Updated 2 years ago
Terence McKenna always liked to posit mushrooms as being responsible for humans learning to speak. On the mushroom-dotted plains of north Africa, when the Sahara was veldt, they would try to explain to each other what they had experienced, and, so the theory goes, language was born. But this sells your brains short, in my opinion – humans have enjoyed transcendent experiences well before they were even humans… as dreams.
When your dog is chasing squirrels in his sleep, furiously working his legs in running motions, he is peaking!
This is a gift from nature.
All the psychedelic drugs you would ever really “need” are done every time you go to sleep and have REM dreams. With practice (and luck!) you can even get good at lucid dreaming and take it even further. As the saying goes, the mind, once stretched, will never return to its original dimensions. Like meditation, you can get good at it. All you have to do is try.
Some people have broken their lives into pieces to get to experience this comic bliss, astral travel to the Other Side… and the gift has always been there, inside of them.
If you still need more of this magical experience when you’re awake, an argument can be made that you’re kind of being a greedy first world asshole! The equivalent of demanding an 8K monitor with all the bells and whistles that shows all the CGI… when just a little old black & white beat up 8″ will do.
Try keeping a dream journal and re-exploring your dreams – you can “learn a lot about yourself”… your hopes, your dreams, and your nightmares. A voice-activated Google Nest at your bedstand (synched with Google Keep, their notes app – “Hey Google, make a note”) or similar from Alexa is the easiest way to do this. Then, you can open the app on your other devices and see what you’ve said.
And dreaming is cheaper than drugs. And dreams aren’t at risk of being laced with Fentanyl. And you can experience and enjoy them even whilst in prison.
No one can take your dreams from you.
Of course, you can still do drugs. But if you ignore your dreams, and what they tell you, you are missing out on a potent psychedelic.
Cultivate your epicurianism.
