Lucid Dreaming

[zera]

I'm guessing from the general crossover among psychonauts to experiment with drugs and experiment with lucid dreaming there may be some interest among the posters here.

Swim's had a passing interest and has experimented with dream journals and such for a while. Well today unintentionally he had an amazing experience with it, that he believes is primarily due to a repeated use of DMT. I'll detail what led up to it. Swim smoked approx 35-45 mg of DMT two nights ago (it's hard to tell because he torched the material, but it was a sub-breakthrough dose). He also drank a lot of alcohol that night. Last night he snorted 15-25 mg of DMT, a just above threshold dose and once again drank a lot of alcohol and smoked and chewed tobacco (he's not normally a tobacco user).

This morning he woke up about 4 hours after going to sleep, he normally sleeps eight hours, but sometimes when he drinks heavy he gets a dopamine rebound and wakes up for several hours before going back to sleep. Anyway he woke up, stayed up for about two and a half hours then went back to sleep on his couch instead of his bed. I believe that this contributed to the lucid dreaming, as a technique is to wake up and go back to sleep.

Anyway I'll get on to what the dream consisted of. Swim had a dream of walking around the downtown of the city he resides in with two females that he somewhat knows. At some point something bad happens to swim that has him in a panic in the dream (this is common in his dreams), but for some reason he realizes that what he's in is possibly a dream and wills himself to wake up.

He then goes back to sleep and is in another dream. This time he's sitting in his old house, and the part where he used to smoke pot with his friends. This dream is incredibly lucid in it's details, normally there's a haze associated with swim's dreams but this is amazing, every detail is clearly defined and the people in it behave normally and he can control what is going on at will.

Here's the amazing thing about all this though. He tried willing himself awake and instantly found himself in his bed. He tested the text on the magazine in front of him, reading it, looking away, then reading it again, to make sure he wasn't in a dream layer. The test confirmed that he was awake, he got up and looked around and everything about the environment was exactly right as well, he was in the same exact position and place that he went to sleep, at the same time of day, wearing the same thing and all the objects in the same place. He doesn't normally sleep on the couch either so if this was a dream within a dream he would hihgly suspect that he would be in his bed.

Anyway swim then tried something. He tried to will himself back into the dream, he laid his head down, closed his eys, and wham was right back in the same position doing the same exact thing he was doing when he willed himself awake. As if someone pressed pause in the dream. Not only this but when he willed himself asleep it happenned instantly, with no nodding off or any "falling" asleep. He tried this process again and again waking up and returning to his dream at will and instantly and it kept working perfectly.

It's a very hard thing to describe what this felt like. He could feel his sensory input change from being awake to being in the dream. As if one moment he was getting his sensory input from the dream world, and then *bam* it changes to the dream input as quickly and efforlessly as the image and sound on the TV changes when you change the channel. Okay it wasn't completely effortless, it felt like pushing through a weak mental membrane, but it was virtually instanteneous and he was completely conscience and aware when it occured. The dream world felt so real and so accessible that swim considered the possibility (very briefly) that his consciousness was actually straddling two seperate alternate realities and that rather than dreaming he was experiencing the ability to jump from one to another.

Anyway this has been one of the most fascinating experiences of swim's life and was wondering what if other swiys had experiences with this type of lucid dream or using DMT to achieve lucid dreaming.

Reputation Comments on this post:

Very interesting discussion topic.

[D.U.M.B]

Sounds like an amazing expierence. SWIM has had lucid dreams but no have been due to an ingestion of drug. Possibly marijuana but SWIM can't remember dates etc.

Similar to yours Zera in ways, heres what happened in one of my my lucid dreams. In a dream I dreamt I was waking up. And everything around me looked real so I had no reason to think I was asleep, I was fully awake etc. and I turned on my tv and all too see what time it was. But when I woke I was still convinced I was in a dream for about ten minutes and hell it did turn out to be a dream due to things I could do ie. fly etc. which I found out about twenty minutes later when I was outside. This dream was in real time too. When I wook up the next time I realized I was awake but it was strange, for days on end I had this theory I could be still in dreamland. As the lucid dream about waking up was so surreal. lol strange expierence

[Slidedaddy]

I learned to Lucid Dream while incarcerated. It must have been the confinement or lack of mental stimulation. Every afternoon I would lay down in my bunk and dream for about an hour. It was scarry when I first realized what was going on. My first thought was that I had died. The second time was a little more comfortable. Then it got to be like a movie but I could not stay under for more than 45 minutes to an hour. No matter how long I stayed awake or no amount of meditation would allow the window to be extended. I wish I could find out more about this state of mind. Please provide me some insite if you have any on the subject...

[Graduisic]

SWIM finds that marijuana use kills any chance of having any sort of lucid dream, let alone a dream whatsoever.

There are three key things SWIM takes to encourage vivid dreaming: Valerian root, melatonin, and vitamin B. When using all three at once, the dreams can be so vivid and overpowering that there is no possibility for control whatsoever; it is a careful balance between taking supplements to encourage dreaming, and the biggest factor is biofeedback. Starting off small is key; the moment one can realize they are dreaming and force themselves to 'wake up', hence remembering the dream, this is the first big step towards lucid dreaming. Getting to that point of self-realization in the unconscious is very difficult (which is why SWIM imagines users of psychedelics are more akin to such tasks) and can take quite some time.

Another cornerstone for lucid dreaming is building a solid dream memory. Like other posters have said, keep a journal. It is important to write down the dream as soon as one wakes up, less it be forgotten, or only remembered in small fragments. Remembering to do this is like exercising the unconscious to retain more memory of the dream experience.

It is an art SWIM has yet to perfect, as it does take a great deal of discipline to do well and often, and looks forward to others' insights on this subject.

[Synchronium]

No one has mentioned Calea zacatechichi (Mexican dream herb), shown to increase either the amount of dreams or the recollection of dreams to a greater extent than diazepam or placebo.

Reference:
Psychopharmacologic Analysis of an Alleged Oneirogenic Plant: Calea zacatechichi

Calea zacatechichi is a plant used by the Chontal Indians of Mexico to obtain divinatory messages during dreaming. At human doses, organic extracts of the plant produce the EEG and behavioral signs of somnolence and induce light sleep in cats. Large doses elicit salivation, ataxia, retching and occasional vomiting. The effects of the plant upon cingulum discharge frequency were significantly different from hallucinogenic-dissociative drugs (ketamine, quipazine, phencyclidine and SKF-10047). In human healthy volunteers, low doses of the extracts administered in a double-blind design against placebo increased reaction time and time-lapse estimation. A controlled nap sleep study in the same volunteers showed that Calea extracts increased the superficial stages of sleep and the number of spontaneous awakenings. The subjective reports of dreams were significantly higher than both placebo and diazepam, indicating an increase in hypnagogic imagery occurring during superficial sleep stages.

Certainly worth looking into for any lucid dreaming endeavour.

Reputation Comments on this post:

Interesting stuff! Thanks for the link.

[rawbeer]

SWIM never really sleeps for more than a couple hours at a time - 5 hours would be the max (unless heavy depressants were taken...) and so he finds himself beset randomly with lucid dreams, but their random occurences, and his inability to induce them willfully, has prevented him from really developing any 'dream skills', but he still has fun. Often during a dream he will marvel at the realism of the surroundings, how perfectly the real world is being mimiced, how detailed it is. He can also breath underwater in his dreams, and swims with crocodiles and whatnot.
He finds that while pot doesn't necessarily kill dreams, it does have a negative effect when smoked heavily. For example a bowl or two in the evening is fine but smoking all day generally leads to dreamless nights. But it's hard to generalize - sometimes it has no effect.
From what he's read SWIM thinks the short sleep durations followed by more sleep are what does it for him.