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I saw these weird drapes folded around me that were brown, green, and white stripes. They were gently heaving, and I knew that they were living creatures that were watching over me. I didn't take enough to have a full breakthrough, but in that moment I was certain that I was dying, with all of my consciousness welled up into my head, as if that's all I was. When I came to and regained awareness of my limbs, I was relieved to feel tears on my face because I guess that meant I was still alive. For a couple of weeks I wondered if I really had died. The feeling was that strong. Now, I think that's absurd, but still a tiny part wonders...

The lesson learned was that I needed to start questioning my convictions more. Just "feeling sure" isn't enough to certain of something. I try to maintain a little bit of skepticism and doubt toward every thing these days.

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> Just "feeling sure" isn't enough to certain of something.

Back when I was a teenager, I got interested in the idea of lucid dreaming. One of the suggested ways I'd read of gaining awareness that you are in a dream is to habitually ask yourself if you're dreaming -- sooner or later, you'll do it in a dream.

I tried that for a while, and sure enough, I did actually ask myself if I was dreaming while in a dream, and concluded that I wasn't in dream, because I just felt sure that I wasn't dreaming! Was rather amused when I woke up and realized that I actually had been dreaming all along...

What I should have done -- as I later learned -- was to try to do something impossible while anticipating that it will happen. For example, jump with the intention of levitating, expecting to just hover in the air. Dreams work on anticipation -- what you expect to happen is what happens next. (That's why nightmares always seem to do whatever you're afraid is going to happen next; you expect your fear to come true, so it does.)

Empirically testing reality on occasion is a good thing to do; sometimes you'll find out that what you think is real is just a dream.

> For example, jump with the intention of levitating, expecting to just hover in the air. Dreams work on anticipation

Yep, either you're dreaming or you're now dead.

The book Art of Dreaming has some good tips... Such as remembering to look at your hands. That action for some reason if performed in a dream will help you realize you're dreaming. The other thing is there's two factors of realization (according to the book), the first is realizing you're dreaming. The second is realizing you are asleep in your bed right now. Surprisingly, it helps to realize and acknowledge these independently for the lucid state to properly kick in.

Once all that happens, the next challenge is of course holding it together without waking up. That just takes practice, but some people are naturals at it I hear.

Looking at your hands doesn't seem like enough a test to me. I think you need something more convincing. My reality test when I was interested in lucid dreaming was to count my fingers, and one day I happened to count to 6, and was then pretty sure it was normal and went on with my day. When I woke up, I couldn't believe how easily I convinced myself that I wasn't dreaming

I guess it's a personal thing. For me, the reminder to look at hands worked. Perhaps when you did it, the activity of counting was enough to distract you and prevent you from realizing. Above all, the recommendation is to keep reminding yourself during your normal waking day to look at hands (or whatever routine you prefer). That's the key, to keep the technique in recent memory, which your dreaming self with any luck, will access.

My first ever lucid dream I was about 17, and the week before read about lucid dreaming for the first time. I don't think that's a coincidence. I read about lucid dreaming, then had one. This supports the theory of thinking about lucid dreaming in everyday life in order to trigger them.

> For example, jump with the intention of levitating, expecting to just hover in the air.

The following quotes neatly sum up how flying in a lucid dream feels to me:

> There is an art to flying, or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. [...] Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, that presents the difficulties. [...]

> Do not listen to what anybody says to you at this point because they are unlikely to say anything helpful.

> They are most likely to say something along the lines of "Good God, man, you can't possibly be flying!" It is vitally important not to believe them or they will suddenly be right.

I used to be quite good at this. In a similar vein as asking "am I dreaming?" I got into the habit of slapping my hand palm up on a table and saying "apple!" while willing an apple to appear. One day, it did. I realized I was dreaming and simply started bicycling my legs into the air, and I proceeded to fly around my city (Boston at the time.) The first time, it was exhilarating, but my excitement kept me from easily falling asleep, and I'd wake from dreams really easily. Then, few months later during a period of high stress, I did it again and managed to stay asleep while swimming above my neighborhood. I found when under high stress, I'll get these aware dreams where I can just imagine whatever and it manifests. However, its sorta boring after a bit, you can't surprise yourself, and my life is not so stressed anymore, so I have not had such a dream in a few years.

Conversely it is impossible in dreams to read the same thing twice. Take a book, newspaper and read a sentence. Look away. Try read again, the text/meaning will have changed.

Ha, I've found printed text in dreams (or at least in semi-lucid ones) to be the most amusing source of random words, almost as if whatever level of consciousness is awake is sampling them in transit from some less-conscous level.

Best tests. Easily done in the waking world (which is which?) Without looking like an idiot. 1. Lightswitches, they dont work right in dreams, shading is hard. 2. Clocks, or digital readouts. Time has no refrence and displays are oddly hard. 3. Hands. You do not know the back of your hand. Might be why so many people stare at their hands on psychedelics.

Written text is non-persistent too. If you're dreaming and look away and back at a sign, newspaper, whatever, the words all change.

I've used the light switch thing to trigger a number of lucid dreams too, I always assumed that your brain just doesn't bother wiring things like that up, rather than the complexity of shading being an issue.

Right, "complex scenes" are never completely static; spaces and textures changes if you move around. I find that particularly interesting because I can perceive and remember details (for instance the pattern of a mosaic), but whenever you check again, it change, so it seems like the buffer were this images are coming from is separated from the region of my brain in charge of remembering my current dream.

I had a peculiar experience of heuristically testing a dream not long ago: I had determined I was dreaming, because my field of vision felt too incomplete, that the balance of what I was seeing was titled too far toward interpolation versus observation. That is to say, if waking experience were interpolated from 100% throughput of the visual cortex, I was working on something like 8% (though still interpolating a complete scene from it).

Looking at a wall, I thought "ha, I can't see what color it is", only to realize it was actually a vivid shade of golden-yellow, feeling the color on my retinas. Impressed, I walked over toward a door with a crash bar on it, challenging once again "ok, I can never really feel anything in dreams, so I'll just have a vague sense of touching the crash bar", only to actually feel the heft of the door, and the cast steel on my fingertips.

But as I felt the crash bar, my visual sense of the scene collapsed again, as if all the processing power had just been redirected to haptic from visual. The room and the hallway were just vague ideas drawn once again from a trickle of sensory information. This was amusing enough to wake me up.

Now of course, I don't know if this was actually an insight into how the mind dreams – it's entirely possible that the mechanics themselves were something I dreamed.

> Just "feeling sure" isn't enough to certain of something.

This, I believe, is one of the most powerful and profound lessons hallucinogens can teach us.

If you can experience, first hand, that even the sensory input from your eyes and ears can not always be trusted, then it tends to make you very, very skeptical of things that are held as immutably true beliefs.

It would be hilarious if math, science, and logic turned out to be consensus hallucinations that were not only incomplete but could not make more than limited patches of sense.

It's possible to give a person posthypnotic suggestion that number four does not exist, for example. When they try to count their fingers, hilarity ensues: 1,2,3,5,6,7,8,9,10,11. WTF! 11 figers, this is wrong. I try to count fingers in both of my hands separately and sum them together. 1,2,3,5,6 and 1,2,3,5,6. 6+6=12 WTF, now I have 12 fingers.

If math and logic were hallucinations, they would lead into contradictions.

The existence of contrary hallucinations does not imply that all hallucinations are contrary.

You could just keep adding spatial dimensions until 12 fingers are predicted by the theory. Of course, everybody knows you have both 11 fingers and 12 fingers, depending on how the hand is observed.

There's an old saying, if a problem seems insoluble, perhaps you are asking the question the wrong way. It ties (ahem) in with the parable of the Gordian knot. We've got a few seemingly insoluble questions (such as the nature of consciousness, the unification of gravity and quantum theory, etc) that are just screaming at us.

Everyone knows that we inherit physcially from our ancestors going back millions of years, but why not psychic inheritance. for instance, children are afraid of the dark. dont forget for thousands of years prehistoric animals killed humans in the dark. i believe we inherit from our ancestors and this explains some of our current psychology.

wouldnt be surprised if dmt is halping the mind tap into some human psychological archetype, the insects repesenting something in the numan experience. of course, also, maybe we are a huge experiment by extraterrestrial aliens and they examine us, block our minds from this and dmt is an antidote! the point is, were trapped in our conciousness its all we know.

There is an idea known as "morphic resonance" which encapsulates this idea.

Another sideline issue that this idea addresses is: how did the cells of your ear know to grow into that shape. Obviously we know that stem cells are the base building blocks that can be 'reprogrammed' to become various parts of the body -- but how specifically do the cells know how to arrange themselves to make the specific 'ear-shape'?

The proposal morphic resonance states is that somehow those cells become in tune with some specific frequency and that frequency controls the growth rate. Almost as if nature has a wifi network that holds the 3D CAD files that cells use to organize themselves.

Obviously pure speculation, but fun to think about nonetheless.

In the same vein, after a couple experiences with hallucinogens, I've started having some amusingly pedestrian reactions to some of the effects. I still enjoy them all the same.

For example, when I look at a tree and notice that the clumps of leaves all have the same shape, I'll just immediately blurt out something like, "Well that doesn't seem correct," almost as a reflex. They keyword of course being "seem."

There's no reason those clumps of leaves can't all be the same shape, but my brain seems to want to reconcile what I'm seeing with what I know is pretty unlikely, but not impossible. I've had similar reactions to leaves on the ground arranging into gridlike patterns at first glance. I see no reason why the leaves can't naturally fall into a grid pattern, and I likely won't notice minor variances in how they're spaced out if they actually were in that pattern.

All in all, some of the most positive and personally insightful experiences I've had.

With the same skepticism you could also ask yourself to which extent the hallucinations were actually due to subconscious recall of all kinds of memes surrounding hallucinogens like "out-of-body experience", "consciousness", "parallel worlds", "breakthrough", "feeling like dying", as well as imagery from all kinds of drug films and literature etc.

It's a good point, but I had a similar experience in my teens, before I'd been exposed to any such influences.

Humans are however very bad at retrospectively telling which memes they were exposed to in the past and which not. That is basically the reason why highly specialized people in academia are often bad teachers if they didn't practice teaching a lot. The inferential distance between expert and novice (i.e. the difference in knowledge) simply becomes so large and complex, that the expert forgets what the actual gap is.

We basically have to distrust our memories all the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHd_TNHsyVA

I do agree, but at ~14 years of age, in a small village, during the days when only the privileged had even 28k dial-up access, I'd had rather limited opportunity to be exposed to such things!

It would be enough for a friend having bragged about how they hallucinated about certain things. Words can convey very complex imagery like that and these experiences are encoded everywhere (in scripture, folk wisdom, idioms, songs, jokes, tales); in a web of distributed representations of the noosphere that we share via language. It is pretty much impossible to escape it and it seems conceivable that it might strongly bias our experiences under influence of hallucinogens because the mind is basically always concerned with interpreting inputs by the most suitable explanation (which will likely stem from stories and memories). Of course, we are only talking about a certain extent to which these experiences are determined by shared concept spaces, because there is no indication this is the only sensible hypothesis. The similarity of these experiences by different people may as well be explained by our shared cognitive architecture (e.g. modules for recognition of agency or venomous bugs) as other comments in this thread have suggested.

Same thing for me.

Don't forget UFO's - Their Sightings Coincide with Popular Sci-Fi Films, TV https://www.google.co.nz/amp/www.universetoday.com/37713/rep...

That said there is something DMT that its excreted in your brain at death.

I too remember feeling like I was dying. My consciousness had dissolved and transformed to such an extent that "will I ever be a human living on Earth again? What's stopping me from just being here forever? What's stopping this five minutes as five million years?" Basically every assumption about reality is broken, "real life" takes on a new sense of impermanence. Being alive here at all starts to feel like a fluke, like a hundred-year stop in a trillion-year journey.

I might be full of shit though.

>The lesson learned was that I needed to start questioning my convictions more. Just "feeling sure" isn't enough to certain of something.

Well, that's the life lesson I learned in the maths lectures and exercise sessions I attended. Seems like drugs are not required to understand this ;)

I obviously don't know you, but based off that comment, I think you're missing the forest for the trees and I'd venture to guess that it's because you've never experienced something like DMT. There are definitely levels to certain lessons in life, like learning that "feeling sure" isn't enough to be certain of something. Sure, math class taught you that if something doesn't add up, it's not true. But I see that as an intro to that life lesson of "feeling sure" not being enough. A few levels up from that understanding, a lot of times, involves something like DMT giving you a metaphorical 50,000 ft view from where you can begin to understand that even those math problems might not be the end all, be all of truth.

We live in a world of gray areas, not black and white.

I really think that's walking a very fine line. You may benefit from finding a counselor for periodic visits in the near future.

You talk like someone who has never used hallucinogens.

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