Lucid dreaming can be one of life’s greatest and most astonishing joys, as well as having many practical applications. It can be used for fantasy fulfillment, for learning new skills, for healing, for creativity enhancement, for spiritual growth, as well as for having extraordinary adventures, and engaging in profound and unparalleled self-discovery.
There are dozens of effective techniques for increasing the probability of having a lucid dream, but one of the less discussed methods is often overlooked— utilizing nutritional supplements, herbs, and drugs to enhance the dreaming process.
In addition to the necessary psychological preparation, there appears to be a biological factor involved in lucid dreaming. It seems necessary to have just the right amount of mental arousal during sleep, which is not always easy to attain, and often one just has to wait for those magically balanced nights to capriciously arrive. However, besides the psychological techniques, there are also some valuable neurochemical tools that one can utilize to help with lucid dreaming.
In my experience, using the calea tincture before retiring to bed definitely enhanced the vividness and detailed memories of my dreams, and it shifted the emotional quality of the dreams in a hard to define way. However, it didn’t seem to increase my ability to have lucid dreams.
When I tried a silene tincture I had a massive flood of strange and powerful dreams. My nighttime adventures began with enhanced hypnogogic imagery, and then I had these long, bizarre and complicated dreams about interactions with animal-human hybrid beings, although I didn’t ever achieve lucidity. I found the silene to be somewhat similar to calea, as others have reported, but also thought that it was more potent.
I personally got profound effects from Velvet Bean. I found that when I took it in the evening my dreams were always much more vivid, colorful, action-packed, and plentiful. It also helped me to become lucid, and maintain states of easily entering lucidity for several hours.
I found that mugwort tea, along with a small pouch stuffed with the herb by my pillow, sometimes enhanced my dreams, although not as much as the Calea and Silene did. But it does so in its own hard-to-describe signature way, and sometimes for two nights. I also had one of the most powerful lucid dreams of my life after drinking mugwort tea.
Many people report profound life transformations and healings from these experiences, as well as spontaneous lucid dreams for several days afterwards. I personally found this to be the case, and in fact it was a series of these experiences, and the lucid dreams that resulted from them, that inspired me to write my book on lucid dreaming, Dreaming Wide Awake.
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David Jay Brown is the author of 16 books about the future evolution of consciousness, including Dreaming Wide Awake: Lucid Dreaming, Shamanic Healing and Psychedelics, and The New Science of Psychedelics: At the Nexus of Culture, Consciousness, and Spirituality. He is also the coauthor of six bestselling volumes of interviews with leading-edge thinkers: Mavericks of the Mind, Voices from the Edge, Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse, Mavericks of Medicine, Frontiers of Psychedelic Consciousness, and of Women of Visionary Art. To find out more about his work see: www.davidjaybrown.com
This article was released in issue from
December 2019
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