I had read about this remarkable feat being done by a controlled group of lucid dreamers who had never done a psychedelic in their life. Their objective was to consume dream-LSD and see if they would have an actual psychedelic experience. The results were startling, and not only did the experience they described match traditional LSD trips, but some of them even had their altered state carry over into waking consciousness.
I got extremely excited by this (since I had longed to experience anything remotely close to my paradigm-shattering ayahuasca trip years ago), and made the decision to do it.
It came to me in the form of a muffin which I devoured without hesitation, handed over by my super-hippy friend (who always has some form of illegal substance on him). Some other guy was with him and they both consumed the dream muffins. I was not lucid nor did I intentionally create the muffins into existence in the dream, but the cause and effect of intending to do so the night before and finding the opportunity right in front of my blind eyes suddenly proved too coincidental for even me, and I became lucid. *As a very interesting point to consider later, it should be reemphasized that I consumed the muffin before I became lucid.
About 20 to 30 mintues “real time” passed by in the dream, and I had forgotten completely that I ever consumed the muffin. I was sitting in my front yard meditating when all of a sudden the dream starts shifting rapidly and I lose all ground beneath me. “Holy shit”, I thought, as I realized I’m not just dreaming about a trip, I’m actually having one.
I get the distinct feeling/realization that THIS is a DREAM. I’m not talking about the “holy crap I’m dreaming” feeling that comes when you become lucid in a dream. That realization is still contained in the contextual framework of the physical body consciousness experiencing a dream. Not to mention I was already lucid. I’m talking about the realization that there is no ground, anywhere, in the universe; that all reality, THIS NOW, is ultimately perception, and all perception is ultimately subjective and groundless. Lucid waking might be an apt description of what I felt, except I felt it from within a dream.
I got very curious and decided to check back on my body in bed by phasing some of my awareness. My body was as much a dream symbol as anything else and waved and oscillated, except on some hardwired neuro network of self perception it maintained its consensual form and function. Surreal as it was, I deduced through logic that somehow, somewhere, it was still my regular old body and if someone saw it there it would still look like me sleeping. This was logic, however. My direct experience was that my physical body was also a dream.
The function of my body was incredible during this experience. My kundalini was set to “afterburn” while my third eye regurgitated kaleidoscopic-fractal-spectra into the steaming pile of vomit that was my reality (fresh with chunks of dichotomy and seething with yesterday morning’s contradiction). My body was like a self sustained reality generating hologram; a hologram that projected it’s own reality of form and function. I checked through each of my other chakra’s, and delighted as I became enveloped in a diapason of perception. My heart center was a deep and engaging love song; my base center was heavy metal; my crown was like the most enchanting angelic music I’ve ever heard, or dreamed, or hallucinated. Each chakra was a corresponding music of the same frequency bandwidth.
I phase back to my dreaming body and meet up with my hippy friend as we go tripping around mindlessly. At this point I have little memory recall, perhaps because i was running low on juice. At one point I’m in a room with the two other guys who ate the muffins (I don’t know if you all believe in Shared Dreaming, but this is perhaps my most convincing personal evidence I have so far; not just of dreaming and the implied dynamics of “other” dreamers, but even of the reality of “other” sentient beings as self contained reality generating microcosms. Remember? The steaming pile of vomit? ).
Anyway, as I approach these two individuals and we all get closer together, our energy fields synergize and increase in resonance, and to my utter dumbfoundment I find my own individual psychedelic phenomenon starts to increase; up to a scary point where all my perceptions become waveforms in an ocean of liquid dream. I back away from the group, and the effects diminish.
Now, some would argue that this was all inside my brain, and the effect was caused by the dream symbology of me getting closer to other psychedelic energy fields. Fair enough, after all, the whole experience was produced by a dream psychedelic muffin, and I did have a real life experience with which to generate everything.
*But remember when I ate the muffin to begin with? I was not conscious; it was like watching a movie. And when the trip started? I was lucid, but I had no memory whatsoever of taking the muffin. There was something that, despite the level of my consciousness and the influence of my subconscious mind on my dream, carried forth the enfolded instructions of what that dream muffin was supposed to invoke. I think that this was the dreaming body itself; existing as a self-sustained reality despite our level of conscious engagement with it. If I can have a dreaming self that is “real”, is isn’t too far a leap to say other dreamers can too.
The real question is, of course, is there an objective “other” period? Some mystics would say that no, ultimately it is all within your consciousness, even your brain is a perception of your consciousness, therefore there is no “out there” and you are utterly alone. Some scientists would say that yes, there is a definite quantifiable objective other, yet compelling as all their arguments are, I’m still the one that hears them speak and reads their papers, and It’s all perceptual information that’s happening in my world. I still don’t know if there is an outside “reality”. If I can perceive this “reality” directly, then it is still my own, personal, utterly alone perception. Perhaps this gives a clue as to what reality is?
I put forth idea that the self/other dilemma is not exclusively one view or the other, nor is it both views at the same time resulting in some weird dichotomy that defies logic. I put forth that self and other is a function of consciousness; two ends of the same stick.
Well, needless to say, the experience got me philosophizing