A superhero at night-- Lucid dreaming, opioids, and ibogaine

[Music] Welcome to Back from the Abyss. I'm Dr. Craig Heakock. Chris and I have now produced 42 episodes. It's been such a meaningful and amazing adventure. And I've been thinking about how to get more feedback from our listeners, how to connect with you guys on a deeper level. Initially, I thought I would do some sort of, I don't know, survey monkey thing, but that seems so co-vity and distant and not that much fun. So, I've decided to do a little experiment in connection and podcast feedback. I invite you to email me on my website, CraigHeakockMD.com. If you're interested in having a phone or video chat with me about Back from the Abyss, I'd love to know who you are, how you found the podcast, what you like, what moves you, what you'd like to see more of, what you'd like to see less of. All constructive criticism is welcome. I'm thinking that I'll pick some number of responses. I'm not sure how many yet. I'll give each person a call. I'm actually really excited to reach out to you. So just let me know if you're interested. This episode is not like anything we've had on Back from the Abyss before. Late last year, I got an email from Ian Jaded, a Colorado based author, artist, and video producer, who said that he had some stories that might be interesting for the show. So, I reached out to him and found Holy cow. Ian has so many stories, many of them with themes we've never explored on the podcast. So, after a few phone calls, we distilled the magical mystery tour of his fascinating life into two major abyss stories. First, Ian's descent into eventual breakdown and brief psychosis after his psychonaut plunge into the realm of lucid dreaming. Then later, Ian used the African psychedelic eboga, or eye-be-game, to pull himself out of the hell of opiate addiction. Before talking to Ian, I was only very faintly aware of lucid dreaming. I thought it was some type of especially vivid dreams, which were not actually meaningful or physiologically different from REM-based dreaming. How wrong I was. It turns out that lucid dreaming is an amalgam of a REM dream state and a fully activated and essentially awake parietal lobe. EEG studies of lucid dreaming prove that parts of the brain are an REM electrical pattern, while other parts of the cortex appear completely awake with a beta-type electrical rhythm. On the subjective level, this amalgam of REM sleep and awake in cortex could account for the feeling of being not just awake during a lucid dream, but also being able to control the action and even alter the dream context. And on a medical psychiatric level, by not having the human brain go into its normal sleep architecture, with intermittent periods of full brain REM sleep, REM deprivation can lead to mental and emotional collapse. The first experience I had was when I was about 19, and I'm 48, so we're talking, you know, a while ago. So we're talking about 30 years ago or so. And you know, at that time, I was a teenager. I had no background in this whatsoever. I didn't even know the word lucid dreaming or, you know, I'd heard of the idea of out-of-body experiences and that sort of thing, which we can get into deeper if you'd like to later. But this first experience absolutely blew me away. And what happened was, is that, you know, the setup is important. So I'm going to give you a little bit of the setup. I was woken up at like five in the morning because I had to take my mom to work because I wanted to use her car during the day. So I took her to work early in the morning, but then I went back to bed. And that is really important because when this lucid dreaming will often happen for people when they're kind of like in a slightly awakened state, a little bit like your body has been awakened. Your mind has been awakened. I had to go drive a car, kind of a cross-town, get her to work, and then I came back and then I fell back asleep. I was still tired. So my mind had been kind of in this highly focused state, but then my body was still like, you know, I was a growing, growing teenager, so I needed more sleep. So I fell, I fell deeply back into sleep, but then so about 45 minutes or so after I fell asleep, I found myself in a forest. And it was the most realistic scene I had ever been immersed in in my life. And I had no idea what was going on. The only thing that I knew was that I knew that my body was asleep. I was fully conscious. I knew what was going on. I'm like, I'm like, I know I just took my mom to work. I know I just fell back asleep. I know that my body is asleep. But this is not a dream state. That's all that I knew. I didn't know anything else, but in my heart of hearts, I'm like, something is going on here that is profoundly different. And I kind of just, and this first experience just unfolded for me where I kind of wandered around this incredible forest. It was a, it was a autumn morning. And it looked like what the land would have looked like maybe 200 years ago. Like the forest was completely overgrown. And there was no, you know, there's no roads. There's, you know, there's nothing of, you know, of any sort of human civilization around me whatsoever. And so when I woke up later, and I'm trying to describe this experience later to people, I'm like, I'm like, I had this thing happen to me. But you knew you knew you knew then it wasn't a dream. I knew it wasn't a dream, but that's all that I knew. Exactly. But I couldn't tell why. And it, of course, later as I, you know, the internet wasn't really a thing. This was like 1990, you know, the internet wasn't really, you couldn't just jump online and start doing research. I saw it was kind of my only option was to, you know, go to bookstores and go, okay, well, what am I looking for? Am I looking, you know, what happened? It was the consciousness, the level of consciousness that changed everything. And by that specifically, I mean that I was aware that I was dreaming. And that made all of the difference. That made that I was fully conscious that I wasn't being strung along by the narrative of the dream state. So, you know, any any normal dream state, you know, whatever's going on in your dream, you are just kind of following along the storyline, you're kind of being, you know, tugged along by a leashes the way I kind of describe it. You know, you're, you're sort of, you take the reality as it's presented to you, right? You know, and it doesn't matter how crazy it is, you know, your dreams, of course, can be whatever anything can happen in a dream state, you can be on another planet, you can be a different person, you can, you know, anything can be happening and you accept it as is and you, you know, you can feel fear, you can feel pain and, you know, your full range of emotions. But, but at the end of the day, with any normal dream state, you are just kind of following along with the rules of the dream. This was not the case with me. I was fully awake. I was fully present. Again, like I said, I knew that my body was asleep. I was fully aware of that. And you had agency, like instead of 100% in a reactive contextual dream that you, exactly or like a first person experiencing driving things. I could completely control everything. In fact, I was walking around this forest for this only this first experience. What's funny is that how, how mind blowing and earth shattering this was it, you know, it only lasted for a few minutes. And this was only perhaps a three minute experience at first. And yeah, I was able to walk around. I was, I was touching things. I was, I was putting plants up in my face. I could feel the sun on my face. I could feel the moisture in the air. I could smell the humidity. I mean, it was like, it was insane. I was, I was picking up leaves and going, my God, I can feel this. I can see the intricacy. What the heck is going on? Like this is, this is nuts. What you're describing is, you could also be considered by, you know, in some context, like a religious experience, a spiritual experience, almost psychedelic experience. At that point, at 19, I had really no experience with psychoactive. I had no experience with meditation or anything related to spirituality or shamanism. My parents, I did not grow up in a really religious household by any stretch of the imagination. To answer your question, it absolutely like, I didn't know what a religious experience was. I didn't know what that meant to have a religious experience. But that is exactly what I was left with. I'm like, this was a religious experience. Like this was the stuff that I, I had heard about in holy books and whatnot or what they had been talking about in, in spiritual circles. But again, as I said at first, it took me a long time to understand what made this different. And, you know, but then eventually I started finding the right books. I started finding books that, you know, there are, there are lucid dreaming practices in, in Buddhism and shamanism. And it turns out that there have been, had been people studying lucid dreaming. How, how much are you being strung along by the story of your life? And that's what I started learning that, oh, there's, there's, there's larger life lessons to be learned here. And I started kicking in almost nightly. And this, I would say I had these, I started having these kind of intense experiences almost every night for about the next 15 years or so somewhere around there where, and some of these experiences would last sometimes three to five minutes up to several hours. And, and you do know how much time is passing. They've actually, they've proven that pretty well within this, in the, in the lucid dreaming community that, that your sense of time actually matches pretty closely to what's, what's going on in the, you know, the real world, so to speak, you know, that you do have a pretty good sense of time of what's going on in there. So, yeah, this started happening constantly, so, and each, each experience was, it was almost like I was, I was being taught in levels, like I would be shown something and, and it would be so intense and incredible. And then sometimes I would need a couple of days to process it. And then the lucid dreams would back off, like for a couple of days where I was just processing and I was just going into normal REM sleep and during the day, I would just kind of wrestling philosophically with, with what was going on. And then, and then I would just be hit, I would just be hit for like, you know, two weeks at a time, you know, where it was just nonstop. Like it seemed like the majority of my nightlife was filled up with just lucidity and going, walking into these worlds and exploring them. And it was a lot to take in one, in one respects too. [Music] Yeah, so many questions about this. One is that, I mean, I wonder if you were finding yourself wanting to be in that world even more than the regular world because it was so vivid and fascinating and unexpected. And I mean, were you, yeah, more wanting to actually go to bed and be in these states than actually face sort of the day to day. And I was a little bit, yeah, because especially at first, because it was like, for me as a teenager when these kicked in, it's like I was, I was a God at night. But then I was still a kid during the day who had no real philosophy, who'd still had, and who's wrestling with his ego and his self identity and, you know, anxieties and doubts and all that kind of, you know, all the stuff that you, that you are still dealing with, you know, with, at those younger ages. So absolutely, it became very difficult. I was, I became obsessed, you know, because it's like, I just wanted to enter these euphoric realms again. And I couldn't, you know, again, it took me a long time to understand, well, what, what is it about this quality? What, why is this so euphoric? What is going on exactly? And, you know, it took me a long time to understand that it was the freedom of being fully conscious without being pulled by, by this, by some storyline, by some, by some context. You can completely jump outside your context, and it took me years to understand, oh, that's kind of what we're all doing all the time. You know, we live in this, these tightly knit context during our day, you know, our storyline that we, that we adhere to, you know, of our life. You know, like, well, I got to, I got to get up in the morning and I got to go to work and then I've got to do this at home. And this is the, these are the things I'm dealing with financially, these are the things I'm dealing with in my relationships and, and then, you know, we're always looking for some reprieve, right? We're always looking to some way to escape that. And, you know, I had found this ultimate escape where I was where, you know, my body was asleep. I didn't even have to deal with my body. And then I was in these fully conscious realms where I could do anything. And that's the thing when you're in that state and you're fully conscious, you know, you can do anything. I mean, you're like a, you're like a god in your own little, in your own little world, you know, you could do whatever you want. And, you said, I had found Ian, you said, I had found, but actually it's more like it unfolded. It's presented it. That's how it felt. Yes. Yeah. And so how did the younger you explain that? I could see where you think, okay, am I, am I getting some kind of like special messages? Am I tapping into the collective unconsciousness? Am I, do am I some sort of spiritual? I mean, like, because I'm guessing you're asking other people and in general, people are saying, I don't know what you're talking about. Totally. And so, how did you explain that? You know, I would say that that ultimate question is still something that I would not claim to have all the answers to. Why this, what exactly was entering my consciousness and the best that I would say is the way you've described it, that, that consciousness is a very funny thing that at the, at once you get through all those layers of that context that I've been talking about. Once you get through all those layers of identity, once you move above all of that, that there is a, there is absolutely a universal consciousness that is really free from any limiting narrative at all. I mean, it can, it is pure freedom. And when you are that, I would say that is your true identity, right? Now, I would say that the best, the best that I can describe is that that larger, you know, that pure consciousness, that collective conscious, just sort of seeped into my, you know, into my life. And that's where it started. It started with lucid dreaming, but, but my feeling was that it could have inserted itself into my life in a lot of different ways. And so, lucid dreaming was, was the path that worked for my ego, I suppose, because I was a very rational, when I, and I'm still a very rational kind of individual, I probably get that from my father. So there was still a large part of me that for years, I was still, even though I may have not completely admitted it to myself, there was a, there was a logical part of myself that could still say, yeah, but, you know, it's still just a dream. It was still just happening at night, you know, and I could kind of like still kind of put that away in a box during the day, if that makes sense, I could still rationalize it. But then there was also another part that knew, and I was starting to learn more and more, like there is something much, much bigger going on here. And so, it's not simply just something that's happening during, you know, at night in my head, especially when these, when these experiences started moving into, as I've touched on, what we call astral projection. And when that started happening, I started realizing that I was really able to truly touch on realities and realms that were beyond my physical body. And I was able to come back with information that I absolutely should not have had access to. Here Ian takes his lucid dreaming experience to a place where I struggle to stay with him. And I think part of this is language dependent. For certain words and phrases represent ideas that speak to our past experiences, that somehow feel congruent and true. And other words and phrases they don't, for whatever reason. Ian uses the terms astral projection and out of body experience to describe how he was able to somehow transcend his physical three dimensional body and go other places in space time. At first he lost me as a long thought of out of body experiences as a mental or psychological phenomenon, but not an actual physical reality. Out of body experiences are typically catalyzed by a non-ordinary state of consciousness such as being under the influence of ketamine or having a seizure or as Ian describes while having a lucid dream. I did, however, finally resonate with how Ian came to explain these experiences as evidence for consciousness being non-local, unified, collective, somehow able to transcend space time. Though I still think of this leaving that body idea as a metaphor, not an actual process, I do think that it may well be possible to access the collective unconscious through various non-ordinary states of consciousness, including psychedelics. When that started happening and that took a couple more years for that to start kicking in, that started really freaking me out because then I had to say, "Alright, this isn't just something that's going on in my dreams. This is something that is much larger. I'm going to have to really start taking this way more seriously, that this isn't just a fun thing that's happening at night." I was definitely becoming a very philosophical person at a pretty young age for sure. By the time I was 21, I was running my mouth probably more than I should have because I really felt like, "Oh yeah, I'm the Buddha now basically." I've got this whole spiritual thing totally under wraps. I totally understand what's going on, but then my ego would get completely pummeled with some other new experience which just brought everything up to a next level. For sure. I didn't know much about lucid dreaming, but I thought of it as something that was very interesting and emotionally powerful and compelling, but not necessarily something that had value in and of itself or that allowed you to access other insights from your mom's eye. That's me. It was news to me too. Now that's, if you're on the internet and you've got your connections to these groups where these conversations are taking place, it's very easy to find that connection right now. That was not a connection I had even suspected or ever. I had no reason to even think there was any connection between why would there be a connection between this lucid dreaming and what we call an out-of-body experience. Now, in retrospect, it completely makes sense. Those two go hand in hand actually. What happened at first before I understood any of these connections at all? I started in my lucid dreams. I started going, "Well, what can I do next?" After a while, you're kind of like a god in these states. Where can I go? I would go check in on my mom or my dad or friends and family. I was kind of like, "Well, can I connect with people? What does that mean? Am I connecting with what my vision is of my mother in my subconscious?" I didn't really know what that meant. I thought, "Hey, from a psychological perspective, that might be interesting to go connect with people who I actually know in my daily life." The first thing I did was I went to visit, quote unquote, "my mother." At the time I was in Muncie, Indiana. I was in college. I was actually working for Bob Ross. I don't know if you know Bob Ross is the happy little trees guy who did the painting stuff on PBS years ago. His studio was run out of a small outfit in Muncie, Indiana. My mother was still outside of Chicago where I'm from. She was some 150-200 miles away. What I did is I just kind of projected myself into my home to see if I could find her and I found myself in my living room. I was kind of observing and I saw my mother in the kitchen through the living room and I watched her just kind of, she was like making breakfast and I just kind of observed the scene for about two, three minutes. I just kind of took everything in like there she is and I tried to say something but there was no, you know, there wasn't any response. I didn't feel there was a real connection to what was going on. I kind of looked at the clock on the wall and I looked and I said, "Okay, it's like 720." I kind of took a, I observed everything that was going on, what she was wearing and then she did something funny. She pulled these pans out from under the stove and she dropped this giant frying pan. Like in a just, you know, I just heard her say, "You know, God damn it, you know, that sort of thing." And I just kind of giggled and whatnot. Then I went back and I woke up later on. So out of curiosity and it was just pure curiosity. I called my mom later on in the day. I said, "Mom, just bear with me for a second." I said, "You need to tell me, just tell me exactly, exactly. What were you doing at about quarter after seven, 720 in the morning this morning?" And as she starts laying out the details of what happened and everything and I asked, I said, "Did you drop that giant frying pan underneath the stove?" And she just paused and she's like, "How the hell do you know that?" She's like, "You're at school, right? You're in college." I'm like, "Yeah." And I say, "Mom, what were you wearing?" And she tells me what she was wearing. And the whole thing completely lined up. So I didn't want to hear that. I mean, I didn't want to hear that at all. That wasn't fun to me. That wasn't like, "Ooh, how cool." That was like, "Okay, how was that scared the crap out of me?" [Music] Again, I'm a skeptic to the last. I mean, I still am to this day on some level. I still said, "All right, I know my mother. I know her habits. None of this means anything. I'm still going to put this under coincidence that I know so much about her and I know her behaviors." And I might have known, "Well, she would have been getting ready for work at this time, Yadda Yadda." But then these continued and they just kept piling up where I would, and they got more and more specific. It's starting to get incredibly interesting and scary. And I mean, did it start to get a little dark? I could see where you're thinking, "Hey, I have special powers or I'm losing my mind." Something is not like, most people are not doing this. Yeah, I could just imagine that this would be thrilling and horrifying. It was exciting. The astral projections were at first, before I could really prove it. I would say the experience I'm laying out now is one of the first times where I'm like, "Okay, this is too specific. I feel like calling this coincidence is now getting to the point where that's inappropriate." And I'm going to have to start looking at this from another perspective. These just kept happening over and over where I kept on being able to confer with other people and go, "Okay, this is not just, this can't be coincidence." And then I'm going to look at the connection between Lucid Dreaming and this projection to be able to release your consciousness. And what I have now, and the books that I'm now writing are all based around this philosophy, that it all comes back to breaking away from the narrative that you're presented with. And that narrative can be your daily life, but it doesn't have to be. It can be any narrative. We are, there's something about consciousness that it seems to be drawn to storyline. We are storytelling creatures. There is something about us at the deepest part of our nature. And I have a theory about why I do believe that it has something to do with it. It's storylines are essentially, they are, "order from chaos." Essentially, that's what we're really talking about. I mean, a story is basically just taking billions of pieces of information, right? And streamlining it into a nice, "Well, I did this, and then I did this, and then this happened." You see what I'm saying? It's a nice, it's order from chaos. And I think there's something about our attention that loves that. We love storylines. And so whether that storyline is presented to us during the day, the story of our life, whatever we would define the story of our life, but we can get attached to that, or we can get attached to any narrative, even, of course, at night. At night, we're kind of disconnected from our daily storyline. Right? Now, the body is asleep. We're not really dealing with that, but then another story can be presented to us. And that is, of course, the dream state. But that's, it's like these narratives act almost like as a cage on some level. They restrict your consciousness to the limitations of the context that you are bound within. Once you become lucid in a dream state, you are now, your body is asleep, right? So you're not connected to your body, and you're not connected to the narrative anymore. So that is the last thread that is keeping your consciousness in a limited localized area. So once you break away and lucid dreaming, once you become aware that you're lucid dreaming, yeah, turns out your consciousness can do anything it wants to. So that's what started proving to me, oh, consciousness is not just something that lives, you know, behind your eyes, somewhere in your brain. You know, it's something that can extend beyond, you know, whatever that means, it can go beyond. The idea is that consciousness is not localized, and that has a lot of implications. So when I started experiencing that, that really, really profoundly disturbed me where I started going into these states of awareness, where I could sort of astral project out of my body, but then I could then be in multiple places at once. And now when I say that, you can't even, your, your, your minds are so linear and so limited, you can't really probably even understand what I'm saying, because if I say that I saw things from two to group perspectives, you might think of kind of like an overlay, you know, when a movie has like a transition from one scene to another, or you might see of like something like a split screen when you're, you know, like when you're in a zoom meeting, and you can see things from two different screens, right? That is not what I'm talking about. I would be able to go into states of consciousness where there were two truly perfectly realized perspectives happening simultaneously, not like a dissolve or a split screen. I'm talking to completely realized perspectives. And that broke me because it's like that I felt like I broke something at some fundamental level is how it felt. You know, I was like wake, I would wake up and go, I don't, I don't know who I am anymore like my, it's like that shatters your ego at such a core level because it's, you know, your self identity, you like to think of yourself as being just in one place at one time, you know, you have this idea like, well, I'm me, I'm this, you know, you know, I'm whatever this is that's living behind my eyes, I'm in a, I'm in a very specific point, you know, if that follows in, in, in, in, in a place. In, in, in space and time, but it turns out in terms of consciousness, that means nothing to consciousness that, that consciousness can do whatever the heck it wants to. And that really disturbed me though that is very, it's very disturbing to be in two places at once it turns out. So, yeah, I, I didn't like that. With increasingly severe sleep deprivation, Ian descended into chaos and fear, wondering what was real and what was not. Now we know that REM sleep is crucial for restoring emotional resilience and maintaining mood stability. And as Lucid dreaming took over his nights, he began to feel increasingly unstable and disconnected from his world. It's still not clear to me what parts of Ian's experiences here were due to the transients that causes of sleep deprivation and which were an extreme and unusual manifestation of his Lucid dreaming. Whatever the case, Ian's increasingly frightening experience speaks to why sleep deprivation has long been used as a primary form of torture to break people down mentally and emotionally. Those kind of experiences that actually made me pull back from Lucid dreaming and whatnot, I became so frightened of these experiences. I, I didn't know what was happening and I was just like, I started feeling I was going crazy and I did not have the philosophy like we've been saying, I did not have the philosophy to back this up. I'm curious again, it sounds like you're going deeper, deeper deeper into these realities, whereas you said you can hold two or more complete. Yes. Awareness is or contacts at the same time and then you're saying, it's getting really scary. I feel like I'm kind of breaking my brain or and you want how did you how did you pull back and did you have some kind of ability. No, I didn't do it on on purpose. It's not like I was like, well, I'm done. I'm going to turn that button off. You know, I'm going to flip that switch. It just it's like once it was more of just kind of a conscious thing, I suppose, where I'm like, I'm freaked out. I'm frightened and I don't, I didn't want to go into the, I was, there was a while where I was afraid to go to sleep. And once that started, once that started happening, they did kind of just stop. And like I said, they tapered off at around this, these experiences tapered off for the most part. I still have them to this day, but they're much more rare and I've also learned there's a reason for that too. These tapered off right around, I'd say in my early 30s, somewhere around there, somewhere in that general, like, you know, it's like these started just kind of pulling back. And it was mostly because like I said, it's like my brain was full. I guess you could say like I had experienced by the time I was saying my mid 30s, I had then had thousands of these experiences. But what would have led them to taper off in your early 30s, you said like it was almost like the hard drive is full or you've reached some kind of like psychospiritual tolerance, you know, like you have so much. - A good way to put it. That's a good way to put it. - Yeah, you just didn't need or couldn't really process more. I couldn't process anymore. And plus on top of it, because some of these experiences were taking up the majority of my night life, I wasn't dreaming properly. I was not going into REM sleep really properly anymore. And, you know, there's, you need that. You really do. You still need to let, you know, you can't be in control all the time. You can't be conscious all the time and be dealing with our daily life. You know, we know this. I mean, I know I don't have to explain this to you. Dreaming is essential to REM sleep is how we recharge our emotional batteries. It's how we restore resilience. You know, I think of people who are REM sleep deprived as heading towards breakdown, whether that's sort of anxious. - That's what I was. - Or a psychotic breakdown or manic breakdown, but if that's how it's felt. - You've deprived people of REM, they will lose their minds. - And that's what that's exactly where I was heading. I mean, I was, there was so many times where I'm like, I can't deal with this anymore. Like, I, this is too much. I don't, I'm not prepared for this. I don't understand what's happening. And the implications were, were so profound. I didn't know how to conduct my daily life anymore. You know, I didn't know where to go from there. And so I went from being the loud mouth like, yeah, I've got everything under control. I, you know, I'm basically the Buddha. I got, I got this under control to just going, I don't want to talk about this anymore. I'm tired of, I don't even want to tell the stories about this anymore. This is just freak me out. And I just, I pulled back completely. It's almost as if you're journey there in your 20s to early 30s with lucid dreaming, sort of paralleled what happens with almost with addiction or, or a lot of substance use that it's, you know, it's exciting and vivid at first. And it can take you to places you haven't been and it's this thrilling journey. And then it starts to get more and more intense and you know, can eventually get to the point where it's too much like you're not getting, you know, the negatives outweighing positive. You're not getting the benefits. It's starting to get scary. And for you, as you describe, a fundamental process of of your brain REM sleep was not happening and you're realizing, I can't keep doing this. So on the physical level, my solution to that was opiates as you as you talk about addiction. I mean, once I found opiates opiates to me, it's like, it's like it was the perfect answer in many ways as you're saying, it's like it seemed like the perfect solution. I was for, you know, for minor surgery, I was first given some percassette and I absolutely adored it. It's like percassette gave me the nice fuzzy warm numbness that it's like, you know, it's like I had been living my life, like kind of like an exposed nerve. If that makes sense, it's almost like, that's how it felt. It's like I was just this exposed nerve that was absolutely aware and conscious all the time. Like I couldn't even get any sleep, right? And then I found opiates and, oh my god, I could suddenly go into this nice comfortable fuzzy warm womb, right? And I could just, and I could sleep. And opiates, I would sleep and it was perfect. I would sleep for 10 hours and it was fantastic. That's what opiates were like. So I turned into a huge addict. I got to the point where, you know, like I think I mentioned earlier that when we were talking before that I was, I was never a non-functioning addict, but it certainly wasn't a good thing where I was, you know, just, you know, once you start on an opiate addiction, it's not like you can just set it aside. It's kind of like, you know, that thing will be tapping on your shoulder every day going, yeah, well, you know, what are you going to do? You better find a solution to this. So I eventually went from percussettes and, you know, and I realized that that was too unreliable finding finding any sort of percussette supply. And I started, I started just making my own and I got addicted to opium tea and it turned out that find at the time that's not really the case anymore, but at the time getting the resources to make opium tea was was really quite easy and really very inexpensive. So I started creating my own opiate elixir, so to speak, and I was on that for years and years. So that sort of, that sort of was my solution, I guess you could say. It was a solution until it wasn't. Until it wasn't until it just got to the point where, okay, I'm just, you know, I'm just, I'm opiated out and I was not feeling anything after a while where I realized, like, you know, it does something not just to your physical body. And the opiates have all sorts of weird things where I wasn't really feeling my emotions properly anymore and I, and I was after a long time, I was missing the lucid dreaming after a while. I kind of felt like the opiates did kind of serve their purpose really on some weird level. I mean, they did what I wanted them to do, but then, you know, it's, it got to the point where I couldn't say no to them. So I had to, after a long time, I'm like, all right, I need, I need to get off of this. This is not worth. This is not a lifestyle I can, I can continue with. So I eventually found solutions to that as well through, through another hallucinogen, it turns out, I bogeyne, I did I bogeyne. I dozed myself with the African root eboga and that helped tremendously. It didn't fix the problem. It didn't fix the problem, but it helped tremendously. Yeah. Tell me about the process of how you decided to go down the I began road, how you prepared for that, what that actual, sure, like. So I started doing research online. I started going, all right, well, I started, you know, I was always a researcher. I always had the brain on me. So none of this was ever done unconsciously. I understood what an opiate was. I understood that we have opiate receptors and I started understanding, okay, well, there's, how do, how do you get off of this? What is the best way to do this? And I had, I had touched on withdrawal a few times where I just had run out of my supply of opium or whatever. And I knew that that was really unpleasant. I mean withdrawal was just so, you know, it shuts you down for that, can shut you down for a couple of weeks. And I had a job. It wasn't even something I could do. I'm like, I can't just withdrawal for two weeks, you know, and try to maintain, you know, and go to work. So I had to find some other solution. I think Ian downplays here the utter how of opioid withdrawal, possibly because of the gut wrenching intensity of his I became detox, as you're about to hear. Still, it's really important to understand why Ian would have chosen a detox option, which necessitated many hours of nausea, vomiting, delirium, hallucinations, and optundation. Opioid withdrawal is day after day after day after day of unbearable fatigue, diarrhea, nausea, depression, and restlessness and unending insomnia. The withdrawal syndrome of any drug is always the opposite of its primary pharmacological effects. Opioids catalyze a profound sensation of inner emotional warmth, an energized euphoria, a disappearance of fear, and the near complete resolution of any physical or emotional pain. Thus, the opioid withdrawal syndrome, in addition to its horrific physical symptoms, creates a psychospiritual withdrawal characterized by feeling absolutely alone, completely vulnerable, emotionally raw, with utter elimination of any remaining emotional resilience and confidence, and sense that the world is ever going to be okay. Given this unimaginable option, Ian chose a different, though much riskier path. I was just doing research, like, "Oh, okay, what does this look like?" And it looked like from what their information was, is that eyeball game is really weird. It is a psychoactive, but it does appear to snap into those opiate receptors, and yet it's not an opiate. It stays there. It will snap into your empty opiate receptors, which is, again, where all of your agony comes from. You've got these starving opiate receptors that aren't being filiozoopiates when you're going through withdrawal. But eyeball game snaps into that. It seems to be a chemical that fits itself into that, and it will stay there for, they think it would stay there for about 30 days, or so, and then it sort of drifts off. So, on the chemical level, it's like there's a perfection to eyeball game. Now, before I start sounding like I am just singing the praises of eyeball game, I'm just simply speaking about on a chemical level. What it does chemically, it is amazing. I mean, that's exactly what you'd want. If you want to get out of phanopeia, you know, and you are willing to, you know, kind of go through a little bit of withdrawal and the agony, because you, you know, you're basically, with, you know, you're replacing all of those opiates in your brain with this other chemical, and it stays with you for weeks. But, and you purge really heavily during this experience. I mean, you go, it's a psychoactive, like I said. So, you are in a hallucinatory state, and you are purging and very heavily. Yeah. How in wind spirits less about 16 hours or so. So, how and when did you decide after the process of research that after I had enough. It's time to do. Once I had enough under information on my belt, and I felt I understood it. I did all of the math for my body weight and everything else. And I said, okay, I'm doing this. And so basically what I did is I, I stopped taking the opium tea for about 24 hours. And I let that kind of, I kind of waited till I waited until the point where I would be looking for like another dose, you know, right around that time, or I'm like, all right, I'm starting to feel unpleasant, right. And that's right about the time where you take. And I'm using two different terms, but, and this may be confusing to people who have no familiarity with this. There's eboga. Eboga is just the raw root. And I cannot remember the exact, there's, you know, the Latin name for the root out there. But then they can isolate it just like you can isolate anything, you know, you break it down to it's just to its active constituents. And that's what you call Ibo gain. All right. So there's eboga and then there's Ibo gain. So what I did is I first started with a small dose of eboga, just the natural root. And that's supposed to the idea is that you just take that at first just to see to make sure that they're not going to have any like an allergic reaction to it or any kind of weird, you know, some sort of crazy reaction. So I took eboga at first, let that settle in for a couple hours. I felt pretty comfortable. You do this on an empty stomach. So things were kicking in pretty fast. And then I took the other, the rest of the Ibo gain, which was the concentrated, the isolated version of that. And then I, what you do is you have to lay down, you have to go into some room. I brought fluids and I brought a bucket because I knew I'd be throwing up and you dim the lights. And no one was with me and I was living alone at the time. I had just gotten out of a relationship and I said, I didn't want anybody around. I people knew I told my some close friends and family. I said, hey, this is what I'm doing. You know, I'm doing this to myself. I was pretty open about my addiction to a few of the closer people in my life. And they knew I'd been researching this stuff. And so I had people on us, you know, if I needed to contact them on my cell phone, I could have, but I felt confident that I could do this alone, and I could get through it. And I mean, I did get through it, but I would say that this, it was still an absolute mistake. I should never have done this alone. I, I was not prepared for how incredibly powerful the experience was. Maybe I took too much. I mean, it's possible that they gave me too much for my body weight. That that was not that that wasn't the math that I had done. And they agreed I had other people who had who distributed this stuff, who said, you know, this is, this is the correct dosage. So, you know, this is how that experience felt. What you experienced mentally, physically, emotionally, how that evolved over the hours and days. So the first thing that is really that was really frightening was that it drains you of your energy. And I had heard that I had done the research. But I didn't really know what that meant. I'm like, okay, so you're going to be tired. It's not like you're tired. It's like it does something to your body where all of the energy like it's like my energy just seeped out of my muscles and just, you know, just evaporated. And moving became difficult. That freaked me out because then I realized, well, I'm kind of kind of trapped in my bed like I really couldn't move very well. It does something to your body. I still don't really understand that exactly. I don't understand the. Thank you. You're incapacitated. It was like you're incapacitated. I mean, it was like my muscles barely worked. I could, don't give me a wrong. I could get up and I could get some water and do basic things. On top of that, not only does it rob you of your energy, it also, it does something to your equilibrium that I compared to like seasickness, but it's like seasickness times 100. And this is why when people do this in a professional settings and there are, there are, you know, this, this is actually legal in several countries like Canada and Mexico and Germany. You know, this is, of course, not the United States because we're always behind everything. When this is done in a professional setting, you wear an eye mask and you do this in a completely almost almost a completely dark room. Well, I, again, I had heard this that you would get nauseous that you'd get kind of like a seasick feeling, but I had no, I was not prepared for how intense this was. All I had to do, I still had some light coming in through my window, because I started this at around 11 in the morning or so, because I knew I'd be doing, I'd be dealing with this for the next 17, 20 hours or so. So I started this, you know, earlier in the day, just the light coming through my room, if I turned my head too quickly at all, just from the little bit of light coming through the shades, it's like the whole, all of my vision would just become a swirling, nauseous mess of wave and color. And it was horrible. So all you can do is just lay back real still and just let it do its thing. And then you just start throwing up. And I probably, I can't tell you how many times I threw up, I must have thrown up a dozen times over the next 20 hours. I was nauseous, I was sick, I couldn't move. I heard him and you're alone. I was, I've got pretty scared, definitely, but it was still not at the, it was still following the basic pattern of what I had researched, right? So I didn't, I didn't like, okay, you know, I didn't, I wasn't really a point where I felt, man, I'm not going to call an ambulance and like, and I kept thinking like, if I called some sort of medical professional, what are they going to do with me? They're not going to really know what to do. You know, I had a feeling they're not educated with this thing that I just took. And so I wasn't, I guess I felt that I wasn't, I wasn't totally confident that they, that even the doctors would really know what to do with me in this state. I decided to just bear, you know, to just kind of go through it. And it was rough. There were a couple of times I had to go to the bathroom. The bucket was absolutely not enough. I mean, I was purging, I had to go, and I was, I was urinating constantly. So it got to the point where I had to go to the bathroom. And the bathroom in this apartment that I was in at the time was literally 15 feet away from my bedroom door. To get there would take, I bet it took me about a half an hour to get from my bedroom to my bathroom. And I'm talking, I had to crawl slowly on my hands and knees slowly so that I, so that I wouldn't throw up again so that I wouldn't jostle my body too much. It's like, God, just thinking about it. It's like it's bringing back nightmares. It's like your whole body is beyond nauseous. And it's like if somebody just, this sounds possibly worse than opioid withdrawal. You know, but the thing is about it is that the idea is that it's almost like you're doing two weeks of withdrawal in one day. That's the idea is what you're going to do. So this went on and then of course you're hallucinating on top of it. And again, I'm experienced with hallucinogenic, you know, with hallucinogens. The hallucinogen part did not really bother me. I was fine with that. I mean, what's happening mentally and emotionally. So physically, as you said, sort of crushing two weeks, three weeks of opioid withdrawal into one just right. Hell period. Yeah. So you're seeing in your visions upon visions and that were just like all very metaphorical, you know, as I, as I had mentioned before, like I had, I kind of imagine myself for the longest time. Like, oh, I've got all this under control. I'm like the Buddha, right? No problems. You know, and so some of my visions were like seeing these old Buddhist statues like covered in like drenched in a swamp like they were just filthy and they were slowly emerging out of this, out of this filth and muck and this, this like this black tar, you know, all the, all the toxins and whatnot were like slowly pouring off of these statues. Of Buddhas and whatnot. So I'd see stuff like that was any of the content important, you know, sounds like it was a really powerful detox that I want to. It was here in a few minutes. What were the results of that, but the actual, you know, the emotional mental content of that session. Is that important during or after? It was, it was not like there was a specific vision that that that was really like, oh, that's a metaphor for something. It was more of a general sense of because of what was happening. What I had done to myself and that I'd isolated myself in my apartment and all of this crazy stuff was happening. I was overwhelmed with feeling of just isolation. I was overwhelmed with isolation. You know, also on an emotional level and that was really, really difficult. That was difficult on an emotional level that I was just dealing with this huge sense of feeling alone and separated from everything. And, you know, and of course that went back to everything that I had been dealing with as well, not just from the opiate addiction that I had kept quiet for the majority of my addiction. I kept quiet. I didn't mention it to anyone, but also just from my experiences, from all the experiences I'm telling you about with, you know, as exciting as this lucid dreaming and the astral projection as exciting as that might sound from an outsider's perspective. All of that stuff really does isolate you. I mean, it really does isolate you from your fellow man that you can't really, you know, it's, you know, again, most people cannot relate. Most people are just like that sounds crazy. And, you know, they look at you like, you're either, you're either full of crap. You're either lying or you're crazy or I mean, none of their reaction, you know, none of it adds up to anything good, right? It's all one option or another that's, you know, that none of it comes down to taking your your story at face value if you have no experience with that. So that's what I was kind of wrestling with is just the isolation and then, but you know what slowly slowly by the time the night went through and by by the time it was like four in the morning, the next day, my energy slowly started returning the nausea slowly started wearing off and and I was kind of like that exposed nerve again. And even though I was not withdrawing, like I said, it does tap into those opiate receptors and I felt that it did that I was not going through that that kind of withdrawal anymore. So I had, I had gotten past that, but, you know, for the simple fact that you're not on opiates anymore that's that that in and of itself is rough even without withdrawal. You know, I'm saying like just the all of my that exposed nerve sensation came back in full force again and my lucid dreaming immediately kicked in like, you know, 300%. Immediately like so like, you know, the next the next several days my lucid dreaming was just off the wall intense, which I was fine with. I mean, I was, you know, I had the experience with it. I was okay with that, but I kind of relearn how to deal with just, you know, not being on opiates. Yeah. And I wouldn't recommend it without without a total supervision from a medical professional. So it's better to say what the I've again experienced did was sort of fast forward the awful opioid withdrawal. So concentrated, but it didn't fix the problem. It didn't change your life. It didn't change the psychological longing or dependence per se that you still then in the days, weeks and months afterwards you still had to do the work of absolutely hearing how you're going to live without opiates how you're going to live with it and how am I going to deal with it psychologically and luckily again by that point in my life. I had learned how to meditate and that is I would say if there's one thing that has been the the life saver in my life. Even more so than any of the lucid dreaming or the projection any my crazy experiences I would say that I learned how to meditate at a fairly young age and that was that was a godsend that I was I learned how to do that. So my meditations helped me so so much when they say you're an addict forever. I really am. I mean, I'm I know I'm not on opiates anymore, but occasionally I will take what's called cratum or Tom is how it's actually apparently pronounced as what Hamilton says on Hamilton's pharmacopie on vice, but cratum is something I'll take occasionally, but like right now I've not had cratum in like two weeks. It's like my relationship with opiates has changed forever. There's not the desperate need, but but anytime any I'm around anyone and someone even mentions, oh, I've got some percassette my ears immediate will prick up and go, oh, really. Do you have perhaps two percassettes? That's just that's probably just how my life is how it is you know it's just what it is so yeah. So where are you now today after I mean you've been through some powerful experiences in your 20s with Lucid dreaming and and yeah, in tapping into this sort of non local consciousness and then this whole other phase of seem seeming like finding opiates is kind of a spiritual way to write our through and continue your creative process and that worked until it didn't and now post both of those experiences where where are you today. So today now I am I've kind of taken all all of these experience and and more that of course we've not even had time to discuss, but I've taken all of these experiences and I'm and I've been kind of bringing them all together. They have started to unify and gel into one larger theory and this really started I really started this deeply around seven years ago and I started writing a book it was a it was a book that I had I had a story that had been brewing in my head. God possibly forever that I had a story kind of brewing in the back of my head even since I was a little kid and it's evolved so much over the years and I finally started writing this thing down so I'm going to start writing this this book I want to write this story and that's what I started doing and and it was fiction basically was taking all of my crazy experiences everything that I had I had dealt with from the lucid dreaming to the spiritual kind of aspects of it to and even the rougher stuff my demons I took all of it and I. All of it and I poured all of this into this book and that was my first novel tripping the field I found a I found an indie publisher out of Oregon who was willing to not change any of any any of it there was a lot of people who who looked at their like well I want to I don't want to have so much drug use in the book or I don't want to have so much discussion about religion or certain things like that and so I kind of had to turn them away but I found a wonderful publisher. Wonderful publisher out of Oregon who took my book as is and so then when I started when when the book was published I kind of started doing like radio shows and podcasts where I would kind of talk about the book and then what I didn't expect was that naturally people would ask me like hey this is a crazy book that you heard this is a wild adventure that deals with you know psychedelics and quantum physics and all this not stuff like where did you get the inspiration for this so then I kind of started talking about this stuff again for the first time in years and years and years. And as I started talking about this again and through writing that book I I started all of this stuff started really well it's not like it started to gel the reality was that it had gelled and I just wasn't aware of it. I'm like oh wow all of this stuff has really been jelling for years and I really I've really walked away with a really a very unified theory of everything it's going on. Now I'm in a place where I can speak about this stuff and so now when I when I come across a problem in my life or any of my tendencies towards whether it's addiction or depression or anything like that I now I can see it through this larger perspective I can see it through this you know this unified theory of how consciousness works you know like as we were talking about earlier this larger perspective of consciousness. [Music] [Music]