I recently had a dream that was so vivid I wrote some notes on waking. Obviously it was only a dream, but it left me with some questions and thoughts that I consider worth sharing. I had recently read FourthRipley's PDF, which played a part in inspiring my dream.

In my dream I decided to try my first extraction on Phalaris Aquatica that grows nearby. The grass is real, it is on unused industrial land and gets slashed every few months. When it is slashed it would be easy in theory to collect new growth, but as it is a field of mixed grass it is easier to identify the older grass.

In my dream I got up a bit before dawn and was in the field around sunrise, (late autumn). I collected 6.5kg of raw material, which included a portion of stems and seed heads that could be separated in a more comfortable environment.

No small amount of time separating leaves of all ages and feeding them through an Oscar juicer produced about 3.2L of juice and some garden mulch.

Simmering overlapped with this process, enabling some reduction, and after filtering out the remaining solids and what I believed in my dream to be chlorophyll and such I was left with about 1.6L.

To this was added 200g of NaOH dissolved in 400ml of water, followed by 100ml of shellite. I have never seen this process in real life and was very impressed by the visual in my dream. Slightly yellow precipitate started immediately to bubble very obviously from the aqueous layer into the shellite where it proceeded to dissolve.

This was separated and repeated. It was done a third time with only 50ml of shellite as by this time the obvious (apparent?) extraction had come to an end.

The separated shellite was evaporated using a fan at room temperature, which left a VERY small amount (140mg) of yellow goo.

In another dream at a later date it seemed that the yellow goo would not fully dissolve in warm shellite or warm ethanol, and that 100g of the fresh cut leaves had dried to just over 26g.

So based on an estimate that 20% of the wet material was discarded it seems like a total raw material equal to about 1350g of dry leaves yielded 140mg. Thats 0.01%.

It was insightful to have had this dream and imagined going through the process. It was a lot of energy and effort for the return. Maybe the process had flaws, or the material was poor to begin with, I welcome any feedback. Meanwhile I am awaiting a TLC kit.

...keep us posted if the dream returns

edit: ...we've read somewhere that spraying the cut leafs (at once) with strong alcolol will halt the alk break-down processes in phalaris, but we haven't been able to confirm that, it's just based on intezam hear-say......

A spot test with Ehlrich was positive.

since you used shellite (naphtha) in the dream, there shouldn't be any gramine in the goo.
But there could be minute amounts of unwanted betacarbolines..(soluble in naphtha?)..and in conjunction with spice, 5-MEO (bufotenine?) could produce some wibbly-wobbly dreams?

But if it was from New Holland perhaps the wild aquatica is still close to the original cultivar? But you never know, they say New Holland sun is burning hot (stress), so if you dream on bioessaying, try an ever so tiny amount first and perhaps rather not make changa but enhanced (parsley...etc) leaf only?

Thanks

That is the tek that I had read shortly before my dream.

The weather had been very hot and dry until the first real rain for weeks just a couple of days before I dreamed, which visibly "improved" the look of the grass from it's stressed state. Such is life, and my available time.

I've been doing some reading about the use of e-cig type vapes and think this sounds appealing. I don't smoke but I do vape, and I make my own juice already so it seems a no-brainer.

Will keep you posted.

Are you planning (to do) the zinc reduction?

Nice work, Imagineer.