This is adapted (slightly) from a comment I wrote on an old thread in PD originally about another substance entirely. This isn't so much a trip report in the traditional sense as much as an account of my own experiences with this 'dream herb' Calea Zacatechichi. I think I'm just going to link to this thread in that comment, since this seems more organized and more likely to welcome discussion around the neuroscience/pharmacology theory at the end, which I welcome input on!
I started experimenting w Calea Z. around age sixteen. I got a quarter-pound of it from a co-worker who introduced me to smoking weed out of a bong, among other things. He said it was good for dream recall and I was actively training myself to become an active dreamer. Journals were always hard for me, but I tried lots of the common techniques. Visualization, reality-checks, meditation, and eventually I decided dream herbs. I did a quick google and didn't find much so I went ahead. I remember reading on Wikipedia at the time about how a tribe in the Oaxaca region of Mexico used it for 'divination' - a term I had associated with confirmation bias or deception. I didn't think much of it.
At first the effects were subtle. I smoked a lot of weed at the time (still do haha) so that may have been counterproductive, but at any rate I like most people decided it was gross and bitter and not worth my time. I put it in a drawer and forgot about it for a while. Eventually I decided to give it a try again, and I was using it every night. I was starting to practice meditation and had been experimenting a lot with LSD and mushrooms. Anyway, I kept taking it, both tea and smoke - sometimes with cannabis and sometimes without - and then I'd go lay in bed and meditate.
I just kinda choked it down, sometimes with lots of stevia and occasionally sugar and sometimes without. It always made me wretch a bit, but I kept at it for some reason, determined to get some benefit from it. Initially all I noticed was a subtle increase in dream vividness. Eventually though, this grew into lucid awakenings. I was really happy with my progress, stoked to finally be having dream-induced lucid dreams, so I kept on with my nightly ritual. That isn't the weird part though....
Eventually, I came to start to notice a peculiar effect in my waking life. A sense of.... I didn't know yet. It was a feeling, just outside of my realm of conscious thought. Like when there's a word on the tip of your tongue, or when you can't quite name something but think you understand what it is. That feeling was a welling sense of familiarity, but I didn't realize it at first. Initially what stood out was the sense of 'importance'. IDK how else to word it,it was like I'd be relaxed and suddenly get this sense of urgent wakefulness. I'd look around and think about what was transpiring around me to see if I could figure out what was causing this, but I couldn't make sense of it for months. Eventually that changed, and I'll never forget the first time I realized it was familiarity.
I was sitting in a basement in Victoria BC, exhaling a bong hit watching the smoke swirl mixing with the dust in the beams of sunlight coming over my shoulder through the blinds, and I remember thinking to myself 'hey that looks familiar... I've seen that exact swirl before..... IN A DREAM!" - and at that moment a few things happened. I suddenly understood the feeling of urgency was accompanied by a sense of familiarity, only my logical mind started doing backflips trying to make sense of it all. On one hand, I had never lived this moment before, but on the other hand I was now clearly remembering the smoke and dust swirling together in front of me. I looked around, desperate to break the chain of cognitive confirmation that was taking place. Everything I looked at just increased the sense of accuracy and affirmed that I had indeed done this before.
So... at the time, I was nowhere near equipped to handle that experience. I thought I had 'done too much acid' and maybe 'broken my brain', and by this point I'd told my friends all about it and they were looking at me like I was acting crazy. I actually spent a long time convinced I was 'going crazy' for lack of better words, because I didn't expect that to happen or understand anything resembling why it might have happened. It took me /years/ and a lot of help from friends over IRC to find and understand some studies on Calea Zacatechichi to try to piece together an idea of what may have happened. I still don't know, but this didn't just happen once, it would continue to take place often, sometimes many times a day for years after I ceased my use of C. Zacatechichi.
OK, so there's some study that found that C. Zacatechichi caused in cats a 'dissociative action' in a 'multi-unitary formation' in the basolateral amygdala. I've come to understand that part of the brain to be implicated in many things, including some aspects of governing wake/sleep cycles and flagging information as important or otherwise. This all takes place pre-cognitively, I think.... I'm no expert, in-fact I have no formal education. However, as I understand it, this multi-unitary formation (webby structure) in the basolateral amygdala is somehow used to consolidate various sensory modalities in our brain. We seem to encode 'time' in a relative sense, in memories in part by the relative order of sensory information.
I read somewhere (text box on the left) that "The reticular formation consists of a disorganized network of neural fibres with the neurons’ cell bodies scattered inside of it. Through collateral connections, this structure receives information from all of the sensory modalities. When all of these different kinds of information converge on a single neuron in the reticular formation, they lose the specificity of their origin and acquire the non-specific property of activating the excitatory neurons of the wakefulness network. "
So... uh... I know I may be doing 'bad science' here but I don't know enough to do better. I hope someone here does. My theory is that my extended use (over 10 months daily heavy use) of C. Zacatechichi caused a 'dissociative action' in the part of the brain responsible for encoding an aspect of time in memories. This somehow caused those 'memory banks' to lose specificity of point of origin and in doing so created a persisting (for years, not any more though) cognitive illusion indistinguishable from 'magic/divination/time-travel'. This has been written about in Homer's Oddyssey, described as 'veridical' dreams, which he defines as differentiated from 'those of a non-prophetic nature'. This has also been observed and described as 'Oneiromancy' - literally 'divination through dreams'. That was the phrase used to describe the intentional use of this herb by Chontal people of the Oaxaca region of Mexico. Their medicine men used to take this very herb in order to ask questions directly to god, and they even called it "Thle-Pela-Kano" - translated that means Leaf of God.
Honestly, at this point I'm fairly certain I could recreate the effect for study if it was ethically and/or in any other way viable.
I'm about to turn 29 and no longer have these experiences, though I did for years and years after I stopped using the dream herb. I left out a lot about my personal experience feeling like I was going insane and later coming to accept that it was probably just some form of brain damage. That was weird, ngl.
Happy to fill in details and answer any questions about my experience as best I can! I'm excited to be finally talking about this again, and able to do so calmly. It is hard to overstate the impact this experience had on my life growing up. I'm in no way exaggerating when I say it was easily the single most profound drug experience I have ever had in all my years of experimentation.
I started experimenting w Calea Z. around age sixteen. I got a quarter-pound of it from a co-worker who introduced me to smoking weed out of a bong, among other things. He said it was good for dream recall and I was actively training myself to become an active dreamer. Journals were always hard for me, but I tried lots of the common techniques. Visualization, reality-checks, meditation, and eventually I decided dream herbs. I did a quick google and didn't find much so I went ahead. I remember reading on Wikipedia at the time about how a tribe in the Oaxaca region of Mexico used it for 'divination' - a term I had associated with confirmation bias or deception. I didn't think much of it.
At first the effects were subtle. I smoked a lot of weed at the time (still do haha) so that may have been counterproductive, but at any rate I like most people decided it was gross and bitter and not worth my time. I put it in a drawer and forgot about it for a while. Eventually I decided to give it a try again, and I was using it every night. I was starting to practice meditation and had been experimenting a lot with LSD and mushrooms. Anyway, I kept taking it, both tea and smoke - sometimes with cannabis and sometimes without - and then I'd go lay in bed and meditate.
I just kinda choked it down, sometimes with lots of stevia and occasionally sugar and sometimes without. It always made me wretch a bit, but I kept at it for some reason, determined to get some benefit from it. Initially all I noticed was a subtle increase in dream vividness. Eventually though, this grew into lucid awakenings. I was really happy with my progress, stoked to finally be having dream-induced lucid dreams, so I kept on with my nightly ritual. That isn't the weird part though....
Eventually, I came to start to notice a peculiar effect in my waking life. A sense of.... I didn't know yet. It was a feeling, just outside of my realm of conscious thought. Like when there's a word on the tip of your tongue, or when you can't quite name something but think you understand what it is. That feeling was a welling sense of familiarity, but I didn't realize it at first. Initially what stood out was the sense of 'importance'. IDK how else to word it,it was like I'd be relaxed and suddenly get this sense of urgent wakefulness. I'd look around and think about what was transpiring around me to see if I could figure out what was causing this, but I couldn't make sense of it for months. Eventually that changed, and I'll never forget the first time I realized it was familiarity.
I was sitting in a basement in Victoria BC, exhaling a bong hit watching the smoke swirl mixing with the dust in the beams of sunlight coming over my shoulder through the blinds, and I remember thinking to myself 'hey that looks familiar... I've seen that exact swirl before..... IN A DREAM!" - and at that moment a few things happened. I suddenly understood the feeling of urgency was accompanied by a sense of familiarity, only my logical mind started doing backflips trying to make sense of it all. On one hand, I had never lived this moment before, but on the other hand I was now clearly remembering the smoke and dust swirling together in front of me. I looked around, desperate to break the chain of cognitive confirmation that was taking place. Everything I looked at just increased the sense of accuracy and affirmed that I had indeed done this before.
So... at the time, I was nowhere near equipped to handle that experience. I thought I had 'done too much acid' and maybe 'broken my brain', and by this point I'd told my friends all about it and they were looking at me like I was acting crazy. I actually spent a long time convinced I was 'going crazy' for lack of better words, because I didn't expect that to happen or understand anything resembling why it might have happened. It took me /years/ and a lot of help from friends over IRC to find and understand some studies on Calea Zacatechichi to try to piece together an idea of what may have happened. I still don't know, but this didn't just happen once, it would continue to take place often, sometimes many times a day for years after I ceased my use of C. Zacatechichi.
OK, so there's some study that found that C. Zacatechichi caused in cats a 'dissociative action' in a 'multi-unitary formation' in the basolateral amygdala. I've come to understand that part of the brain to be implicated in many things, including some aspects of governing wake/sleep cycles and flagging information as important or otherwise. This all takes place pre-cognitively, I think.... I'm no expert, in-fact I have no formal education. However, as I understand it, this multi-unitary formation (webby structure) in the basolateral amygdala is somehow used to consolidate various sensory modalities in our brain. We seem to encode 'time' in a relative sense, in memories in part by the relative order of sensory information.
I read somewhere (text box on the left) that "The reticular formation consists of a disorganized network of neural fibres with the neurons’ cell bodies scattered inside of it. Through collateral connections, this structure receives information from all of the sensory modalities. When all of these different kinds of information converge on a single neuron in the reticular formation, they lose the specificity of their origin and acquire the non-specific property of activating the excitatory neurons of the wakefulness network. "
So... uh... I know I may be doing 'bad science' here but I don't know enough to do better. I hope someone here does. My theory is that my extended use (over 10 months daily heavy use) of C. Zacatechichi caused a 'dissociative action' in the part of the brain responsible for encoding an aspect of time in memories. This somehow caused those 'memory banks' to lose specificity of point of origin and in doing so created a persisting (for years, not any more though) cognitive illusion indistinguishable from 'magic/divination/time-travel'. This has been written about in Homer's Oddyssey, described as 'veridical' dreams, which he defines as differentiated from 'those of a non-prophetic nature'. This has also been observed and described as 'Oneiromancy' - literally 'divination through dreams'. That was the phrase used to describe the intentional use of this herb by Chontal people of the Oaxaca region of Mexico. Their medicine men used to take this very herb in order to ask questions directly to god, and they even called it "Thle-Pela-Kano" - translated that means Leaf of God.
Honestly, at this point I'm fairly certain I could recreate the effect for study if it was ethically and/or in any other way viable.
I'm about to turn 29 and no longer have these experiences, though I did for years and years after I stopped using the dream herb. I left out a lot about my personal experience feeling like I was going insane and later coming to accept that it was probably just some form of brain damage. That was weird, ngl.
Happy to fill in details and answer any questions about my experience as best I can! I'm excited to be finally talking about this again, and able to do so calmly. It is hard to overstate the impact this experience had on my life growing up. I'm in no way exaggerating when I say it was easily the single most profound drug experience I have ever had in all my years of experimentation.