This is very interesting and i must save this for later reading!
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The Use of Salvia Divinorum to Facilitate Lucid Dreaming
Posted by DrTechnical on Dec 10, 2010 in + Research | 7 comments
An Experience:
The previsionary state begins to take hold. As usual, I find myself in what appears to be a dark room, illuminated only by what I would best describe as a subtle black light effect. I do my best to relax and let my subconscious drive the ensuing lesson and experience. My visual perspective begins to rotate counter clockwise in a wide arc. When this rotational effect ends, a more developed scene manifests. I am in a room with three walls. The walls, floor and ceiling have only a rough outline to them and are glowing a cool bright white. There seems to be a profound sense of energy and well being associated with this coloration. It’s a safe place and highly personal. I have a strong visual sense but no perception of physical form. I suppose one would say I am disembodied? What would normally be the rooms fourth wall is missing. In its place is a hole into outer space. Nothing more than blackness and stars as far as one can see. This scene remains stable for the next several minutes as my visual perspective then slowly shifts clockwise. The scene begins to dissolve. I remain in this heightened state of awareness for several more minutes before fully breaking from the scene and re-engaging consensual reality.
Introduction:
This was a recent experience I had with the magical herb Salvia Divinorum. Yes, you can read descriptions like this all day long on erowid if you have the time and motivation. But that is not the purpose of this article. Fundamentally, this is a site focused on dreaming and dream lucidity and I will not stray far. In fact, I will try to link the topics of Salvia and lucidity in a manner that I have not seen discussed by others. But first some necessary background.
I have used this herb in a responsible and exploratory way for about 4.5 years. The best source of information on the subject in general would no doubt be Daniel Siebert’s sagewisdom site. I will forgo a summary of his key points and opinions. I will only reiterate that Salvia is to be respected. It is not fun, relaxing or socially facilitating in any sense. Many who try it dislike it immediately, considering the effect to be uncontrolled, frightening or just plain confusing. Others claim to be somewhat immune to the effect. Yet others find it to be a great aid in personal exploration and the generation of creative ideas. Still others, like myself use it to explore the bounds of human consciouness itself. Interestingly, this seems to be evidence that she chooses you and not the other way around. What does the experience “mean”? Frankly I am still forming my own opinions. I am not convinced that it’s possible to draw a firm conclusion in that regard. If it is possible, it would probably take a lifetime. It truely is a complex experience.
I have been lucid dreaming regularly for a little over 4 years. I put a fairly significant amount of time and energy into reading on the subject of lucidity as well as a number of related areas. I am also quite knowledgable about lucid dream supplement theory and use it to great advantage. These efforts and focus are rewarded with maybe 20-30 lucid dreams per month. Some wonderful and others mundane. But at the core of this effort is my use of Salvia. It was responsible for motivating me to get back into lucid dreaming and it continues to play a role in my success. I am sure of it. It’s actually fairly shocking to me that little work has been done linking salvia to lucid dreaming. After all, a full blown salvia vision can be quite similar to a lucid dream, or perhaps more precisely an out of body experience.
But how does Salvia support lucid dreaming? There are three main aspects to consider. Two facilitate awareness training. The other is a broad, rather heuristic claim I will make.
WILD Practice:
The first thing which should be striking about salvia is the nature of the transition from a wakeful state to a visionary one. In lucid dreaming, we are all familiar with the concept of a wake initiated lucid dream, or WILD. Frankly speaking, WILDs are tough to pull off. I can induce WILDs, but they almost always require a bias in my acetylcholine levels (e.g. by taking a mix of galantamine and choline). Even then, most of my WILDs would be characterized as OOBE’s, with a vibrationary state followed by an entrance to my dreamspace in which it’s a replica of the real life scene I just left (e.g. my bedroom). But of course there is the case of WILDing based on hynagogic imagery (HI). As many have experienced, the twilight state between awake and asleep is often preceeded by hynagogic flashes and even auditory hallucinations. It’s quite natural, normal and does not require psycho actives to induce. One only needs to pay attention to their closed eyes field of vision when drifting off and perhaps try to stay alert during the process. But there in lies the key. Staying alert. Maintaining a balance between consciously aware and drifting into formal sleep. This should ring a bell so to speak with the process of drifting into salvia space. Now I refer more to the process of consuming 1-3 hits of a high potency standardized extract. My personal choice would be a 20X extract standardized to 72 micro-grams of salvinorin A per gram of leaf material. Large hits should be consumed as thoroughly and as fast as possible due to the short half life associated with this method of consumption. Have you used salvia and smoked it in this manner? Did you go from 0 – 60 in about 3 seconds? Hard to maintain control and focus right? A little hard to relax and just let your subconscious drive? Well isn’t that process and those attributes much like a WILD transition based on HI? Now let’s go back to WILDing. Even getting to the hynagogic state and transitioning to REM generally requires that one engage in this exercise later in their sleep cycle. Hopefully, the reader is aware that WILDs are almost impossible early in the evening due to the propensity to move between stage 1-4 sleep with little REM (stage 5) in between. So practicing WILDs becomes difficult. It’s hard to get to the hypnogogic state and such practice is best done in the middle of the night. But practicing awareness, relaxation and subtle control of the salvia ramp up is possible on demand. I maintain that learning to control that ramp up, helps one negotiate the WILD transition. In fact, it probably helps with both HI based and vibration based WILDs. If this idea intrigues you, start experimenting. Try to master the wakeful/alert to salvia space transition. Leverage this mastery to improve upon your management of WILD transitions.
Control and Recall in a Non-Wakeful State:
Think about the dream state. It’s driven by our subconscious. It’s unpredictable. It is hard to control or apply logic in. It can be very hard to remember dreams upon waking, even though we were quite in the moment while still in the dream. Do these attributes sound familiar? Can we make the same claims about the salvia induced visionary state?
Much like salvia can be used to master WILD transitions, I maintain that it can also be used to create a greater intimacy and level of control with the dream world. It allows you to experiment with different visionary levels. First, practice using a small enough dose such that you get visuals, but also maintain full awareness and keen recall once you leave the vision state. Once that dose is mastered, step it up a notch. A larger dose and additional practice in maintaining awareness, mental clarity and recall once the experience ends. At some point, you will hit a dose where you begin to lose these abilities. From my experience, the first to go is full recall of the experience. It’s essentially an amnesiac state. But over time, you should be able to better negotiate control, awareness and recall. You should be able to maintain these attributes for larger and larger doses. This practice should positively impact your ability to apply focus, logic and recall of the dream state.
This suggestion is not completely disimilar to the practices of Tibetan Dream Yoga. In dream yoga, the goal is to master lucidity, destroy negative karmic threads and improve ones overall mental accuity and condition during dreaming. It is believed this focus and ability can be carried with you upon death. At death, the mental training one has undertaken is expected to help them maintain focus, and in principle provides the ability to influence their reincarnation. They are not caught up in the fantasies associated with the bardo’s of death. Rather, their mental training spills into this state. A similar though somewhat more mundane analogy would be the use of reality checks. Doing reality checks repetitively during the day improves awareness while awake, which hopefully creates the habit of awareness while dreaming. Same fundamental concept.
Mastering control, focus and recall in the salvia induced visionary state, should spill into other mental states, including the dream state. Again, practice with an open mind and sense of purpose.
Poking Holes in the Wall:
Well, figuratively speaking anyway. Why don’t we lucid dream as part of our standard operating procedure? Why can’t we pick up on PSI information with greater reliability? What are the b
arriers involved? Evolution I suppose? I can make arguements as to why neither is particularly productive toward the survival of the species in general. But what about the small p
ercentage of us interested in exploring the bounds of this reality?
However one chooses to conceptualize things, there appear to be certain barriers or walls in place that only facilitate certain states and information transfer in general. Let’s model the problem as such. Let’s form a mental picture. A first wall-A divides the conscious and subconscious minds. A second wall-B divides the subconscious and supermind. Info at the supermind level needs to travers two walls to get to the conscious mind. Here, I use the term supermind in the spirit of Robert Monroe. It is the impermanent portion of your mind. It transcends death. It likely has access to all psychic (M-band) information. It is represented by the dreamspace itself.
From a life experience perspective, it seems to me that wall-A and wall-B are filters. They let in some info, but not all. Information bubbling up from your supermind would have to cross two full layers to get to the conscious mind, in the form of a visual imagine, stray thought, gut feeling etc …
I maintain that the use of salvia chips away at both of these walls. It creates a temporary merging of all three aspects of your mind. For that matter, lucid dreams yield the same effect, a merging of the different components of your mind. I would conjecture that using salvia weakens these walls, and has an effect on both the conscious reception of PSI information, as well as the cooperation of the conscious, subconscious and superminds. It helps to create a closer relation between these processes and in doing so facilitates lucidity. Lucidity itself, strengthens ones ability become lucid in future dreams and if one challenges themselves, becomes a stepping stone for deeper exploration. These pursuits compliment one another, and stengthen the overall experience. It forces us to deepen our interpretation of the salvia experience. It becomes one big counter dependent loop. One which strenghtens and becomes more complex and deepens over time.
Summary:
So in summary, we’ve discussed three possible ways in which to use salvia to enhance lucid dreaming. But like all lucid dream facilitators or induction methods, people will have varying degrees of success experimenting with the methods herein. As with any method, give it a fair effort and period of time before you draw conclusions, positive or negative. If you choose to explore the use of salvia in this manner, please be responsible. This wonderful herb has received enough bad publicity and is poorly understood at best. But for those willing to take the time to work with it and explore its use in an intelligent manner, the rewards can be quite substantial. Only you will know when you get there.
7 Responses to “The Use of Salvia Divinorum to Facilitate Lucid Dreaming”
Lee Adams says: December 10, 2010 at 10:02 pm Dr.Technical,
That was a great post. I am very interested in how you trained yourself to recognized the state of mind you were in during a salvia “experiment” and apply what you learned to the dream state. I was also very interested to what you said about the “wall” a barrier from the reality of life into the unknown realm. I would like to hear more about this. I have heard about that barrier in the lucid dream yoga book I read and also other peoples personal accounts of their experiences in lucid dreaming as well as psychedelic experiences. I hope to hear more.
Reply DrTechnical says: December 11, 2010 at 8:02 am I had tried salvia purey out of curiosity. It was not what I expected nor did I remotely understand it. Yet, it’s similarity to the lucid dream state was obvious. It also “seemed” very important. This is a running theme for me with salvia. When returning from a version, I often have inspiration to pursue some original and creative idea. It seems overwhelmingly important. As if the idea was a gift to be cherished.
The barrier concept is not my own, though I do agree with the concept. The question becomes, how best to model the layers of the mind and what the dreamspace or salvia space represent in relation to those layers. I firmly believe that the salvia space is a merged state between those seperate aspects of the mind. As such, it is a meeting point to others in your I-there cluster (other manifestations of your being, past lives, and so forth)
Reply Joe T says: February 14, 2011 at 7:27 pm I have never used Salvia before but I have had my share of Wake Induced Lucid Dreams. My WILD’s pretty much o.b.e’s as well. Did the salvia prevent you from having more control of your dream?
Reply DrTechnical says: February 16, 2011 at 7:35 pm I can offer a few things. It appears that salvia has something of a REM suppression effect. So you would not necessarily want to use it at “wake back to bed”.
But in terms of its effect on dreams. I’ve noticed that if used before bed, I tend to get stranger dreams. This is interesting though, as dream control can be inversely proportional to “dream realness”.
I have discussed this issue with many experienced lucid dreamers. When dreams are very realistic, like OOBE’s, people tend to have less control over the dream or ability to suspend perceived physical space 3D rules. When cognitive ability is a little lower, or the dream is less realistic, dream control can sometimes be better.
So that is a long winded way of saying that salvia might have a small net positive effect on dream control.
Reply static end says: November 28, 2011 at 7:29 am Great post! Thank you.
I’ve used Salvia about a week ago for the first time for the same purpose. Could you tell more about the practicalities? Do you smoke it from a pipe straight before going to bed?
Reply david collins says: July 20, 2012 at 9:25 pm I personally got the idea to ‘train’ salvia recently after experimenting with 50x. which is hellish, to me. the effects i notice are terribly difficult to explain, something to do with family relationships; as the subject and object merge and everything gets combined into one field, what were separate entities of thought before take on some sort of characteristic of relatedness which seems to indicate to me underlying mental strain in that area. in that state, i get the urge to do something. i get up, move around – seeking? once i made hot dogs, the first time, i ran to my room and hid under the covers, once i went to get water, my friend suggested we go get something and i confusedly attempted to go an get it although it wasn’t decided. the thought, ‘this is not what i wanted’ seems to occur. a dreadful something goes on.
the state doesn’t seem visionary so far. everything ‘locks up’, whatever my gaze fixates on assumes the same significance everything else does, and as the optical data no longer has the comforting coherence it did 10 seconds ago, it just becomes shapes and colors. honestly, i’ve taken extremely, extremely high doses of psychadelics before, and never once experienced anything like a hallucination. i’ve contrived ways of getting very large amounts of DMT into my lungs very fast, and never had any sort of classical experience… and what salvia leaves me is a sort of mocking voice that says, “what did you EXPECT??? this is reality. it doesn’t leave or break, and there is no deus ex machina that will show you something else”. i’ve read reports on erowid of other people that seem to have morbid psychological characteristics having the experience of being mocked as well – in one case i remember them saying something to the effect, “welcome to the impersonal unity, baby. you read all about it? what, baby needs reality? awww, how awful. hey buddy, you OK? you stuck? awww, too bad buddy, how did that happen? hey, it’s cool buddy-” whilst he had the visceral sensation of his body being ripped to shreds by hooks. which i can see as a very realistic response to salvia if panic set in.
i remember in the depth of the first experience thinking, wait no! i can talk! i can say something! and i felt that i needed to express my existence. to say something. to fight the dissolution. as i think out loud here on what i’ve learned, it seems that salvia obviously crushes your solar center, your ego, and after years of dwelling and ruminating on such things as ego and zen and the proper state of mind and jungian psychology and mysticism and science, i’ve come to a profound appreciation of ego that isn’t often echoed by others that are interested in the nature of reality itself. it seems that many more find ego a pressing problem, more then something to be carved and strengthened. this may be an attribution i make because for a very long time, my ego was incredibly weak. the christianity that i was taught from a young age and later abandoned, what i took from it was different then what many take from it – my determination until i abandoned my faith was to have nothing, and be nothing, and to devote myself fully to fixing my attention on what i’ve heard many other people call by many names, boiling down to No Thing, i learn. this is all stuff i’m still unsure on. i’m just very curious about this topic of discussion.
i gave some to my friend and watched him immediately start to drool and look like a stunned animal, while probing around his environment in utter confusion, and his thoughts mimicked mine, at first he said, ‘i forgot what i’m doing’. after he said, ‘there is nothing to do’. so i draw a connection between salvia and the motivator… after my first attempt with the 50x i remember immense relief as i observed my normal thought process begin filtering back in. afterwards it felt fantastic to go play piano. something to do.
i’ve been experimenting with small hits and trying to ride it, and avoiding the compulsion to flail out for some sort of task to perform, as normally i’d think, you take a drug, sit there and observe… but on salvia, sitting still seems intolerable. like, existential horror intolerable.
any thoughts you (or others here) have on what this all, as you say, ‘means’ i’d really appreciate hearing. other entheogen type drugs seem to bestow meaning, salvia seems to rip it away from you. afterwards i get the feeling i’m glad i survived.
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