This was from a private correspondence, but the thought struck that nobody would find pleasure in this, so away I Goethe.
When I was a baby, despite American arrogance over Iranian oil, to get me to sleep my parents would have to pack me into a baby-seat and circle me around the block in their station wagon til slumber took. I cannot settle, physically or ideologically. Insomnia has gotten worse as I age. But I love dreams, even the scariest nightmares. I am a voracious dreamer, with a night free of them being almost uncommon. I have read plenty of books on them over the years, and not mall bookstore garbage but textbooks on the psychology, etc. I think Freud is full of shit, but Jung’s collective unconscious always struck me, known alternately as the noosphere and as the ideaspace. We can joke that social media is our way of giving form to such a place, but I think there is a lot of truth to mythologies and religions of old originating from dreams as much as from enduring dramatic weather patterns without science books to explain what the fuck was going on. Archetypes persist in our artificial cultures strictly due to derivative redundancy, but they persist in our dreams beyond the limited reach of our conscious imaginations, and I feel for reasons beyond genetic memory. That’s where I’m coning from.
From my teens well into my 20s I kept a long series of dream journals, pocket-sized spiral notebooks, just to scribble down contents of the weirder, the scarier, whatever the nocturnal incursion, as most nights I could easily have several in the few hours of sleep, and usually I was so impressed or hyped I wanted to recall every detail before they might fade. Because my family was poor and that was free entertainment. I’ve had dreams that pick up from where others left off, sometimes months after the fact and sometimes on for years, like resuming a book very sporadically. I had a 4-parter once that hit me across 5 years or so, and while a year would pass in real time as much time passed in that world. But I’ve also had dreams that resumed immediately, like unhitting the pause button days or weeks later. I’ve had details that show up in diverse dreams, like a coffee-table cluttered the same way by the same random objects even while none of it factors into the story of whichever dream itself. Real people and real places very very rarely show up in any of mine. Sometimes they can share commonalities, or more often they will be composites, like this character is like so and so but also like the other person with elements of the lady from ago. I pay attention. I have had many lucid dreams, but aside from 2 or 3 successes they were largely by accident. Trapped in night terrors is fucked up, but fully conscious in a Penthouse exchange is another ordeal entirely. To the extent I have been terrified I may have stumbled into someone else’s dream, and might have been imprinting unintentionally. What if the villain from your dream was not a conjuring of your subconscious but the dreaming mind of another representing itself, unbeknownst to them?
At some point I was working too much to continue the records, to have the time for remembering what just happened at all, so I comforted myself knowing that at least my subconscious was having adventures. But how the years fly by. My dreams started going into overdrive again a few years back, possibly because I have been unable to camp in this time, so I am trying to pay attention once more. Camping was a huge release for me, having gone at least one weekend per month year-round for 7 or 8 years. I’ve lived in tents for entire seasons.
As far as their relationships to the DMT compound, I have imbibed the reproducible natural drug a hundred times, easy, starting around 2011. Maybe 2 or 3 dozen times I have guided others through the experience, like a coach, but usually I did it alone in privacy. While they are guaranteed interesting there have been two separate occasions for me which were life-changing affairs on par with experiences of Old Testament prophets. The earlier was while sitting cross-legged on the small back-deck to a cabin built by an uncle on property where he and my mom and their other 13 siblings were raised, overlooking a hundred acres of woods, that endured for the entirety of a huge electrical storm hand in hand in hand with loads of thunder and lightning lasting all the live-long night. This was my longest voyage, but one of those where the senses we have can’t cover what I saw/felt/experienced. But it had much to do with showing the thin strands of order tying everything together between the chaos. The neon elves famous for cameos in DMT trips held their largest role in this, eyes and smiles like Felix the cat, which sounds ominous and creepy but for me as well as by all other accounts they projected absolute kindness and grace. Playful mirth in a way, like children playing with their favorite toys. Imagine meeting foreigners in a bad circumstance, smiles are disarming, in a good way, especially when no harm’s intended. Or a big, scary mongrel comes barking at you, calling it puppy in a soft voice throws it for a loop, disarming it and making it remember when it was younger and loved. The neon elves never came across as any variety of threat whatsoever, more like happy observers, watching grand-kids unwrap X-mas presents.
The later big trip also involved an Abrahamic anointing with ceremonial oil. It’s a Crowley thing, which also required my focusing on a particular tarot card for guidance. As I was having the DMT guide me, I did not choose the Fool, which would have been too obvious, so I went with the Hermit. Which led me on something like the rainbow bridge through the branches of Yggdrasil. If you’ve seen the 1970s sci-fi film The Black Hole, the final sequence where they are pulled inside the phenomenon, where they are then pulled through both heaven and hell, that would be like a stick-man portrait whereas what I felt was the Sistine Chapel version. Afterwards, I would completely identify with astronauts who must undergo counseling for months or years after the fact, trying to decompress the levels of distance, scope and magnitude. Nothing on our precious mud-ball compares, not remotely, and yet I realized all the while that while the omniverse traversed was longer than what this brief spark of mortal life might ever prove capable of physically traveling before my candle irrevocably snuffs out, I never left my seat in the dirt, which redefines Exploding Head Syndrome.
These two trips in particular weighed together made me reconsider my dreams, made me wonder if what we see are not unconscious hallucinations, but rather looking through the eyes of other beings, as their normal conscious times progress. Even if you are in the role of yourself or something close to who you are, it is an alternate reality you whose life you are experiencing for those moments. Alternately, in times of blackouts, or when afternoons feel to pass far quicker than normal, your own life might be getting experienced by the dreaming mind of a thing from some other reality. It’s impossible to prove. Even with a Carlos Castaneda skill at dream manipulation, it’d mean leaving notes for whatever consciousness you pass through, when the numbers of alternates may as well be infinite, making the chances for a reconnection equally infinite. But I really think it makes even more sense than our collective unconscious going to the same metaphysical, immaterial realm. As we are more prone to visit realities closer to our own, what we experience in those further out cannot possibly come from our own minds, be they shared resources or not. I think parallel dimensions and alternate realities must exist, and exist in the same space, the way TV or radio signals from different stations or networks can fly through the same space at the same time without interfering with one another. I don’t know why we are able to access that in such a way, unless it is to learn as much as we can, to recall every detail to bring back with us to this world, to this life. For entertainment, that’s easy, but also to keep all of this before us now in perspective.
In this way, if lucid dreams sincerely are what they are, then they can be dangerous, because the characters we fight or fuck or eat are real, just somewhere else where even if we ourselves should never return, its denizens must live with the shitstorm we leave behind. Like tourists disrupting the lives of locals or knocking over prehistoric monuments. Or catching STDs to bring home, even if only in a metaphorical sense, it could very much be a two-way street.