didn’t think that such a comparison was stretching any logic, I made my own list of the general connections and parallels that I’ve noticed between the state of lucid dreaming and psychedelic awareness. I’ll be discussing these connections in greater detail throughout the book, but briefly, they are:
Much has been written about lucid dreams and psychedelic awareness, but little has been written about the striking connection between the two states, and it was largely this insight that inspired me to write the book that you’re now holding in your hands. However, before we further explore the mind-bending possibilities of the interface between psychedelic and dreaming brain states, let’s first review some basic physiology and psychology. In the next chapter we’ll be discussing what happens in our brains during sleep and dreaming, and what function dreaming might serve in our daily lives.