This is going to be an unusual "trip" report as it doesn't actually involve a "trip" at all, but rather a drug trip that I dreamt I had this morning, or perhaps more accurately to what I actually experienced, a legitimate drug-like "trip" that I had while dreaming. It stood out to me in this way so very much that I felt compelled to share it as if it were an actual drug experience, because at the very least, I do think it was a genuinely interesting altered state experience, and one I think I can learn from like any others I've had before.

I will start out by describing the dream, and add in my thoughts about the experience as it goes along. The dream itself did not take very much time to elapse, at least the part of it that I remember, but I do have a lot to say about it. I'll also say that I wasn't on any drugs at the time while asleep; I did smoke cannabis some time before bed the previous night, but I had this dream after waking up around 5 or 6 AM and then falling back asleep, so I know I was sober by the time it occurred. Waking up early in the morning and falling back asleep is something that often makes my dreams more vivid and sometimes lucid though, and I did also masturbate while I was awake briefly, which may have had an impact on my dream content as well. I'll also say that in the past week I have had some light drug use aside from my typical daily cannabis smoking, which includes a meaningfully intense blue lotus (Nymphaea caerulea) 100X extract capsule experience just under a week before this, as well as an experience taking 24 mg of oral THC edibles, one kanna (Sceletium tortuosum) 100X extract capsule, and later some Merlot a few days later (a very pleasant combo, I must say). I do feel that these experiences affected my state of mind in the days after, so it seemed worth mentioning them now as possible contributors to my overall headspace at the time of this dream.

Anyway, let's get started.

As is typical for a dream, I don't actually remember all of the details that occurred in the earlier part of my dream that led me to this point or how the dream began exactly, I only remember the point at which it suddenly got a lot more interesting, and from there until the end in this case.

My very earliest memory from the dream is already admittedly a bit conceptually odd for me, although it still seemed a lot more like a normal dream at the time than what was going to come right afterward. First of all, despite the fact that I use cannabis almost every day of my life and have for most of the last fifteen years during which I've also experimented with a pretty extensive array of other drugs and continued to use some of them relatively regularly for some time, I usually do not ever do any drugs in my dreams, not even just smoking cannabis. There was a short period at the very beginning of my drug use where for a couple years I did occasionally have a dream about taking a drug, although usually ending with me being afraid that I accidentally overdosed because the dream's haziness makes me freak out about my lack of clarity about what drugs I've taken and how much or something like that, and I'd just panic until I woke myself up. I have had a few dreams before where I took a psychedelic drug, usually one that I had taken in real life like LSD and had similar effects to what I experienced while awake although generally weak, but one time many years ago I did have a dream where I took mescaline - a drug I still have not taken to this day in waking life - and had some very clear black and blue visual patterning of an animated Sierpiński triangle unlike any actual drug visuals I've had in real life but still of a quasi-psychedelic nature, so that was pretty cool. However, even at these times actually smoking cannabis in my dreams was rare, and for the record, I also can't remember ever having any sort of drug "breakthrough" or out-of-body or whatever kind of experience in a dream before, just things like visuals and headspace changes. However, in this dream I had this morning, the very first thing I can remember is that I was smoking cannabis, ostensibly at least. I think I might even remember there being some detail like it supposedly being my first time or something, which also seems like a weird detail.

The second big already weird thing about this dream was, at the moment I can first recall when I was smoking cannabis, I remember having two friends with me who were watching me smoke, and I felt visually aware of who they were in my mind's eye, but I don't think my actual field of vision really contained them at this time. Furthermore, while I'm a little bit too hazy on this detail now to want to say with absolute confidence, I feel like I remember them being two people who are, strangely, extremely familiar to me during waking altered state experiences, especially on psychedelic drugs. If you are familiar with my trip reports or online posts, you may know that I have dealt with dissociative and psychotic issues over the years, and if you're not, just know that I have. There are familiar entities in my mind's eye who at some points in my life have acted more like alters, at some times more like crazy voices (at least from my perspective), but are usually at least comforting to me even at points when we argue a lot, and when I'm on drugs, my internal experiences with them become stronger and they often populate my hallucinations. Despite this, it is unusual for me to see them populating my typical dreams as if they are just other people that I'm physically hanging out with. The fact that in my memory it seems to me that they were the friends I was hanging out with while smoking cannabis in my dream, and also being aware of them but not really directly seeing them just like during my waking life, to me seems to make this already very strange dream situation even stranger. I really don't know what was going on in my brain at this time, but this was just the tip of the iceberg compared to what was coming next.

(You know what, I just realized I have to correct myself. I just remembered that once many years ago, I did have an out-of-body sort of experience from a dream drug that was described to me as being like a mixture of Salvia divinorum and diphenhydramine and yet somehow everyone liked it anyway, and they convinced me to try it but I hated it, and they convinced me to try it again and I hated it again, and I told them they were all crazy for liking such a horrible drug. Fun memories. Nothing about that really changes the value of this dream I'm describing now, though.)

So there I am with my friends smoking cannabis. In my notes I wrote that I was smoking out of a pipe and I also said that to a friend after waking up, although thinking back on it now, I think it might have actually been a joint. (The least important detail of all this but I still would like to remember it accurately.) As I was taking multiple hits off of the joint or whatever, I remember clearly feeling relaxed in a way that almost felt like I was falling asleep, and as I leaned back to relax, although to myself I felt I was keeping my eyes open and watching closely my surroundings, I suddenly felt that I registered my friends as trying to quickly take the cannabis away from me before I dropped it while it was still lit, allowing me to go into what I at the time assumed they were seeing as something like going into a K-hole or watching someone breakthrough on DMT. I don't recall having any specific reason to think that it made sense that I would be experiencing this after smoking cannabis, I think I was simply basing it off of what I suddenly felt was happening to me. As this occurred, something very peculiar started happening: first, I felt that my environment (which I didn't get too good at look at before this started) started spinning around me in circles, although with no feelings of discomfort or disorientation whatsoever but rather more of a dreamy bliss, and second, at the same time this spinning started happening, I started hearing a sound that I at the time interpreted as the sound of a loud or large clock ticking, although thinking back on it, it would have been ticking rather quickly. These things lasted only a brief moment, and then, though I remember no resolution to the feelings of motion and sound, I was suddenly in a new environment, motionless and calm, and the sound was gone, but something far more incredible had taken its place.

It's worth noting that this was not a lucid dream, because I never realized that I was dreaming at any point, but from this moment on, the dream was extremely vivid and heavily detailed like a very complex lucid dream, to the point of feeling mostly similar to reality and I'd say taking in more detail than I generally would even during waking life, which is pretty unusual for a non-lucid dream for me. I even started treating the dream like a lucid dream where I was hoping to stabilize the "trip" and keep it going rather than allowing it to fade away, by making sure to keep my eyes moving around the environment and stay engaged with things, but I assume this is just because I have experience with lucid dreaming and naturally attempted to treat this "breakthrough trip" in the same way out of instinct, as opposed to because I knew it was a dream (which I most definitely did not).

In the environment that I found myself in, what I immediately noticed is that I seemed to be in something like the check-in lobby for the hotel part of a fancy casino, the ones that actually look like you're in some kind of psychedelic palace even in real life, except that the detail to the structures around me were even more psychedelic than that actually is, and seemed to me to actually be very clearly like primarily sort of golden brown psychedelic wheel or clockwork geometric visual structures of very high intensity and detail that had crystallized into fully realized forms that I now inhabited in this dream or "trip" space, creating grandiose architecture everywhere in my field of vision. I would suggest that this place may have only looked like a casino to me due to this architecture, except that I know for a fact that that's indeed exactly what it was, because I believe just off to my left at the edge of my vision, I could see a TV - the television itself composed of the same highly detailed psychedelic clockwork architecture molded into recognized form - that was playing some video about a jackpot that I knew to be happening locally, and I could clearly see the "$10,000,000" printed on it in fancy lettering with lots of apparent excitement about it in the background.

At this moment, I seemed to be sitting at a table if I recall correctly, although I wasn't really paying attention to the table itself so it's hard to recall it or much detail about it clearly now, but it helps my memory that there was someone just across from me in my field of vision too, who I believe was sitting on the other side of the table from me. This person was a man who was by far one of the most interesting aspects of this experience to me; he looked like an African version of the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland crossed with a suave psychedelic steampunk figure. He had normal human proportions, seeming quite fit as I recall, and was fully decked out with a cool clockwork hat and trippy suit design that I remember less clearly now compared to the hat, and I think he might have been wearing round black-tinted glasses although that's not what I focused on. I do recall that he did literally speak to me in clear English, although as will be the case throughout this report, I can't actually remember the specific sentences he spoke anymore, but I do think I still remember clearly enough the message that he was conveying. The message was essentially something like, "Hey, you're here. Come in and have a look around."

At this point, I think it's worth pointing out that while I feel I can clearly recognize some similarities between what I was experiencing and the stereotypical DMT breakthrough trip - the kind where you enter a visual-based but realistic other world as clear as or clearer than waking life filled with trippy but sentient-seeming and strangely familiar entities who might hit you with a, "Hey, there you are, come on in!" - I have never actually had this kind of trip, on DMT or otherwise. In fact, despite using DMT many times, I have never had any sort of out-of-body experience where I completely entered a hallucinogenic other world in this way, and while I've flirted with things like that on other psychedelics, those experiences did not seem to match the stereotypical DMT breakthrough story the way that this dream drug trip was now doing. At the time during this dream trip itself, I was fully aware of this and flabbergasted because of it, feeling something along the lines of what I would describe as, "Holy shit, is this it?" Because of this, I was extremely engaged and excited about it in the way that I would been had this suddenly happened for the first time for me in waking life.

I got up and started moving around the lobby, and in my memory it kind of seems like I was floating at first I think, but I think that might just be because of my excitement and engagement with my surroundings; I do remember it feeling like I was just walking around by the end of the dream or "trip" experience. The fact that it was a casino with themes of jackpots was actually fitting to my real life currently, because this year I did actually decide to start trying gambling and did actually get very lucky with some of my winnings and one particularly big one, so it doesn't seem like it'd be that out of the question for me to have dream content like this now, although I think it's worth saying that this was the first time I've actually seen these things come up in a dream that I can recall now. The casino kind of felt familiar, but at the same time, I was absolutely amazed with the psychedelic nature of the architecture I could clearly see all around me in high definition and three dimensions clearly integrated like real life. There is a brief moment here where what happened in the dream is a little harder for me to recall now, but I think that's because this is when I was just moving around looking at stuff and trying to find some form of stimulation to latch on to to make sure it didn't all just fade away, as opposed to actively engaging with something and building memorable experiences. I do recall kind of looking around at different objects or walls with trippy textures or designs on them that are difficult to recall now, as well as seeing that there were several other people in the lobby as well, not like a huge crowd, but at least in the higher single digit numbers. It's hard to remember the detail now, but I think similar to the "Mad Hatter" equivalent I had seen upon my first arrival, all of these people had an African look as well, as did the only other couple of people I'll mention in this dream. This seems worth pointing out because I personally am Caucasian, have always lived in majority Caucasian areas, and tend to have dreams that are populated by majority Caucasian dream characters, so this stands out as another detail that's noticeably different from my typical dream experiences to me.

The next thing that I can very clearly recall is easily the strangest sentient-seeming and realistically-detailed entity I have ever seen during any dream, drug experience, or other altered state experience I can recall ever having had in my life. I came upon this entity standing in one of the areas of the lobby between some pillars, and was immediately awestruck. It was very clearly a chimera of a human man and one or more bird species, although probably a more accurate way to put it was just that it was some bird-like imaginary creature with a human head. (And again, I'm including this entity when I say I think the human part was African, and I forgot to mention this before, but every person or this entity in the dream seemed to be male too.) The bird-like body had the size of something like a large ostrich or perhaps larger, but the actual shape of the body looked more like a peacock without feathers, or at least that's how I remember feeling about it right when I woke up and it was still clearer in my memory. The texture of it was strange, and combined with the color I actually woke up and described it as looking kind of like cooked chicken, but I only mean that humorously, because it's not like I thought it looked dead or anything at the time. In fact, I thought it looked exceedingly beautiful, although not so much because of how it looked at any given part, but I think more like the spectacle of actually seeing it all put together right in front of me as a vividly real-seeming being. When I noticed it, it looked right at me and again spoke to me in clear English, but I don't actually remember specifically what it said anymore, just that it was something along the lines of acknowledging that I was taking in its beauty, and expressing, "Yes, look at this!" After smugly saying this, it stood up high with its human head raised up even higher on its long neck, and it unfolded its wings and held them high up, looking very much like some kind of spiritual half human, half bird figure that would have been painted on cave walls, for instance, and it really maximized my astonishment with it just watching it do this just for me.

(I didn't actually realize until rereading that last paragraph I typed that despite using this entity as a point to introduce the fact that every other person I encountered during this experience was male including this entity, I still referred to it, or him, as "it" throughout that description. I don't really have other entity experiences like this to draw experience and perspective from, and it didn't even occur to me to think about that at the time. I suppose my brain does not recognize it as "human enough" to have conferred it the male gender in my speaking about it even though it did clearly have a human head and voice and I specifically recognized it as being male. That just seemed like an interesting thing to point out to me. I've left it as is for posterity.

And I just noticed that I still did it throughout that paragraph without realizing it too despite specifically making a point about it.... So strange the human mind is. My apologies to any entities of the human mind who feel offensively dehumanized.)

After interacting with this entity, I walked further in the same direction I had been going beyond HIM to another section of the lobby where on the left of me there seemed to be a person standing behind the check-in counter awaiting new arrivals, and on the right of me there were more clockwork architecture TVs playing strange shows on them. This time, rather than being about the casino activities, it appeared as though there were strange entities, entirely non-human ones who I could not clearly attribute human-like characteristics to, engaging in something that I remember thinking at the time seemed like it was maybe some kind of weird game show or something, but I recall feeling like I wasn't really able to grasp what was going on at all. I was interested in it not only due to the confusion but also due to the high level of intricacy in the psychedelic-like details in the patterns that seemed to make up the textures of their bodies, so I got close up to one of the TVs and just started watching it closely for a moment. Unfortunately, I think this might have been the wrong move on my part, because as I had feared earlier on and as is fairly typical for me in dreams, once I stopped doing anything actively in the dream, the dream rapidly faded away, and I woke up.

Once awake, I suddenly realized that I had been dreaming rather than tripping on a drug , and I felt a mixture of confusion and amazement and a desire to write as many notes as possible and try to make sense of what happened and share the story as I usually would for a waking drug trip, so here we are.

As usual, I have a desire to not make too many concrete claims or observations too confidently, but since this was literally just a dream I had and not a trip on a specific drug I took, I feel that I can at least take some liberties in trying to point out or understand some things about it.

First of all, the fact that this dream "trip" seemed to match the stereotypical DMT breakthrough style that I've heard of so well and in so many ways is remarkable to me. I am very well-read on different altered state reports from other people so it's not infeasible that my brain could have constructed a mock DMT breakthrough experience for me, although I have to say, I am suspicious that this is not what happened. The very strange start to the dream where I actually smoked the cannabis (some amazing bud, that), the high level of similarities to those breakthrough trip reports, the general differentness from my typical dreams in so many ways, the extreme lucid dream-like clarity and beyond reality-like detail, all of these things lead me to suspect that it's not unlikely that what happened is that for some reason, my brain actually did enter a state genuinely similar to that stereotypical kind of DMT breakthrough that I've heard about, as opposed to just recreating it in a normal dream.

I personally do not find this theory hard to swallow, for multiple reasons, one of which is that I've heard people describe having DMT breakthroughs happen in their dreams that closely resembled waking DMT breakthroughs after having waking life experience with them, to a degree that also apparently seemed like more than just a typical dream kind of recreating it, which suggests to me that producing this kind of altered state is within the realm of possibility and the repertoire of dream-creation functions that the human brain has access to, and while I haven't actually experienced that kind of trip yet from DMT or any psychedelic, I have taken a lot of different psychedelics and even more recently been exploring with getting effects that I would describe as having a genuine psychedelic nature from higher dosages of cannabis, so that is the kind of thing that's been on my mind lately and I think could feasibly make it into my dream content even if I'm usually not doing drugs in dreams, and it seems like possibly the right kind of activity required to trigger the same sort of brain circuits. For what it's worth, I'm not convinced that DMT itself is specifically required to produce the kind of breakthrough state that DMT is known to trigger like this, since something so complex and intricate still seems to me like it could have a more concrete basis in the brain itself beyond just nonsense being propagated throughout our neural circuits by an exogenous substance.

Second, I feel it's worth pointing out that I also very recently had my first ever trip that I would refer to as a breakthrough on Salvia divinorum, and I was compelled to compare and contrast these two experiences not long after waking up from this dream. I have been quite fascinated with the state I experienced on salvia as of late too, so I figured it might be worth sharing. On the salvia, from smoking a few bowls or so of plain leaf in a very strong bong, I was able to completely enter a hallucinatory, dream-like out-of-body environment with a coherent plot and narrative, and I would say that the narrative there was actually a lot more solid than it was in this dream trip, as that salvia breakthrough had a clear narrative beginning, middle, and end with a whirlwind of a emotions and a clear climax, whereas this dream trip was much more aimless, as I simply wandered around interacting with the environment and entities and taking in the incredible sights.

Despite being more story-like though, the resolution and detail level in the salvia breakthrough were far lower than in this dream trip, to the point that even though it felt like I was fully inhabiting a 3D space that felt lifelike in my engagement with it, it also very distinctly made me feel like I was in an anime or something, and I think it's worth noting that I have heard salvia breakthroughs called "cartoony" before with respect to that; by clear contrast, this dream trip was at least as well-rendered as real life and probably fair to say more highly detailed, although not to a completely disabling extent, just enough to induce some clear awe in everything. The salvia breakthrough was also disorienting and had a negative resolution, causing me to come out of it happy that I managed to breakthrough but still left in a sort of awkward "Well, that was weird." mood afterward, while this dream trip was full of clear experiences of positive emotion, with the entities being generally welcoming and show-offy, whereas the salvia breakthrough entities were actually the ones asking things of me, and then laughing at me afterward when I failed to deliver. I find this to be an interesting comparison to make because I had already been comparing this salvia breakthrough to my dreams lately, particularly my lucid dreams, and this does seem to me like it can add a lot of perspective to the thoughts I was already having.

And third, on the subject of my lucid dreams, I wanted to return to the interesting fact that everyone in my dream trip experience seemed to be a black man, even the one that was literally a human-bird hybrid. The reason this seems particularly worth calling attention to to me is because just recently, in relation to my thinking about my salvia breakthrough as well, I had been considering the fact that in my typical lucid dreams, it seems like usually at least most if not all of the other people present are women, and while I know for a fact that they're not always all white, I think they usually mostly are at least, which again I don't think is too unusual for me in general since that's my own race and reflects the environment I live in, mostly. However, a notably quirky aspect of specifically my lucid dreams is that I usually engage in homosexual behavior with the other women in the dream space, despite the fact that while I'm awake, I seem to pretty consistently only ever really have heterosexual desires and fantasies, except for in certain things that seem like clear exceptions to me, like some drugs cause me to fantasize in ways I typically don't while sober.

I've actually known this to be the case about my lucid dreams for a long time, but I've recently become interested in thinking about it again because I was considering the fact that while I just generally enjoy my strange dream-only homosexuality when it occurs and am someone who accepts people for things like their sexual orientation in the waking world, I worry about things like implicit biases based on the way my brain categorizes different types of people as just seems to be normal for human brains to do, that might cause behaviors I wouldn't consciously agree with if my attention was called to them to slip by subconsciously if I don't always strive to help myself be aware of my brain's implicit biases. To this end, I felt that it might be helpful to use my lucid dreams as a probe to help myself understand how my brain understands things like sexual orientation and categorization of people who have qualities different to myself during my typical waking states, particularly because the fact that my lucid dreams really are usually basically all women does seem like a unique and easy chance to try to make some scientific observations about my own mind based around that. The reason I had started thinking about that in contrast to my salvia breakthrough experience, for instance, is because every single entity in my salvia breakthrough experience was a child, and so it got me thinking about how different altered state experiences I find myself in seem so oddly selective for just certain superficial groups of certain types of people, and again what it means about how my brain and mind work with respect to understanding how to interact with people who are different from myself.

In the same vein, the fact that I just had this dream trip which seemed to be my first ever experience with a certain recognizable type of altered state and it just so happened to be the case that every single inhabitant of the experience was a male of a different race than myself, and also of my lucid dreams and the salvia breakthrough overall, seems like yet another highly intriguing sign that something about the function of my mind can be gleaned by trying to understand these experiences of my own, which may further help me in my quest to understand how my brain understands people who are different than myself and how to avoid things like implicit biases through explicit awareness, so I felt that was worth mentioning as well. While this dream trip was not exactly the same as my typical lucid dreams, it was similarly vivid and clear and took place in a dream, and I even instinctively treated it as a lucid dream despite not realizing at the time that I actually was dreaming, so I find the contrast between this and my usual lucid dream population particularly intriguing, because it does seem to be that the fact that the dream was specifically about me having a breakthrough trip on a drug is one of the actually differentiating factors between the experience. I confess that I don't actually understand my own mind well enough yet to understand what to do with this information, but I hope that having it in my databanks will help me to make more informed decisions about how to behave based on the impressions that my mind seems to form instantaneously so that I can never stop treating people as equally as possible. While I again know that I am an accepting and loving person explicitly, I also have personal experience with things such as culture shock while in a sane state of mind as well as conspiratorial delusions while not, and I'm fully aware of the fact that my brain has faults as does anyone's, so it is of the utmost importance to me to gain as much perspective as I can about my own psychological workings such as this so that I always understand how best to work with myself.

Not trying to soapbox or anything, I've just taken up an interest in this topic recently again due to my salvia breakthrough.

I have to say, after having this dream I woke up very excited. For a dream, it sure had an impact on me similar to having a wild drug trip of this nature. Dreams continue to impress me as one of the most truly powerful and trippy things we humans seemingly actually can experience, although I think it's worth noting that this dream far exceeded the trippiness of my normal dreams even considering all the crazy shit I've normally got going through my head, and if I felt I could easily recreate the circumstances that led to it happening I would certainly try, but I'm not convinced that it's quite that simple. (Not that I won't be looking for the signs that it might be nonetheless.) However, I'm glad to be able to record it in the level of detail that I have for now. I hope it helps keep it in my mind, and I hope that anyone else who read it had an entertaining or interesting experience in doing so.

Sweet dreams, friends.

Exp Year: 2023	ExpID: 117724
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: 32
Published: Oct 24, 2024	Views: 14
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Dreams (85) : Entities / Beings (37), General (1), Alone (16)