Psychedelics and Dreams

            According to researchers, Ayahuasca changes brain waves to a state akin to lucid dreaming, so it’s possible my former teacher wasn’t lying when he said his brain had been permanently changed and that he was always journeying, drugs or not.

            But I handled changes in my brain with less nonchalance. I’d spent my life trying to learn and see more, it was only after psychedelics that I wished I’d seen and known less. My daily life became a waking dream, enhanced in 2020 by the pandemic and moving to Rocky Boy’s Reservation. Uncanny, strange things happened every day; reality seemed just as wild as my imagination. I began to wonder if I would ever wake up. When I realized I couldn’t, that perhaps I was like my former teacher and had gone on a forever trip—and that there was no going back to my old experience of the world or my old self—I began using altered states to escape who I had become. My reason was fear, just as my former teacher said it would be. I feared that I was like him, and I feared that what I saw and dreamed would come true.   

            Here’s a link to research that examined the biological and physiological similarities between dreaming and tripping on psilocybin. Additional research purports to show that psychedelic states are more like lucid dreaming because of the “clarity of consciousness” during a trip and the “meta-cognitive abilities” psychedelics can facilitate. My teacher preached the benefits and necessity of using information learned from altered states in real life, and over time I’ve come to believe this is how great art gets made and how great basketball teams gel. The problem is that the information, habits and relationships learned in altered states are often viewed as unacceptable in consensus reality and, what’s more: the information can be hard to learn and hold.

            When I started asking around about the difference between dreams and visions on the Rez, some people didn’t want to talk to me about it all. Many people viewed drug visions as inferior, potentially “not real” visions, while the visions a person received from fasting and doing a vision quest alone on a mountain for at least four days produced more reliable visions. An old man told me once that the truest visions are those you have to wait for; they come after the first ones, which can be intoxicating and infatuating. Like James Welch’s depiction of visions in the novel Fools Crow, the old man said the truest visions were often difficult. He viewed nighttime dreams as more reliable than psychedelic visions because dreams come more fully from the unconscious and are less easy for the ego to manipulate.

            In psychedelic groups people were obsessed with having good trips and euphoric visions. There’s an obsession in the scene with set and setting, with engineering the psychedelic experience so that people have good trips and only good trips. I fully support harm reduction and using drugs in the most comfortable, safest way possible, but I don’t believe there’s a way to control people’s visions, trips or dreams. You can suggest, you can try to help, but you might not be successful. Some people will always have troubling trips and, if you journey enough, you’ll have a “bad” trip too. Plants and even molecules are sentient, and they’ll take you on a ride if they please. One truth I believe my former teacher taught me was that you could never truly control the psychedelic experience; there is always risk. Not just of a bad trip, but of life-altering trips and also, it must be said, of death.  

            When my drug visions turned out euphoric, I was both elated and overwhelmed. Suddenly people wanted to have visions like mine; they wanted to feel the way I felt. They wanted to know how I did it. It seemed I was having the quintessential psychedelic experience, that I was being healed. But I didn’t understand how I had managed the visions, nor what they meant, or even if they were real. That’s why, in the aftermath of my psychedelic experiences, I latched my consciousness onto my former teacher’s, clinging to his understanding of the world for sanity.

            While my psychedelic visions might have been euphoric, once I returned home, I found my nightmares had been amplified. When I was a girl, I had recurring nightmares of snakes. These dreams sacred me so badly that for many years I woke up in the middle of the night, flipped on the lights in my room, undressed my bed of its covers and looked under every piece of furniture. I didn’t like having cords around and I hated toy snakes and worms. Anything that wiggled freaked me out. As a girl, I couldn’t look at pictures of snakes—I opted to never turn to the reptile pages in my science textbooks, marking them with sticky notes—and I couldn’t look at images of snakes on television. After the euphoric psychedelic visions I had in my teacher’s groups, the snake dreams returned with the same vividness as my girlhood nightmares. Then I digressed, waking up multiple times in the night to check under the bed, the pillows, the covers.

            My former teacher helped me navigate and understand the snake dreams. When I first told him about them, I was surprised to learn that he thought I was lucky. I felt tormented by the snakes, but he told me to get interested in them. He said the snakes in my dreams were obviously trying to communicate with me and that I should stop making it so difficult for them. Maybe, he said, if I stopped being so hard to reach, the snakes would stop coming after me, stop trying to bite me. So, I did what he said. When I saw a snake in real life or in a dream, I’d try to look at it, try to gleam as many of its characteristics as I could. Every time I saw or dreamt a snake, I texted its details to my teacher. There were green ones, yellow ones, glittering ones—but most of all there were rattlesnakes. My teacher said that snakes’ skin is like our fingerprints, endless unique variations of the same patterns. He said in his tradition anaconda birthed the world and that I should feel lucky snakes had blessed me with their knowledge.

            He was right about the dreams. The more I paid attention to the snakes, the more I learned about them, the more I saw them in the real life, the more the snakes in my dreams retreated. But as my dreams about snakes became less intense, other dreams had not lost their vividness. Among the many changes to my brain wrought by psychedelics, vivid prophetic-seeming dreaming seems to be among the most lasting effects.

            Few of my revelatory dreams were happy. Actually, they were nightmares that belong in a Cormac McCarthy novel. I didn’t welcome the knowledge any of them brought and there were many I wanted to unknow immediately after I woke up. But that’s not how dreams work…

-continued in next post-