Dreams, Hypnogogia, Astral Projection, Lucid Dreams, Transcendent/Deep Meditation.

All of these phenomenon share a few things in common:
Endogenous production of Dimethyltryptamine is my focus.

You must relax. Clear your mind. Relax. Breathe slowly. Did I mention relax?
"While sleeping, watch." If you remain conscious as you approach sleep, you will undoubtedly notice the hypnogogia state - the threshold between awake and a dream. If you practice enough, you may learn that you are able to push beyond the hypnogogic hallucinations into a conscious or lucid dream. If you did this process with the intention of astral projection, you may see the dreamscape as an astral plane, or your own plane.

When we meditate, many of us focus on a specific thought or affirmation. When Zen monks were asked what they meditate on, they confusingly replied, "the floor". I maintain that meditation is not for the purpose of affirmation, and when you are trying to meditate, you are not meditating. Other than sitting or laying in silence, meditation done right may very well put you to sleep. Some of the earliest humans in history figured out that if you relax in silence long enough without falling asleep, you dream awake.

My hypothesis is that these events are all in fact variations along the gradient of one process, the body's response to DMT. They are distinct only by the amount of DMT in production, and the presence of other neurotransmitters. Of course smoalking is on an entirely different level, but this is hundreds of times more than the amounts your body would synthesize naturally.

We know the sleep cycles are in the business of compounding and converting melatonin serotonin, pinoline and tryptamines.
Although DMT is highly active in REM, that doesn't mean it happens only in REM. It's a stretch to think that someone could consciously synthesize this, but it was a stretch to think someone could consciously stop their own heart before someone did it.

Okay now you can tear it apart and criticize…constructively please.

How do you battle extreme raised heart rate and panicking at the threshold? It comes with the feeling/certainty: Death has arrived -- it is here...Now.

Lots of theories keep banging about regarding this. I'll wait until there is some evidence - cause and effect in one instance does not necessarily mean the cause is the same in all instances.

A bike can take you to the city for work, but this does not mean the city is created by bikes - or that cars are made of bikes and people who walk are generating tiny bikes.

By accepting that this is possible, this can be my end, now. I have to confront myself and accept the sensation/feeling/idea before I can truely let go it. In the end, all I can do is to go on and see what happens. When death is coming to tear my life apart, I can not miss it anyway, regardless of how much I worried before.

tseuq

Good advise, although It is difficult to always be ready (with no regrets) hence that works only sometimes....it (whatever it is) has many tricks, incl. false awakenings and sometimes it just gets we....(we wonder why it does what it does).

Perhaps this has to do with it: We eat one square meal a day - at night (about 10pm)? This, we cannot stop!

We typically experience this when we drift into sleep (while we didn't plan to sleep, or if there was something waiting we wanted to do)

We also noticed that haoma and dmt does that too, on occasion ...but not as direct/brutal/realistic

For what's it's worth, because I've too hypothesized along these same lines before :

When I had quit smoking cannabis for a long stretch in order to finally attempt regularly astral projection (before it became unclear what exactly is the difference between astral projection and lucid dreaming stuff, on one particular occasion at around 2-3 am, I literally found myself within the astral plane, but falling - yes, falling at a tremendous speed down down down through layers of realities in which existed these creatures - figures with no features, they were shadows in the shape of a human form. Finally I end up in some massive red devilish hotel place, and I was welcomed. I was terribly confused.

Not soon after, I found myself back in my body back in bed eyes closed.

Here's the important part relating to our hypothesis.
When I finally muscled the courage to open my eyes, because at this point the boundary between what was the astral/dream and what was base reality was fluid, I opened my eyes to what perceptually speaking was what I would be looking at if I had just smoked a small sub-breakthrough dose of DMT!

I couldn't believe it. Now, a few more times have happened since then. The vibrations come, the siren comes, I get the feeling I can float, to which I try and move but feel stuck. So, I relax and the vibrations and sirens continue for a few more minutes, die down, and then I'm back in the body, with the physical after-effects of what seems similar to the comedown from DMT.

You say this is a hypothesis. I would venture to say, that from the perspective of personal experience, and just paying attention, DMT MUST have something to with it.

I even wondered that by taking 50 mg of melatonin a day might kickstart the pineal and indirectly provide substantial preliminary material for the production of DMT.

What we need are people who are respective masters in these two domains, astral projection/lucid dreaming & smoking DMT, to come together on here on a forum to discuss the differences, the similarities, the specific perceptual effects, the before mind-state, the after mind-state, and so on of these two experiences.

Because it seems that all those who "Astral project" are also tending to be anti-druggist, which is why I don't trust them, because they don't have a complete picture as much as they seem to think they do. The same seems to be true of the DMT realm travelers who aren't interested in astral traveling/ lucid dreaming.

Some people think it is only by the plants we reach other worlds.
Other people think it is only through ourselves we can reach other worlds, and any other means is, because it's cheating or something outside your own self-means, you shouldn't use them. See, they tend to take some moral high-ground - this is why I don't trust them.

Why just DMT? Our bodies produce a host of other psychoactive chemicals, including 5-MeO-DMT, bufotenine, different betacarbolines, cannabinoids, opioids, etc.

Also... "DMT is highly active during REM" -> Source?

"Dreams, Hypnogogia, Astral Projection, Lucid Dreams, Transcendent/Deep Meditation."

Some of those states do not resemble the states induced by DMT at all, in my experience...especially lucid dreaming. Astral projection?..well, okay...what does that even mean? I don't think it is much different from a lucid dream.

Im not sure I follow. I guess I would say that DMT is the bike, that takes you anywhere. You've had a bike your whole life, it just turns into a rocket-ship when you smoalk.




I agree with tseuq. With DMT, my method is to just become the observer. If it seems like I am going to die, I have the opportunity to observe my own death. Always confident that I will return. As far as the hypnogogic threshold between wake and sleep, I have not experienced panic or anxiety. The visions arise from empty silent darkness so they come on quite gradually. The hard part for me honestly is staying awake.




I maintain both. The plants figured it out long before we did, but once a symbiosis was formed between our species and theirs, we decided that was a molecule worth discovering.





I didn't know we made 5-MeO. My interest is in DMT simply because that's what I've been exposed to.
I should clarify, I don't believe the dreamscape / astral plane / hypnogogic visions are a manifest of DMT. Rather that DMT retunes the brain to bring new signal in, and/or your signal (consciousness) out. I oversimplified when I qualified their distinction, there are many more variables than I thought. As far as activity in REM, a more or less baseless hypothesis. It seems logical to me, but maybe that's because I am not a neuroscientist. You remember this thread. I think it's probable that between melatonin pinoline and DMT, visions turn into environments, turn into dreams. Even if it is not a REM function, perhaps the initial integration from the hypnogogia would be enough to tune you in such a familiar way that you move in and out of your resting body in phases all night. The conscious intention and wakefulness into the process would then expand and intensify the signal exchange.


What I would really like to know is, how the hell do we get the ball rolling? This is just a silly hypothesis among many silly hypotheses that will just remain stagnant until more experimentation is done. Is there really nothing that can be done before something political must be done? If not, what political thing could that possibly be?

I agree with you completely. Astral projection and lucid dreaming only differ in how the person describing wishes to label the experience. It's the same whole thing, but people will even protest that lucid dreaming is nothing like astral projection. And let's be thorough, meditation is nothing like dreaming. My rebuttal to this argument is simply, yes it is. They differ between each other like english differs from spanish or chinese, but this is all behavior of language. They differ like rock differs from hiphop or classical, but all are music. A smoalk and a dream indeed look and feel very different, otherwise they would be the same word. But that doesn't mean they cannot share the same catalyst. Perhaps it's my own allure to a unifying substance of reality, but I think if DMT is in 1st place so far as the likely candidate, 2nd place is a long ways behind.

Sorry I should have been clearer: Its a logical mistake to believe that because one event has a specific cause, that all identical/similar things have the same cause. By all means its a good theory, but pointless unless you are into neuroscience, and/or gathering such data.

Since there are different chemicals that have a similar effect it could be any number of chemicals, or who is to say that you cannot just imagine/experience something without a chemical being the cause. After all, those who say it is like DMT are those who have taken DMT and can remember DMT.



Say you like guitar music, and some music has guitars in it - But it would be crazy to claim that all music is guitar music. There is only one definite thing that exists in all of these, and it is YOU.

If this is not neuroscience, what is your goal here? To raise DMT up higher on a pedestal, reassure yourself that you have chosen the correct drug? There is no objective answer to that.

You are travelling a road to a new location - today we enjoy the road, but do not make the road your destination.