September 26, 2007

• Drug Dreams

  Yesterday’s entry was a little nothing, some quotations gleaned from a day of online tripping through websites related to consciousness.  A quote from the Buddha, “All reality is a myth. Myth becomes ever nearer to reality,” brought this tangential comment from [Edit:]someone who prefers anonymity[/edit]:

  All reality is a myth.
  I
  keep dreaming about eating acid… but I wake up before it kicks in. I
  quit the stuff in real life… but it sure would be fun to trip in my
  dream

  Is that cheating?

  …and then soonaquitter veered off on a tangent of her own:

  Love the quote from the Buddha.  Tripping on acid-whoa, that was years ago!

  My own thoughts bounced off each of those comments, caroming off in several different directions. 

  I wondered just how so twentieth century acid is. 

  On Erowid I found a bar graph showing SAMHSA statistics on 12th graders, from 1975 through 2004, who reported ever having tried LSD.  From a high of about twelve percent in ’75, it dips to below 10% in ’86, rises through the ‘nineties to a peak around 15% in ’97, dipping to its lowest point in three decades, around five percent, in 2004.  Self-reporting statistics can be skewed either way, of course.  Would there be more kids who wanted to deny and conceal their own use than there are those who want to boast of an experience they’ve never had?

  This, of course doesn’t address its use among American adults.  I seldom go outside my neighborhood and don’t socialize a lot, so my knowledge is limited.  I do know that LSD use around here spikes every August during the Talkeetna Bluegrass Festival, where it is seldom found in its old forms of pills, blotter, or gelatin “windowpanes”.  That spike in use, I am sure, is due more to an increase of supply than to any increase in demand.  Day to day, crack and meth are more readily available here than acid is.  The most popular form of psychedelic drug here lately is LSD or some other
  designer hallucinogen, dropped onto dried mushrooms of the edible sort
  from a supermarket.  Most buyers and users believe they are getting organic psilocybin.

  Google News took me to a September 8, 2007 story from Virginia, about a bust for a commercial quantity of LSD that was shipped in by FedEx from the West Coast in 3 vials, wrapped in the San Francisco Examiner.  One cop said, “[The bust] is the first I can remember in a long time.”  Another said, “It’s not out of the ordinary,” and both said that cocaine and marijuana are more common in that area.  I suppose that would be true in the rest of the U.S., too.

  The anonymous one’s characterization of acid tripping as “fun,” reminded me of a recent conversation with Greyfox.  Long ago, my old fart started calling the two of us the, “Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat of drugs.”  That is mostly because my drug of choice was always anything-but-downers, while he never met a depressant he didn’t like. 

  In that recent conversation, he learned something I’ve known for as long as I’ve known him, that our individual responses to psychedelics, and our reasons for taking them, were widely divergent.  He took acid for entertainment, for the colors and hallucinatory distortions of visual perception.  That’s what we used to call a “pleasure tripper.”  I was a business tripper.  Visual effects seldom lasted for me past the initial rush, and the interesting part of the trip was the heightened insight, the higher consciousness.  After I realized I no longer needed acid to achieve that, I stopped using it.

  The anonymous one’s question (probably rhetorical, but when did I ever let that stop me?), whether it is “cheating” to dream about using a drug that one has decided not to use, brought to mind something that is discussed frequently in Narcotics Anonymous meetings.  Newcomers report that in the early days of their abstinence they are troubled by dreams of using.  Then some old-timer will assure them that we all have such dreams, that eventually they will become less frequent and less troubling, but that even after decades of recovery they occasionally return.

  Most such dreams have a pattern of frustration similar to what “anonymous” mentioned:  chasing the drug, finding it, buying it, taking it, and waking before one gets off on it.  I had a series of meth dreams in that pattern while I was locked up around the time the 60s turned into the 70s.  I have heard many stories of similar dreams about all sorts of drugs.  Some recovering addicts report that such dreams make their abstinence more difficult, while others look upon them as cautionary and enlightening insights into their unconscious minds.

  In later recovery, another dream pattern surfaces for some of us.  In these dreams we follow our old habits, use our drug of choice, get loaded, and after the dream takes us through whatever it is going to, we wake with, first a sense of dread and failure at having used and revived the addiction, and then a great relief that it was only a dream.

  In no sense can I see drug dreams as “cheating.”  Whether the dreams benefit us or cost us depends on how we respond consciously to the input from our unconscious minds.  Acid is so different from all the addictive substances that I can see no reason (other than the risks of arrest and incarceration) for anyone to abstain from moderate recreational use, as long as one observes Timothy Leary’s cautions regarding “set and setting.” 

  Many people have been indoctrinated to fear the psychedelic experience.  If it is undertaken from a negative mindset and/or in a hostile or threatening setting, the result can be a bummer.  If it is experienced in conducive circumstances, it brings awakening, an expansion of consciousness and spiritual realization of Oneness that most inexperienced people fail to understand is possible, and few ever attain without that neurochemical boost.  In my opinion, those who are most in need of the experience are the ones who fear it the most, and that sets up some profound conflicts.

  The Merry Pranksters were hippies and wanted to world to get hip.  They believed that the cultural and global benefits from expanded awareness outweighed the risks of a few bum trips for a few random individuals, and they gave acid away without always revealing that the fruit or Kool-Aid they distributed was drugged.  Timothy Leary was a scientist and man of medicine.  He was just as convinced as the Pranksters were that the planet could benefit from higher consciousness, but he sought gentler means for achieving it.

  By the way, an article last year in the journal, Neurology (2006;66(12):1920-2), “Response of cluster headache to psilocybin and LSD,” reported that, “both psilocybin-containing mushrooms and LSD may reduce severity and frequency of cluster headaches.”

  Aleister Crowley said: “There are three ways to increase your intelligence:
  
  1. Continually expand the scope, source, and intensity of the information you receive.
  
  2. Constantly revise your reality maps, and seek new metaphors about the future to understand what’s happening now.
  
  3. Develop external networks for increasing intelligence.”

  

  • 3:11 pm
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