Wow! You gave me a lot to read and respond to.
Thank you for taking the time to respond to my very long post.
I am very interested in learning more about salvia and understanding how it works, and getting perspectives outside my own is very helpful for that especially.
Yes, when I used salvia, I found cannabis to be much more challenging, and I tended to prefer smoking some dry leaf (i.e. low dose) to "mellow out" versus cannabis. I am an extreme cannabis lightweight until I develop sufficient tolerance. To use cannabis casually the way most people do, I pretty much have to use it daily. I also had to learn how to enjoy the intoxication. Once I learned to enjoy it and started smoking it daily, I lost interest in salvia. It's clear I have nowhere near the experience with it as you do.
That might be the case, but this is mostly so accurate to me too that I could’ve written it myself! Pretty much just minus the part about moving on from salvia, and it’s worth noting that I don’t feel I’ve even had the luxury of seeing if I’ll reach that point yet, which might make the critical difference here.
What it comes down to is that this year I moved to a new state, and in my old state salvia was made illegal a decade ago, after I’d only gotten to use it for a handful of years, and now where I am it’s legal, so I’ve been going a little crazy experimenting with it. I really like it, and really missed it all those long years. It doesn’t help that I also parted way with my old drug stash before leaving my old state because I didn’t want to take the risk of traveling across multiple state lines with it, so currently, basically all I have is salvia, legal cannabis (also new to me here), and then the things like kratom and kanna I’ve been talking about again, and I’m trying to make the most of it.
As to what you said, I actually back in the day got into cannabis quite easily at first, but it wasn’t ultimately that long before I started having panic attacks with it that completely and utterly killed my ability to enjoy it at any level, eventually forcing me to take a half year break and reintroduce it slowly so that I could learn to truly understand and appreciate and enjoy the high. During the period that I was dealing with cannabis anxiety, and having a lot of difficulty with most drugs at the time actually, salvia was always one of my lifelines because, weirdly as potent and unsettling as it can be, it just didn’t make me feel bad the way that anxiety did, and I really loved that about it. I wasn’t able to use it much back then because of the law changes which happened around the same time period or slightly after at least I think, and I didn’t know too much about it back then and was mostly just buying extract at the stores, but this time around a bought a bunch of plain leaf and have very much been enjoying smoking it for use in what could be considered a cannabis-like way where I just smoke low dosages to relax, and to me it’s been a revelation because I had no idea how much I would enjoy it but I really do like having it as a novel kind of getaway in my life so far. That being said, I still feel that I could easily see that one day I’ll be like, “Alright, that was cool…. Don’t know if I’ll really still need it but it’s been interesting.” It’s just kind of not… perfect, for relaxation, I think. Like I think once the fun of the novelty and stuff runs out, I could see cannabis seeming like the much easier choice to mostly just stick with again. But I’m trying to get the most out of my experimentation along the way.
Extracts may be a different story. I have a lot more interest in tripping hard on salvia, but I don’t actually have enough experience getting to the level I want to get to to say with much confidence whether it’ll keep up in the long-term or not. I’m optimistic about it, though.
I don't think I read those earlier posts, no.
A caveat should probably be added that I was often literally on salvia while trying to figure out how it works, heh. Sometimes I would think something and then stop and go, “Wait, does that make sense? Where did that idea come from?”
Here, you propose an interesting model of dreaming and drug intoxication. I can't say I agree with your take, for a few reasons, but it does inspire plenty of contemplation.
First off, let me suggest that your idea of "game playing" could also be called "goal-seeking". Winning a video game is attaining a goal. So is finding food. Or a suitable mate. I make this distinction because many games aren't meant to be won or lost, are they?
I suppose you’re right about that. For what it’s worth I have a tendency to use casual language a lot when speaking about these things, I think that may be relevant to multiple parts of what you had to say. I think the “gaming” model does help me think through some things in novel ways too, but I also don’t want to restrict myself to that view, and I hadn’t considered more open-ended games when saying that, so I’ll take that into consideration particularly when trying to create that model for others to consider as well, as I want to be as clear as possible, and I thank you for that.
That being said, for the record, I am aware of the “goal-seeking” label and specifically derived my gaming metaphor from understanding that that’s what it was. To me, gaming seems like an easier way to describe it to people who might not necessarily think in those terms, or seemed so anyway. But like I said above, I do also try to prioritize true accuracy.
Second, I believe goal-seeking is but one possible cognitive model, one might describe very well certain human (and animal behaviors) but which is nowhere near complete.
Are you suggesting that it’s not accurate (theoretically I mean of course) even as a partial explanation for human behavior, though? I didn’t mean to suggest that that was the entirety of what’s going on with us, although I can certainly understand how it seems that I’ve honed into it, and perhaps given myself blind spots with respect to contemplating the entire range of potential dream and salvia trip scenarios that can develop too.
I might be misinterpreting what you said here, but I personally find it hard to believe that goal-seeking is not at least a part of our behavior, if you’re suggesting it may be some other model entirely that should take its place instead. As much as I try not to speak certainties about human behaviors and keep my mind open to other explanations about things, I feel that the fact that humans and animals do run on goal-seeking behavior is fairly obvious at a superficial level, or seems so anyway.
Third, I am not a pharmacologist, but I have studied a fair bit casually and have also studied other scientific subjects a lot more rigorously. It is a huge understatement to say that "our understandings of the dopamine system and human consciousness in general are obviously incomplete". First, there's no dopamine system. Dopamine is a neutrotransmitter and hormone that plays a part in many of the body's subsystems.
I fear that I may have again been speaking too casually for what you were expecting. Frankly, I don’t expect most people to have a detailed understanding and interpretation of these aspects of the brain, I usually assume people know about dopamine from blogs talking about why we like the things we like and stuff like that, or at the very least, I kind of took to talking that way in case. That being said, I’m well aware of the extent of what we’re aware of dopamine being and doing, and I don’t think “the dopamine system” was a bad way to describe what I was getting at in a casual manner. I’m just talking specifically about the role dopamine is hypothesized to play in the widely scientifically popularized model of reward and aversion, which I feel is what most people most likely know it from, and of course what relates to the theories I was putting forward here.
Second what is known about the role of dopamine and other neurotransmitter is much more useful for the purpose of drug development than it is for understanding what's going on. That's to say, that probes we have available are very crude, and so they lead to an extremely shallow understanding of things, but that understanding at least helps us design drugs more efficiently than we could with non-educated guessing. Does that make sense?
I understand what you are saying, but I respectfully disagree about the use of using our understanding of this neurochemistry to understand what’s going on too, or at least try to.
In my case, I’ve pretty much always actively tried to do both. I based the drugs I sought out the most readily based on my understanding of drug structure-activity relationships and how they affect these neurotransmitters and such in scientific studies specifically so that when I took those drugs I could try to relate what I understood about that science to what differences they were subjectively producing in me specifically and try to build an understanding of how those things correlated to what’s actually going on with us in general. I’m not saying I did a perfect job, but I wasn’t anticipating that either. My goal when I first got into using drugs was essentially to hack my brain like a computer and change my reality like a video game, a loftier way of putting it than I would now as I was just young and optimistic, but still, I think there’s validity to viewing it in that kind of way.
For what it’s worth, it’s my opinion that people chronically overestimate the complexity of these systems. I’m not saying that I’m the one viewing it the right way, but I feel like I’ve encountered a lot of people who will avoid trying to make theories because they assume it must be more complex than they would equate the theories they would want to make to, or something like that anyway (I’m not a mind reader but I get impressions along those lines). Whereas my personality is more like, I’ll happily be wrong tons of times as long as I feel like I continue to learn from it and hopefully increase toward something increasingly right, and I feel like being that way gives me perspective that people who are more reserved simply won’t have because they’re not coming up with ideas as readily as I am. And I’m not trying to say one way is definitely better than the other, but there definitely have been times when I thought things like, “Huh, that’s not so complex.”
I hope I expressed that correctly…. I don’t think this is something that’s unique to this situation; I think in all cases, people who try stuff more even at greater risk of failing end up picking up things that people who try less don’t simply because of their lived experience of that trying, but simultaneously people who try less (are more hesitant I mean, not less willing) are probably more likely to say something that actually does make sense when they do speak based on the things that they actually have experienced themselves at least. I just tend to try shit, at least in cases like this.
To go a bit deeper. Imagine I show you a picture of the fluctuating voltage along a computer network cable. After careful study, you might notice a pattern, that the voltage spends most of its time at either a "high" level or a "low" level and that the timing of changes between "high" and "low" and visaversa occur at a time that is evenly divisible by a particular time interval. But suppose you are naive and have no idea what this network cable is for, except that it somehow makes the Internet work. You understand nothing about the coding scheme for the data that's transmitted along the cable. In fact, you might not realize at all that there is a high level coding. You might assume the "highs" and "lows" represent a single continuously fluctuating level. This would seem very reasonably given the tools you have to "probe" it: You can disconnect the cable or connect it to a static "low" source for some long duration; You can connect the cable to a static "high" source for some long duration; Or you can randomly but quickly switch the cable between the "high", "low", and "through" state, where in the "through" state the cable just functions as if you weren't probing it, and you can control the probability of it going "high", going "low" or staying "through". So you do experiments with these probing techniques and observe the outcomes.
I think the thought experiment I give above is illustrative of our level of ignorance of neurotransmission. The probes we have and the drugs we seek to design based upon our insight are extremely crude in their action but not necessarily consistent. Like suppose the cable states vary randomly but when it goes "high" it tends to get stuck there for a while. Then you might ask what if instead of merely "high" and "low", the cable can also be connected to some voltage in between. You might check the engineering specs to see how the system should be expected to behave with that intermediate voltage, but imagine you're dealing with many different kinds of cables that each have different engineering specs and may respond in very different ways depending on the particular voltage applied.
This is exactly what I like trying to figure out. Not as something that I’ll feel unfulfilled for if I don’t get it down to a science in the end, it’s more like a hobby, but a hobby I chose specifically because it seems to help me make my life better in the end.
For what it’s worth, I feel like I actually understand of lot of different things about the brain relatively well, all things considered. I also have casually researched this area of drug science and neurochemistry in general quite a lot, arguably a bit less “casually” and more “obsessively” (but still not like professionally) for multiple several-year blocks of doing little else with my time. And if it means anything at all, I feel like I got a whole lot out of it in the end, like enough that I feel like I’m far happier now than I would have been otherwise based on the decisions I made in my life based on the understandings I felt I had about the workings of my own brain at the time. But, I’m also open to possibility that I also just got very lucky. Arguably, just using drugs at all is what really got me started down that road, but I did make a lot of very deliberate decisions about which drugs to experiment with next along the way.
I just don’t think our understanding is quite as crude as what you’re getting at. Although, I still feel like I could relate it to my above idea, where if you’re more reserved about judging something as well-enough understood to be worthy of experimentation and such than I am, it might seem more crude to you than it does to me, whereas my rambunctiousness might just give me some added perspective compared to a more reserved person, even if it also increases my chance for producing errors. That’s my feeling about it so far, anyway.
I can keep building on these analogies which I think relate quite well to what drug/receptor interactions probably look like in reality and why so many different 5HT2A partial agonists might feel so dramatically different from one another, even ignoring possible interactions at other receptors (which may be counter-intuitively more important than is assumed).
Just to state this plainly, I have used I believe around fifty different 5-HT2A receptor agonists and was absolutely obsessed with understanding their functional selectivity and other structure-activity relationships at the time, so I do get it. I do, for what it’s worth, consider myself to have a lot of experience in this area compared to the average person.
To my second point above, I do not find my own dreams to be dominated by goal-seeking behavior. Rather they tend to be movies in which I'm the star: the hero or the gag. I can't count how many dreams I've had in which I've realized at far too late a moment that I'm naked in public---probably about as many dreams in which I've tended to get around in a way that defies gravity. I just love how, if I jump just right and concentrate, I can move through the air as if I were on the moon. I've had fewer flying dreams, including one the night after my first strong cactus trip (supplemented with some N2O late).
Flying dreams are great. I got to the point where I just suddenly zoom off into the sky like a jet plane going instantly from zero to whatever. It’s a lot of fun, but also has a high risk of waking me up from the stimulation of it lol.
I was starting to think after my post about how in non-lucid dreams, it’s not uncommon to be in a situation that seems like a loss. Frankly, I literally only just had this thought this very second as I type this, but I might have a blind spot there because of how I already recognize cannabis to affect me and purposefully use it for; I have a problem where when I’m sober for extended periods of time I have frequent chronic nightmares that can reach the point of being relatively horrific, but when I smoke cannabis chronically, I suddenly stop having them and my dreams basically become all either very pleasant at best or neutral at worst. As you might imagine, I smoke it all the time.
I think it’s worth saying that the salvia breakthrough I described and the specific lucid dream I described specifically stood out to me as so oppositely parallel I think in part because they happened so close together in time and just felt so fundamentally similar anyway. But, it’s not like I haven’t had lucid dreams of a completely different nature and plot too; I need to consider this more for the sake of expanding my theoretical model for sure. I also need to have more than one salvia trip of that nature of course, as only the one to work with so far is no doubt giving me completely unavoidable blind spots that can only be fixed with more trials.
At the same time, I’ll point out that I feel like saying that you’re the “star” of your dreams is not actually seemingly as far away from the idea of dreams being “game-like” to me as it is from the idea of dreams being “goal-oriented” instead. Since the main character of a video game with characters is the star, I mean, regardless of how the game goes. Just a thought that just occurred to me.
I can see how lucid dreams could become much more goal-seeking in nature for the experiencer. After all, lucid dreamers often achieve lucid dreams with active concentration; therefore, the achievement of the lucid dreaming state is itself an accomplished goal. I am troubled by the definition of lucid dreaming myself. I have had perhaps one dream in which I felt like my awake consciousness was fully present and. It was frustratingly brief, not even long enough to "do anything cool". It happened one night after having smoked a bunch of dream herb. (What was that stuff called?) Unfortunately, I could never reproduce it, with or without the herb. The herb also was quite nasty to smoke and seemed to leave me feeling under-rested in the mornings.
With that said, being that my dreams are like movies I often feel like there is an "observer" present, i.e., I'm watching the movie of myself, even as I am not seeing it on a screen but actually experiencing it like virtual reality. At times, I find that that observer will sometimes intervene with "power moves" that can radically change the character of the dream, usually helping my hero to overcome some kind of otherwise impossible obstable, but despite my hero's apparent access to divine intervention, I don't feel my observer is a conscious version of myself making decisions on my behalf.
On the flip-side, I also have horror dreams which are not nightmares, just as watching a horror movie doesn't cause me to fear for my life. Here again, reality bending things happen. For example, at the moment of death, I might instead simply teleport to another horror-themed reality or perhaps something just plain scifi, bizarre, or psychedelic. My observer is there to reassure me that death is merely a painless transition to another place and transformation into another form. That's to say, I'm immortal in my dreams and I know it.
I don't know if what I describe above qualifies as lucid dreaming. Probably not, but it has many similar qualities to lucid dreaming and I think they offer similar possiblities but with the extra flare of surprise and spontaneity. I don't think I've heard other people describe the observer aspect, so I don't know if this is unique to my experience.
I have encountered many people along this spectrum before, which is an interesting difference from my own experience. For me, lucidity and magical powers that come with it are like turning a light switch on or off: I’m either completely aware that it’s a dream or completely unaware that it isn’t entirely real, and if I’m lucid magical things will happen but I’m not they generally won’t, other than things like weird scene transitions and stuff which don’t feel in any way connected to my own volition. However, I have encountered people who say they always behave in their dreams as if they were lucid even when they’re not, and also people who say they’re literally always vividly lucid, and stuff like that. Like you said, we all definitely do dream differently.
Personally, when I become lucid it’s basically like whatever was happening in the dream stops and I’m like, “Oh, I’m dreaming. Time to do whatever the fuck I want.” It’s kind of like coming out of a more dissociating or delirious trip to the point that I mostly forget what was going on in the earlier dream and don’t react as if it happened at all, and instead just explore what of the dream world remains around me with new goals. That to me draws a truly stark contrast between what I personally consider a truly lucid dream and a dream where I may act like I know what’s going on to some extent even if I don’t feel truly lucid, but that’s just based on my own experiences. That being said, based on my experiences, I do find lucid dreaming to seem like a truly unique state of mind, compared to non-lucid dreams in particular I mean.
It’s called Calea zacatechichi or sometimes Calea ternifolia these days, by the way, although a lot of people do literally call it dream herb, which I always find to be a frustratingly unspecific name lol. I’ve had some cool experiences with it too, also particularly the first time. I mostly don’t use dream-enhancing drugs though just because lucid dreaming already works well enough for me without drugs, and I feel like if you can manage it without taking any drugs, that kind of seems like one of the key benefits of it. For what it’s worth, I practiced and got really good at lucid dreaming during the half a year in which I was abstaining from cannabis because of my panic attacks, heh. It’s probably because I took advantage of it at that exact time period that it worked out so well and stuck with me ever since. At the time I was getting lucid a lot, I think the highest record was like six lucid dreams in one night…. It’s nowhere near like that now, now they just come once in a blue moon, but without any required effort or focus about them whatsoever, so that’s nice. And I still retain all the skills I have related to lucid dreaming in them that I ever had before.
It’s fun, but it’s not like…
that life-changing. It’s just really cool to be that vividly in a realistically hallucinated world with that much control for free and without taking drugs, obviously. It also helps me form ideas about my own mind of course as you can see.
Oh, I do sometimes awaken while in the middle of a dream and am able to maintain the dream state for a short while before it fades away, but I find that this condition is fragile. If I attempt to control a dream while in this state, I end up engaging my "day dreaming" facilities which causes me to wake much faster. I prefer to prolong the sleep-dreaming state until it fades, and then I immediately indulge in day dreaming to explore possible continuations of the dream as I drift into fully awake consciousness.
I think you are describing genuine lucid dreams here actually, but it sounds like they’re affecting you in the way they generally affect most people who haven’t actually actively practiced at it, and even some who have because it’s just a common problem. “Waking up” in a dream is pretty much what it is, like I was trying to get at it with it being like coming out of a dissociative or delirious trip.
There’s just kind of a different logic to the dream world that you have to learn to employ properly if you really want to make use of your lucid dreams rather than just accidentally end them. I actually joined a lucid dreaming community online when I was getting into it, so I got a lot of tips and tricks about that kind of stuff when I was starting out, and like I said I was lucid dreaming very frequently, so I got a whole lot of practice in at the time. It’s certainly not something that just came effortlessly to me at all, even though it often feels that way now.
My recommendation is actually pretty much just readily following from how you already described your own problem: instead of daydreaming, try interacting with the dream like you would normal external stimuli instead. Not actually interacting with the dream is pretty much the number one way to make it end. If you want to try to do something cool with it, try to work it into your behavior instead of trying to bring it out through imagination. I find that expectation goes an incredibly long way in the dreamscape.
Here’s the example I usually return to…. I once had a friend in that lucid dreaming community who was having a lot of trouble with walking through walls in dreams, something that I also started out having difficulties with but eventually completely mastered. His problem was that whenever he approached a wall, he hesitated as he was walking towards it, and subsequently ended up walking face-first into it, as a stable wall. I told him to remember the line from The Matrix:
“Do not try and bend the spoon—that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth. There is no spoon.”
I told him that the reason he failed is because he hesitated, because the only reason to hesitate is if you’re worried about hitting the wall because you believe the wall might actually be there. But there is no wall. There isn’t anything in the dream space other than what you give power to at any given moment. If you just walk forward confidently because you truly have no expectation that you’re going to hit the wall, you’ll just walk right through it. At least, that’s how I learned to do it, and in the end he claimed to master it that way and thank me for the advice.
For what it’s worth, I also think that’s why you can’t just… not interact. If you treat the dream like it’s not there, it won’t be. In my experience at least.
While talking about my dreams, I should mention a few other things. I've heard many people say they dream in black and white but I almost never do.
I’ve heard people say this too and I literally can’t relate in the slightest but it’s so interesting to me. It seems like it’d be an incredibly interesting piece of perspective to me because - not saying I don’t believe it but - it’s so foreign to me as to seem nearly unbelievable, like when I first heard it I was like, “Wait, what? Really? Huuhhh?”
That being said, I am glad I dream in color.
My lucid dream colors in particular are super vibrant and I love it.
I do sometimes have non-visual dreams, hyper-dimensional dreams, and dreams with tremendous synaesthesia. I've taken drugs in dreams before, and the drugs I take are usually drugs that don't exist in real life. The drugs also don't just alter my mind in the dream but can alter *me* as well, like Alice and Wonderland style. Dream trips are the trippiest of them all, and the possiblities are endless.
My dreams are usually not that crazy but I can relate. I haven’t had a dream I can recall where I took drugs in a really long time, years probably, but I used to have them when I was first into drugs and trying everything. I don’t miss them too much mostly because they were filled with the anxiety I have about actually taking drugs and would sometimes involve things like me accidentally overdosing, heh. But I do missing tripping in dreams, that was fun.
I’ve still never taken mescaline despite once having a cool trip on it in a dream so many years ago. One day I’ll learn how horribly off my dream’s predictions were.
And lastly, I have never been able to have sex in my dreams. At the moment of initiation, I immediately wake up. I have had dreams of seemingly hours of courting and hot foreplay though, and these can incorporate any of the aforementioned elements---hyper-dimensionality, rich synaesthesia (in which the senses may overlap with the emotional sphere as well), and so on. Sometimes I fall in love so hard with my dream partner that I get an after glow that lasts for days. Rarely is this dream partner anyone I know in my awake life. They may not even be corporeal (in which case *I'm* not exactly corporeal in my dream either).
Try eating a bunch of menthol cough drops before bed lol. I convinced a bunch of people to do this once and most of them either had sex dreams or at least sexy dreams, except this one woman who was really into BDSM and really looking forward to the sexy dreams and it just made her have a dream about sitting happily on a hill. It gave me dreams of lying in bed naked with someone but no actual sex.
I never have sex dreams either but I also never have sex while awake either, so, you know. Not that you asked but I’m too much of a self-centered nut to have given it the focus it requires. Sometimes I try working on that.
Weirdly, in my lucid dreams, I seem to be pretty much exclusively a lesbian and very expressively so. Like you said, it doesn’t get to sexy stuff all the way, but interactions do happen. The reason I point this out is because I’ve been thinking a lot about this because I’ve been trying to relate it to what happens in my salvia trips by comparison or contrast. While awake, by stark contrast, I seem to be pretty much exclusively straight. This isn’t for lack of trying, as I’ll truly try just about anything as long as I think it’s not hurting anyone else, but it’s not for me, that’s totally clear when I try to imagine it, having homosexual experiences while awake I mean. I still felt strong enough feelings to date a woman briefly once but we never got there, except for kissing. But if you only paid attention to my lucid dream self, you’d have absolutely no idea this was the case. Intriguingly to me, I’m not the only example I know of this; I once knew an ex-opera singer who was into lucid dreaming who told me that she just liked men while awake, but in her lucid dreams one of her favorite things to do was literally grow a penis and use it to have sex with not only women but pretty much anything else that moved…. Mine aren’t that crazy, but I always remember her stories when thinking about this.
Anyway, here’s the interesting thing: when I smoke a very definitely by all definitions sub-breakthrough dosage of salvia plain leaf, like just enough for a high with some sparkly visions and possibly auras and such, it makes me (I mean, not necessarily always, but multiple times so far) have homosexual fantasies, completely different from when I’m not using it while awake, and in a seemingly kind of mirror reflected way to how most recreational drugs give me heterosexual fantasies instead, and especially cannabis edibles which I was comparing it to at the time - and for the record, this is where my “mirror reflection” ideas actually started, comparing salvia to cannabis and other highs, and it only grew to be more focused on dreams from there. I actually do find salvia to be “backwards-feeling” “like a mirror reflection” in multiple ways that extend beyond just my comparisons between a breakthrough and lucid dreaming, and that’s why I’m so interested in the concept and likely will continue to be, even if I come to feel that some of my current ideas about it are actually wrong or misguided.
This all being said, I was thinking back on that salvia breakthrough I had, and I realized that the way I felt about myself and my motivations in that experience, in a way that I can relate to rather abstractly but clearly because the whole thing was abstract but still very vivid and fully detailed and still easy to recall for me, didn’t feel the way I do in lucid dreams when I have those homosexual desires, or when I’m in sub-breakthrough salvia territory, but rather reminded me quite clearly of the way I normally feel and associate with my heterosexual desires, and that other more generally rewarding or addictive recreational drugs make me feel, like cannabis edibles. In retrospect, it even seems interesting to me that my salvia breakthrough entities were children while my dreams usually only contain adults and the lucid ones specifically women in this respect, because my homosexual fantasies also contain just other adult women while my heterosexual fantasies contain men but I also think about things like having children seemingly just inherently (like that’s just part of the fantasies already without me having to consciously insert it).
I don’t mean to go on a detour, but you made me think of this because it’s already been on my mind in the time since I made my last post in response to you. And I think this is a good example of my general personality and frame of mind that I was trying to get at before…. I know that there’s a lot of assumption and supposition in these ideas, and they’re about things that are already inherently abstract on top of us having a relatively low level of actually comprehensive understanding about them, but to me, seeing connections like this is still interesting enough that it’s able to cross my threshold that makes me feel like I just have to try to figure it out and experiment with them, even if my tools are limited. I’m okay with taking the ideas science suggests to me about these things so far and running a pretty good amount of distance with them, because that’s just the kind of relatively detached attachment stance I take towards these kinds of ideas of mine. I’m interested enough in this stuff that I’d rather be thinking about it and being wrong a lot than not trying to work it out at all, although I will say that part of that is because I’m pretty confident that I am actually right at least sometimes, and I feel satisfied to the degree that it occurs. But again, this is like a hobby to me too, so as big as my ideas seem to get, to me what I’m still saying is something along the lines of, “Wouldn’t this be cool? Maybe we should give it a shot.” as opposed to me trying to set forth a dogmatic view of the way things confidently seem to be.
My question, in this case for example, is: why does salvia give me homosexual fantasies at sub-breakthrough but seem to relate to my heterosexual imagination at breakthrough, and why does typical recreational drug stimulation give me heterosexual fantasies while lucid dreams which feel similar and are theorized to involve similar or identical neurotransmitters and feel more breakthrough-y seem to relate to my homosexual imagination? Could it be because dreams are related to dopamine and salvia is related to kappa-opioid receptors which a lot of scientists believe have opposite effects on behavior? And if so are there are other opposite signs between the two states that seem like they could fit that model to me? (There are, but I’m just explaining my mindset.) And then I just kind of run with my ideas from there. It’s just fun to me. That being said, I wouldn’t share ideas that I don’t think have at least some level of scientific evidence, as long as such a thing is possible at all. It is absolutely the case that many professionals believe that dopamine is involved in reward and dreaming and that kappa-opioid receptors have an opposite effect to dopamine and are involved in aversion and dissociation, so I feel that it’s a plausible model to start with.
It was very interesting to read, even as it differs from my experience. I offered my extended response above as kind of my rebuttal, at least based on my own experience. I believe everyone dreams very differently. Maybe everyone salvia trips differently too.
I think you are right, and I should make a note of the fact that as much as I want to talk about salvia, I usually have almost no one to talk about it to.
@JackARoe likes salvia, but aside from him, it’s so rare that I come across other people who do, and frequently even when I do find people who are interested, they just haven’t used it enough to have much to say, like all they’ve had is that one freak-out trip most people have their first time with an extract or something. That being said, it’s probably not uncommon that when I say “Salvia seems like this!” and think I mean it more generally, what I’m probably actually expressing is more along the lines of “The specific salvia trips I’ve had personally seem like this!”
I hope I get more opportunities to change that as time goes by.
I’m glad you enjoyed reading my ideas too nonetheless, and am grateful for your responses as well.
With the grand caveat that I'm not aware of the details of your conversation with
@JackARoe, I beg to differ here. Just because my experienced of matrixed reality contained strong reflections of that reality doesn't mean it was in any way connected to it. I think rather, by entering the dream state so rapidly from waking reality, my dream context was derived from waking reality. Unless I managed to enter hyperspace (like for real!) there was nothing at all real about what I was experiencing. I believe my experience was much like a dream whose context and content were directly from what I last was aware of in waking reality.
I call it a breakthrough because there seems to be a fine line or threshold between the state in which I am lying down on the couch, seeing blobs and feeling a weird pulsing sensation (seemingly in rhythm with the moving blobs), and this dream state in which I had managed to access a hyperspatial hallucination of the real thing. I found these transitions to be nighwell instantaneous.
In the second experience I described, the breakthrough definitely took me to a new place, even though I had the experience of hyper-dimensional translation as the means of getting there.
Now I suppose that if I took a big enough dose, perhaps the transition would be so sudden that it would somehow obliterate all memory of where I'd come from such that I would not experience any connection between the two. I really don't know though. When I dream, it typically starts after a period of unconsciousness, and it seems like the dream that arises inherits a context from my unconscious mind as well. With salvia, there is no period of unconsciousness between the waking state and the dream state, is there? Yet, I know my friend had a trip whose content was fully disconnected from waking reality, except for one crucial detail (see below).
Let me say first that the thing about dreams is that they are not disconnected from your outside senses entirely. Even beyond just borrowing input from your state of mind prior to the dream, it’s common for people to have experiences of, like, hearing people in the room you’re asleep in and having that worked into your dream somehow. That being said, I think this is splitting hairs. I still find there to be a clear difference between being in a dream or a truly dream-like experience and being in a dramatically altered perception of reality that isn’t fully dream-like despite being so extreme and hallucinogenic. The whole “matrixed reality” thing is what I was getting at by saying it can’t be too abstract to meet my definition of a breakthrough, even if it’s like a complete dissociative experience or something; I’ve had lots of salvia experiences where I completely and utterly lost awareness of my body, space, and time that were still nothing like any dream I’ve ever had, where I am actually clearly present with a body and hallucinatory world around that body and there is a coherent narrative playing out in that hallucinatory world. I realize that you said you have very abstract dreams too, but for what it’s worth, I don’t really consider it a full dream unless it has this structure; I think of those kinds of things as more just like sleep mentation if they don’t have clear form like this. The “matrixed reality” thing does not seem like a dream to me no matter how I cut it. That may just be my opinion, but that is what it is.
For what it’s worth, the reason I define ‘breakthrough’ the way I do is in very big part because I’ve specifically had the kind of salvia trip you described plenty of times, and after having the one single experience that I’ve had so far that I refer to as a ‘breakthrough’ now, I realized that all those other experiences I’ve had just took me to a point that I’m now just starting to conceive of as the build-up to that point instead. Like, the “matrixed reality” and the shutting down factory, that stuff’s not unusual to me at all, I’ve been there. On the strongest salvia experience I’d ever had before getting to reunite with it recently, I saw reality zoom in to a microscopic level to where I could see each individual pixel of reality, all just identical and copied in all directions around me at that level, and I could sense that each of the pixels was starting to shut off one at a time, and it freaked me the hell out because I thought my entire life was unwinding as I approached my death, and I ended up literally almost killing myself as I tried to run away from the trip while blinded by visuals completely with no view of reality behind them (that’s a different story). That all being said, I now look back on it and think that I should have just let it happen without worrying at all, because in the experience that I call my only ‘breakthrough’ now, I finally figured out how to not run away and just let that kind of stuff happen again but fully this time, and that’s when I entered the completely dream-like world that completely restructured the way I see salvia in relation to my own experiences. And that’s the important bit for me, because the word ‘breakthrough’ is arbitrary, which is what I was trying to express by bringing that up; the experience just is whatever it is, but in my experience, the kind of experiences you described were where I spent most of my time with salvia until, I feel, I was finally able to push past it enough to reach what I currently feel to be by far the most special aspect of the salvia experience to me so far and that has really made it a true favorite of mine and not just an interest, and so I won’t keep pushing the point because I know that’s just my opinion, but that is also why I bring it up because also in my opinion, it seems to me like you’re in a similar place to where I used to be.
While falling asleep, I do sometimes transition directly from being awake to dreaming. When this happens, I do maintain some lucidity for a while while, but only enough to abort the sleep process. This is very useful when I am trying to "cat nap" as a drug-free short-acting restorative. In my 6 mg 2C-I trip, my hypnogogic imagery started to expand into something more "tangible", and then I felt myself briefly pulled into the imaginary reality. At least as often (and without necessarily any drugs), I experience auditory effects as I approach the transition which eventually transform into the auditory content of the dream.
In the lucid dreaming community, they call this a wake-induced lucid dream, or WILD. One of the only times I ever had one was after eating those menthol cough drops, lol. But yeah, that’s what I was talking about with the way we transition into dreaming. I’m personally of the opinion - just based on experience, not like science or something - that the same process is probably happening in our brains when we go to sleep normally too, and we just normally don’t have the awareness to experience it as this lucid, awake-like transition, we just pass out instead, and like you said the dream may not even start right away in that case too so you definitely won’t experience it starting when it does. But I assume we would experience it like this any time we entered one while awake, or an approximation of this anyway, and that’s what I was comparing what I see now as that in-between stage of salvia to.
There is one very special kind of dream, initiated from waking consciousness, that I've only experienced maybe 2 or 3 times. This is a kind of out-of-body experience. I have on a few occasions literally floated up out of my body and out of my bedroom into other parts of my house. The experience tends to be extremely convincing and realistic. It actually feels like I'm awake but a disembodied spirit. After a short while, I tend to suddenly jerk back into my body, back to the awake (but relaxed) state, but on one particularly bizarre occasion, I jerked back into my body and woke up somewhere other than where I went to bed---the OOBE had been a dream within a dream. Now, by your definitions, perhaps I shouldn't call these experiences "breakthrough" dreams because I didn't go somewhere else---I dreamed I was still in reality, just in an disembodied state, which isn't terribly disimmilar to the disembodiedness of my "matrix reality" salvia experience.
I get what you’re saying, and I think I generally agree. I will say there is a recognized phenomenon in the lucid dreaming community called “false awakening” where you basically have a dream of getting up out of bed and you dream that you’re in your real house, and it’s often extremely convincing until you suddenly wake up for real. Things like that can occur, and I don’t think that’s what you’re talking about here, but I also just wanted to point out quickly that I do think it’s possible to dream that you’re in the place you went to bed and have it still count as a dream completely like you’re not really there at all, you’re just dreaming you are. Again I don’t think this is what you’re talking about, I’m just trying to cover my bases here.
The way I think of the phenomenon I think you’re referring to it is indeed what I would compare to the “matrix reality” salvia experience you had. Not trying to claim I have an expert opinion of it or something, but I conceptualize it as seeming like it’s most likely what happens when your brain is in the process of shifting you from the mental map it has of your waking reality to one that instead contains what we would call a dream environment, and again I think this is probably a normal thing that happens whenever we start dreaming but we’re just usually not aware of that because we’re already unconscious for it, but when we do manage to experience it while conscious, our awareness might also do funky things to the experience like getting us caught in this in-between space, or alternatively our awareness being focused in an unusual way might be what is causing the dream state to begin while conscious in the first place, thus forcing us to consciously push further beyond this in-between state if we really want to, or just staying there if we choose. I could see this being an explanation for accounts of medical out-of-body experiences and stuff like that that seem like they match up to what doctors and nurses said really was occurring in real life somehow, because even though we’re leaving our body’s perspective, we haven’t actually left the mental map in our brain that specifically corresponds to our sensation of the outside world, unlike when we’re fully in a dream (again minus the minor things like hearing people speak in the room around you and incorporating that into your dreams in nonsensical ways as opposed to the logical ways of the out-of-body example). With salvia, I would basically suggest that the reason we sometimes end up in the “matrix reality” place rather than all the way to a complete dream is just because there is a scale to how this works where there is an in-between state, so you won’t go all the way unless you have the requisite amount of kappa-opioid receptor activation to induce it.
Personally, one way I attempt to conceptualize it is that maybe a way to think of it is, a dream is like heaven and a salvia breakthrough is like hell. Bear with me here for just a second…. I know that nightmares and stress dreams and stuff exist. But I’m not trying to say it’s literally heaven, just what we think of as that, and I’m suggesting that the real picture is more complex than we think, generally speaking that is. Essentially, when it comes to dreaming, I would suggest that dreaming in and of itself creates the hallucinatory state of mind we think of as being in heaven, but the state of typical, non-lucid dreaming also induces an additional form of natural, endogenous delirium that prevents us from actually experiencing it as heaven by basically adding an additional altered state on top of “heaven” that makes us confused and concerned, and that’s still probably just a healthy part of whatever the hell dreaming is actually supposed to be doing for us, but nonetheless, that would also theoretically be why when you remove that delirium for lucid dreaming, it is genuinely heavenly as long as you can manage to keep it going, like you’re a god of your own mind who can do anything without consequences. On the other hand, dream-like experiences on salvia seem like they feel specifically consequential and like there’s often a feeling that you specifically can’t escape them, like you’re in a hell of your own making, and again, where things may often go wrong for you, or you may specifically feel like you’re being tricked. While again I’m not trying to say it’s literally exactly what religious people call hell, I think I could see it as activating the part of the brain that naturally is responsible for where the traditional ideas of hell were derived from in the first place. To be clear, this is all why, or at least related to why, I came up with the “winning” and “losing” ideas too, but I’m not trying to say those must be perfect interpretations all the time either, because like I said, I think the brain is abstract and works with what it has and I’m just trying to work with what I’ve got perfectly to figure it out, but in an even more fundamental although hard to express or scientifically back up way, I think there may genuinely be something to the “heaven” vs “hell” interpretation of lucid dreaming vs dream-like experiences on salvia. At the very least, it’s at least enough to keep me interested in thinking about it in that way.
Also, as I almost completely forgot to even get back to, I have a suspicion that this might be related to the stereotypical “near-death experience” where someone is hit by a car and sees themselves from floating above their body and then goes into the white light and explores the afterlife and stuff like that…. I could definitely see that being very, very, very related to all this.
Thanks for your suggestion, and if I try salvia again, I will definitely see if I can go "further". Though admittedly, I don't have much motivation. Indeed, my motivations for exploring psychedelics again are quite different compared to when I was young. When I was young, I was very eager to push the boundaries, to look for hidden or extra-natural realities. Now that I am older, I am much more interested in exploring applications and focusing on specific results be they therapeutic, social, creative, etc.
I’ll look forward to hearing how it goes if you do try it, but I completely understand that too.
I’ve pretty much gone in the opposite direction as you, but more so out of limited choice than actual desire or anything. (I don’t know what I would have done if I had the choice, I just didn’t.) Like I said, I wasn’t able to get salvia for a really long time, and most other options for truly pushing into mysterious other realms also usually elude me. Since for a long time all I really had to work with was research chemical psychedelics, that was what I used, and I tried to use them to their fullest. I truly do see drugs as tools in a completely actualized, no judgment of any kind sort of way, which was one of my goals for myself when I started to understand just how much unfair shit and criticism drug users and drugs themselves get thrown at them. I think drugs are truly some of the best things in the world and that it’s a shame how blind some people are to that reality. I even want all the more dangerous ones fully legalized and everything because I just think everything will be better when we provide resources for people who are struggling rather than persecute them for it. So I totally get that. Everything I do with drugs is in the pursuit of making something about my life better or more fulfilling in some way.
It does seem to fit your model, doesn't it? Except, I don't know if it was a total "breakthrough" because apparently *I* (who was sitting for him) was there with him as his partner, and he spoke to me in real life as plainly as any sober person but in his experience, we were in the jungle trying to escape the amazons. That's to say that even though he went to a completely separate world, he still retained some context from waking reality.
Perhaps the reason my theories seem potentially correct here is simply because I’ve become honed in on trying to describe one specific type of salvia experience that your friend’s happened to also be rather than actually considering salvia as a whole correctly. Like I said, I’ll try to expand my horizons beyond just what I’ve put forward so far, and your responses and input are very much appreciated as tools to help me further my own understanding.
I already covered it but like I said, I do think it’s fair to suggest that even a “complete dream” can incorporate things from your external senses into them. It’s more so just that it clearly seems like a dream still that matters to me, even if a little bit of reality is still poking through, and I do mean just a little bit, like just you being there, but the environment itself still being totally different and such. I know it’s not an exact science but I do feel that to at least some meaningful extent it’s kind of still a “you can probably recognize it when you see it” kind of thing, or that’s how I feel anyway.
For what it’s worth, I was lying down on the couch eyes closed for my dream-like breakthrough. That’d probably generally be my preference but I could imagine doing it eyes wide open could still cause at least some reality blending. Even regular REM sleep dreaming itself isn’t always a complete transportation to another reality if your eyes open when you’re still asleep, that’s happened to me sometimes in the early morning and it makes my dream structure super sloppy and confusing and usually ends up in me waking up from stress and realizing that I was seeing part of my real life room all blurry and weird and that’s why things got so strange.
I agree that anticipation can have a big impact on what effects are experienced with serotonergic drugs, but the rest of what you say here is not really consistent with my experience. I have no problem continuing to have novel, strong, and satisfying experiences on psychedelics that I've tried before. There are exceptions to this, most notable is the one time I tripped 4 times in 6 days.
I do too, there’s just a noticeable drop in intensity in some ways after I’ve gotten used to it. Psychedelics have never stopped being interesting for me except like you said when short-term tolerance gets too high.
The dosages you’re taking would be extremely small for me, which is the main reason I bring it up. I think if I was taking like threshold dosages, this difference from familiarity would be huge for me. It doesn’t make much difference at higher dosages that are always strong though anyway, which is where I usually go. It’s been a long time since I took 2C-I but I don’t think I ever went below 25 mg. Or somewhere around there I think…. It has been like over a decade.
Just my thoughts, not saying I must be right.
I should also say that all of my experiences since my 11 year abstience have been remarkably unpredictable, regardless of dose. Some of this may have to do with my physiological condition varying from day-to-day. Another possibility is that as a matter of habit I may be less prone to letter prior expectations influence my trips. This change in habit may be something I've cultivated through activities other than tripping over the years.
I can’t speak to how long COVID would affect it, but that does sound like a hassle.
I’ve become the same way too over time. When you’re new to drugs it’s so easy to think that they’re relatively predictable when you’ve had only a few trips, not realizing that you’re pigeonholing them at the same time. Now I try to go in just like, “What’s going to happen this time?”
I must confess, I don't feel I can say much with confidence about how the visuals of various drugs compare. I can at least pretend, and in the old days, I certainly had some certain opinions on this matter. My first opinion was that mushroom visuals were inferior to those of ayahuasca/DMT. My first serotonergic trip was with ayahuasca/DMT, and some of the visuals I got from that were simply mind blowing. Mushrooms seemed to share some characteristics with the aya but just seemed way more mundane and dumbed down.
Later on I got into phens, and I tended to find most phen visuals to be more interesting than mushrooms visuals but still not as profound as the aya/DMT visuals. In general, I regarded the 2C-halogens as providing a high quantity of rather simplistic visuals. With 2C-E, the visuals seemed much much more rich and intricate, and once I started using 2C-E, I felt it was superior to 2C-I except in more casual settings. Cactus was in its own category. The visuals tended to be quite subtle until a sufficiently high dose was reached at which point it would completely transform the outer world into something like a fairy tale. I only had one cactus trip that really pushed into heavy visuals territory and its profundity rivaled the aya/DMT at times while the mind remained essentially lucid.
I definitely have lots of opinions about it. I obsessed about it a lot when using all the different research chemical psychedelics. I just base it off of the experiences I’ve had, I don’t think too deeply about speaking in absolutes in this way, but that was part of my decision to get increasingly more casual about the way I talk about this stuff, like just seeing it as a hobby.
Your first heavy trip is definitely going to stand out. I’ve almost never had visuals that were as strong again as some of my first ever heaviest trips. Also of course though everyone is different in this way, both how they adapt to trips over time and how they react to different drugs. Personally, I find DMT and mushrooms visuals pretty similar, and prefer the mushroom ones so far, but I think I can understand seeing DMT’s as a bit more objectively impressive still. It doesn’t do as much for me as a psychedelic as mushrooms have though. But I also haven’t taken ayahuasca yet, just smoked DMT. I’d like to change that some day.
The cactus visuals sound phenomenal. I’ve heard a lot of good things about mescaline like that and it is something I’m looking forward to hopefully experiencing eventually. Luckily I know mescaline is of course still something I can get if I put in the work, I just have to get around to actually doing it. I’m not really seeking out serotonergic psychedelics right now anyway though, but when I do I think there’s a good chance that’s where I’ll want to aim first. I’m kind of at a point right now where as far as hallucinations go, things that seem like fairy tales like that, or like dreams like my salvia breakthrough, those are basically the only things I really have a lot of interest in currently. Abstract art-type visuals are beautiful and cool and all but I’ve seen so many of them in so many different varieties for so long, I’m really hoping to see more concrete and structured stuff for now going forward.
I agree that 2C-E visuals are awesome for visuals more like that too though. 2C-E is a psychedelic I really like in general, although I’ve only gotten to take it one time. I also wouldn’t use it over 2C-I in casual settings. I’d actually go as far as to say it’s one of the most intimate psychedelics for me that I’d have one of the lowest possible levels of desire to do that with. I feel like I’d be afraid of preventing from really working its full magic on me. Although, maybe in the right settings with the right partner(s) though too, hmmm….
But that was then. Everything is different for me now, after 11 years abstinence. What surprised me about the visuals I got on the 6 mg 2C-I is that they were way more complicated than anything I'd seen on 2C-I before at up to 25 mg. Yes, the 25 mg turned my whole vision into a swirling mass, but it was just a heavier version of the usual 2C-I effects. By contrast, the visuals I saw in my recent trip were incredibly intricate---like something I'd expect only on high dose mescaline maybe. Indeed, the thing I saw almost seemed like an entity, like mescalito. It was stunningly beautiful.
That does sound like a shockingly huge difference. I’m not sure it would go that far for me yet, like I still don’t think 6 mg of 2C-I would blow me away, but I have gotten far more sensitive over time to psychedelic visuals and know many others who have too. I personally think it’s a natural part of either exploring these experiences or maybe just aging, one of the two probably, or maybe both I guess…. It’s one of the many things I love about them, I get much more bang for my buck now than I used to. Salvia very much in that way as well.
Something else I can say about my "visuals" since 11 years of abstinence is that I seem to be experiencing them differently somehow. In the old days, they were kind of explicit. I either saw them or I didn't. The visuals I'm seeing now seem to be at a different perceptual layer or something. It's almost like I'm seeing them with a hidden third eye or something. I have a hunch that as I push dosages up higher, I'm going to start getting visuals that are way different from anything I used to see. It's very apparent to me that my brain is very different from how it used to be.
I’m very much the same way. This has radically altered how I view most drugs over time. I think it’s actually a big part of why I find it easier to enjoy and get things out of salvia now than I used to, for whatever that’s worth. Also cannabis edibles, which are very psychedelic to me as well and a big part of how I’m still enjoying the drugs I have access to currently.
Thank you so much! I am definitely taking this weekend off. Over the week, I helped a family member move, which involved flying and then driving back something like 1800 miles in the span of 40 hours or so. This was done totally sober, albeit with whatever 2C-I after-effects were in play plus some weed withdrawl. I utterly failed to get decent sleep all week, averaging like 5 hours per night. My body felt pretty wrecked at times during the trip, especially the morning after a pathetic 4 hours sleep in the hotel. I looked in the mirror and look liked I'd died my skin was so white. With sleep deprivation, I felt more off-base than when I'm high at home. I'm very good at zen driving though.
Sounds miserable lol. I hope you enjoy your weekend recovery.
Yesterday, the day after driving, I had conjunctivits in both eyes. Perhaps eye strain caught up with me? Or maybe it was an opportunistic infection versus my weakened immune system? Also on the airplane, I sat next to someone sniffling and wearing a "blue baggy". I wore my Vader mask, but no eye protection. I hope to hell it wasn't SARS2 again, but so far it doesn't feel like it. I actually felt surprisingly good today, but I suspect I'm gonna feel like trash after a night or two of proper 8 hours rest. We'll see.
I can’t even imagine the fear of getting infected again when you’ve already got that going on. I finally caught it for my first time of the entire pandemic a few months ago and it sucked ass. Obviously I worried about having lasting symptoms the whole time, but it seems I’ve fortunately escaped that fate so far. I’m still absolutely terrified of getting it again though.
Good luck with that and with everything. That really does suck to a degree it’s hard to express my sympathy for. I really hope medicine gets treatments and stuff figured out well soon, for all of our sakes.
Once I find a "baseline" after getting proper sleep again, I can assess whether my various inflammatory symptoms (including long COVID) are still in remission. My hope is that if I take psychedelics frequently enough that inflammation is kept at bay for an extended period of time, then my body will progressively heal, my overall health will improve, and I won't need to take the psychedelics as frequently to maintain symptomatic remission. My fear is that the psychedelic after glow may be suppressing my immune system in a way that allows residual SARS2 to propagate and make me sicker in the long run. I don't know (a) whether I have residual SARS2 in me---some patient do but for others long COVID may be mostly auto-immune; assuming I do have residual SARS2 in me (b) whether the psychedelics are harming my immune system's ability to fight the virus or whether they may be facilitating my immune system's ability.
I certainly can’t tell you the answer and understand how much it must suck having to figure it out while dealing with it, and again I just wish you the best. I can tell you for what it’s worth that I have met and discussed with people before who were treating their inflammatory conditions with 5-HT2A receptor agonists to seemingly significant success, supposedly surprising even the doctors who were treating them; that’s the information I was given, anyway. I hope you are able to find success with it as well, and just wanted to say that I think it’s at the very least an acceptable idea to try, particularly in the face of such mysteries about what’s really going on and a pressing desire to improve.
Thanks again for your very thorough and respectful response, I will be taking the things you said into consideration as I build my ideas forward.
And I again hope you start feeling as much better as you can as soon as humanly possible.
