Why is "everything", but dialating time possible in a lucid dream

I totally just realized another possible GABA connection that I didn't even think of before. This just makes me even more convinced that this theory could hold up.

The four main psychedelics that any random person would most often be likely to recognize by name are LSD, psilocin/psilocybin (magic mushrooms), mescaline (peyote), and DMT (ayahuasca). The first three are the ones that are especially well-known, and have come to sort of set the foundation for what the different "categories" of psychedelic chemicals are, namely lysergamides, tryptamines, and phenethylamines, respectively. DMT is also a tryptamine, being almost identical in structure to psilocin. All of these four drugs are known to cause the typical psychedelic hallucinogenic effects, up to and including immersion in well-structured hallucinations. However, their are some differences between them. The one that really matters to me in this particular situation is that mescaline is known to be the more clear-headed by far for the level of hallucinations it generates. It's also the one known to cause nausea the most easily by a wide margin; the rest can sometimes cause it if you have a weak stomach or are easily overwhelmed by sensory or physical stimulation or anxiety, but mescaline is one that can reliably cause it in a dose-dependent manner in anyone. Being classical psychedelics, all of these work through 5-HT2A, 5-HT2C, and at least a few other serotonin receptors. Both of those two are known to increase GABA release in the hippocampus, and so if my theory so far is correct that could be how they eventually cause dream-like hallucinations in higher doses. However, what is known is that LSD, psilocin, and DMT don't seem to activate 5-HT3 in any appreciable amount, at least not at the recreationally-used doses. While I haven't been able to find direct scientific evidence that mescaline does activate 5-HT3, I do know from anecdotal evidence that the nausea it causes seems to be readily reversible by 5-HT3 antagonists. That alone isn't complete proof, but I'm going to tie it into something bigger here.

There's another lesser-known natural psychedelic tryptamine called bufotenin that is somewhat popular among certain groups of, usually heavy, psychedelic users. It had a chance to go more mainstream, but it was left behind due to the relatively high incidence of side effects, particularly intense nausea. But the tests that were done on it used methods of administration that would cause it to pass through much of the body first, where it would easily stimulate receptors that induce emetic responses. People who use it recreationally tend to stick to either sublingual administration or inhalation (smoking) to avoid this. What those users have discovered is a psychedelic which is immensely powerful in its sensory effect, creating hallucinations that many people claim are even more massively intricate and incomprehensible than those provoked by DMT. But most interestingly, despite this bufotenin is sometimes described as having some of the lightest mental alterations of any psychedelic, which until now I've found fascinating but baffling. Activation of the 5-HT2A receptor and the 5-HT2C receptor to a lesser extent, both of which are activated by bufotenin, don't seem to be separable from considerable psychological effects, so how could this be the case? In fact, based on the reports I've read about bufotenin use (I've unfortunately never had the opportunity to use it myself), it seems almost like a lucid psychedelic in the sense that the hallucinations it causes are extremely vivid and lifelike and yet the trip doesn't necessarily sweep you away, you stay level-headed. But today as I was thinking more about this time dilation subject and what I've discussed so far, something suddenly struck me and I did a little more bufotenin research. And guess what? As could be expected from the side effects, it strongly activates 5-HT3 receptors.

Of course, given the nausea-inducing effects, 5-HT3 activity is generally not something you want unless you can make it bypass the chemoreceptor trigger zone like with smoking to avoid that, at least mostly. Aside from this though, the 5-HT3 receptor is usually overlooked. Activation of it alone does seem to produce some mental effects, but none really powerful enough to shine through at any dose that would be safe to consider testing out with random drugs. There aren't really many drugs it's been testable with though and as a result our knowledge of it is pretty limited, but despite this, 5-HT3 antagonists have been shown to be useful in reducing the incidence of visual hallucinations and some mental side effects in Parkinson's disease patients who are being treated with L-DOPA therapy. So you may be wondering at this point, what caused me to suddenly look into bufotenin again? Well, when I was looking into ways that GABA release is increased in the hippocampus yesterday, I found a study that claims that its release is actually induced by activation of 5-HT3 receptors! So the connection to before would be, if increased GABA in the hippocampus is responsible for creating the hallucinogenic structure of the dream world itself, and if it's possible to remain lucid, or consciously aware, during these hallucinations (as we all know it is), and considering the way that GABAergic hallucinations are sometimes described as a waking lucid dream state, then is it possible that causing a significantly high release of GABA there with a lower ratio of that to other effects on consciousness, could it be genuinely possible to recreate an entire dream world while awake and stay lucid? Given that bufotenin is really the ONLY psychedelic I know of to significantly activate 5-HT3 at recreational doses, most likely because it's almost identical to serotonin in structure (in fact, it is to serotonin what DMT is to tryptamine itself), would it not make sense that it could be creating this extremely vivid yet remarkably clear hallucinogenic state by a heavy combined activation of 5-HT2A, 5-HT2C, and 5-HT3, allowing for a significantly larger release in hippocampal GABA than other psychedelics? Furthermore, it would bypass the activation of GABA(A) receptors in other parts of the brain which are responsible for some of the mental inhibitions of GABAergic hallucinations, and instead stimulate your mind like a regular psychedelic. And lastly, given that mescaline also causes some nausea which is 5-HT3 antagonist-sensitive and is known to be a very clear-headed psychedelic with vivid hallucinations, is it not possible that this would somewhat apply to it as well?

This idea makes me incredibly excited because it would suggest that not only could GABA feasibly recreate the proper conditions that would be responsible to generate the dream world, but it would support that idea that it does this while maintaining the ability to remain lucid while in its hallucinogenic state, something that as far as I'm aware no other chemical theory as of yet has been able to keep up with. Isn't that an awesome thought? :content:

Very interesting posts Alyzarin, in my past I have had experience with time dilation during psychedelics, most notably so with 4-HO-MPT (my friend an analogue clock on his wall, it seemed like it was 4 or 5 seconds, I remember counting 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi etc. while waiting for it to tick) although I am not sure of it's method of action, I can say without a doubt that during my experience I had the most clear mind that I have had in my entire life, outside of a lucid dream, coming with was the ability to alter reality at will (look at a metal pole, expect it to bend and it does), which is a stark contrast to other psychedelics where you seem to be "along for the ride." It was almost like having a lucid dream while awake.

On the role of GABA, my first intentional lucid was after I took a 100mg pill of GABA before a WBTB attempt, I am aware that GABA does not cross the blood-brain barrier when taken orally, but it definitely does something, if taken before bed I have extremely vivid and intense dreams, sometimes becoming lucid without reality checks.

Your perception of time is based on how fast your brain is processes your surroundings, while time passes continually at a finite rate, your perception of it is completely variable, the trouble is, usually, your perception is locked into 1 second = 1 second because your brain is taking in stimuli that support the notion that it is true. But while you are lucid dreaming, you are creating all the stimuli, if you think 1 second = 5 seconds you can drop a rock into water and watch the splash and ripples move out in super slow mo. Obviously, your brain has a maximum processing power, but while you are dreaming you have complete control of how the processing power is allocated, I think it would be completely possible to have a 1 hour of dream time while being asleep for half an hour.

Plan for tonight, set an alarm to go off every 30 minutes, turn it off and try to WBTB/DEILD, see if i can count any time period longer than 30 minutes while lucid.

Ok, so I have been lazy typing up my dreams lately. Hopefully, I can get them all typed up today. I had a dream last night where I tried a much more subtle approach. Upon becoming lucid, I looked around at, what was an incredibly stable dream and thought, "Oh my, this dream is going to last a long time." That was the last I thought about it and proceeded to experience the dream without trying to keep the dream running, like I usually do. I, generally, use several techniques throughout my dreams to keep them going and keep the dream stable, but I didn't in this one. It lasted a good 6 hours (dream time), I'd guess. It was my longest LD in a while. I'll be sure to try and recreate this quick process the next time out and see if it helps prolong the dream again. Once I get both this dream and the previous one I mentioned typed up, I'll link them in here in case someone wants to check them out.

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Originally Posted by Ksero

Very interesting posts Alyzarin, in my past I have had experience with time dilation during psychedelics, most notably so with 4-HO-MPT (my friend an analogue clock on his wall, it seemed like it was 4 or 5 seconds, I remember counting 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi etc. while waiting for it to tick) although I am not sure of it's method of action, I can say without a doubt that during my experience I had the most clear mind that I have had in my entire life, outside of a lucid dream, coming with was the ability to alter reality at will (look at a metal pole, expect it to bend and it does), which is a stark contrast to other psychedelics where you seem to be "along for the ride." It was almost like having a lucid dream while awake.

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This is what I LOVE to hear. :armflap: Of course it doesn't prove anything pharmacologically, but it sure links to two concepts I've put forward already! The most time dilation, the most lucid control, and a tryptamine? :D Thank you for this, Ksero!

After I made that last post I went on a receptor research binge. It would seem that there are quite a few serotonin receptors that are directly involved in the control of GABA release in the hippocampus. 5-HT2A, 5-HT2C, 5-HT3, 5-HT6, and 5-HT7 all seem to increase its release, and 5-HT4 has also been shown to indirectly modulate it with increases in low doses and decreases in high doses when activated alone, but its effect is more variable. With these in mind I start to form an image of psychedelics where the strength of their hallucinations, which seemingly must be activated through 5-HT2A, are dependent on the overall amount of GABA release that the drug causes in the hippocampus, whereas the level of lucidity depends on something else, quite possible the ratio of 5-HT2A receptor affinity and efficacy compared to the other serotonin receptors. I haven't thought quite too deeply in that aspect yet, but I think it could be supported by the fact the bufotenin and psilocin, which are both extremely similar to serotonin in structure, each cause powerful and vivid hallucinations despite the fact that bufotenin is incredibly clearheaded while psilocin is a total mind warp. Bufotenin doesn't seem to display much selectivity between 5-HT2 or 5-HT4, and shows slight selectivity over those for 5-HT3, whereas psilocin seems to be the most selective for 5-HT2 receptors. This same kind of logic seems to hold up well enough when compared to the affinities of other psychedelic compounds for serotonin receptors too, at least as far as I can tell right now.

About the GABA release, I tried to investigate that too. Tryptamines would be the best to look into this for by far both because there's a little more research about them and because they're so similar in structure to serotonin. It's frustratingly difficult to find information about psilocin, but like I said, it seems to be relatively selective for 5-HT2A and 5-HT2C and to a lesser extent 5-HT1A. It could activate other serotonin receptors at higher doses too, but I'm not sure about that, but it's definitely a powerful hallucinogen. However, bufotenin really takes the cake as far as I can tell. In addition to the affinities I mentioned above, it seems to activate 5-HT6 and 5-HT7 as well, but I'm not quite sure to what extent. But what it basically comes down to is that it hits every serotonin receptor that increases GABA levels, that we know of anyway. DMT comes closer to this, but lacks activity is 5-HT3, and a little less importantly, at 5-HT4. LSD is the same but it loses the affinity for 5-HT7 theoretically unless very large doses are taken. I'm not sure if mescaline activates 5-HT6 or 5-HT7 but I would wager it doesn't, but if it does activate 5-HT3 like I speculated before then that would put it on relatively the same level as LSD. All of this would, it seems to me, fit in with the relatively well-accepted idea of bufotenin > DMT > LSD ≈ mescaline > psilocin as far as the structural integrity of their hallucinations go. It also supports the idea that tryptamines will be the most likely to cause lucid dream-like experiences due to the much more variable and widespread activation of serotonin receptors, which is why I was especially happy to hear that your experience involved a tryptamine. However, there are some other factors to consider as well.

Particularly with LSD and mescaline, dopamine receptors may be playing a significant role. Phenethylamines especially are mainly psychedelic due to their similarity to dopamine, rather than serotonin. This involves a favorite neurochemical subject of mine. Mainstream research articles and simplified naming conventions would have you believe that the big three monoamine neurotransmitters, namely serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine, have their set of receptors they work through by the same names (except for "adrenergic" receptors for norepinephrine, and epinephrine) that work solely for them, at least within their set of three. But this is not the case. One of my favorite parts of researching is when I come across this particular kind of ligand-receptor overlap in articles, because it's so incredibly rare that you see anyone talking about it. An example of this which I think could be very relevant to scientific research is that the so-called "dopamine" D4 receptor also binds norepinephrine and epinephrine as ligands at nearly the same potency. Evidence here and here, and that first article even says that norepinephrine and epinephrine bind to D2 receptors as well, though at significantly higher and possibly normally irrelevant concentrations. D4 has actually been implicated in the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, like delusions and hallucinations, and I have to wonder if this is the reason that stimulants, which work almost entirely through increasing levels of dopamine and norepinephrine, cause schizophrenic-like symptoms to emerge so well in high doses. Considering all this, if you ask me, D4 at least should actually be considered both a dopamine receptor and an adrenergic receptor. I'm not totally sure on the implications of this one yet either, but while we're discussing dopamine-norepinephrine crossovers, this article here suggests that dopamine itself may also be activating beta-adrenergic receptors.

The interactions that interest me the most though are those between dopamine and serotonin. I'm not sure if serotonin and norepinephrine connect yet... but there's definitely some cool stuff here. For one, dopamine itself is a partial agonist at 5-HT2A receptors (as is serotonin), as stated here. Even more interesting is the fact that its ability to internalize the receptor increases after sensitization with serotonin, but it still can do it by itself. When I originally found that article a long time ago I came across one that said it binds to 5-HT2C as well, but I wasn't as interested in that at the time and unfortunately lost track of it. However, yesterday when I was trying to dig it up again, I came across something even better! Another study that not only includes information about it binding to 5-HT2C, but to 5-HT1A and 5-HT3 as well, located here. This adds a cool extra kick for me too, because I was already going to highlight dopamine's partial agonist effects at 5-HT3 covered here and here. I think these last two articles contribute to what I'm trying to say too, as they talk about how full agonists and partial agonists effect 5-HT3 differently, which means serotonin and dopamine will act differently at it. What it would basically come down to is the idea that all of these receptors at least, 5-HT1A, 5-HT2A, 5-HT2C, and 5-HT3, could be considered to be both serotonin and dopamine receptors that play distinct roles in the effects of each. This is first of all, I think, pretty important when you're considering the implications for states of mind which involve very high levels of dopamine and very low levels of serotonin, such as REM sleep dreams, or certain anxious or psychotic states. You also have to wonder how exactly these receptor affinities stack when both serotonin and dopamine are high, especially when it comes to how serotonin primes the 5-HT2A receptor for dopamine.

But what I'm really trying to bring this back to is the relevance for psychedelics. People often think that mescaline, for example, is psychedelic because it's similar to dopamine and dopamine is similar to serotonin, but with this I could suggest that it gets its psychedelic properties solely from dopamine similarities, as the serotonin receptors it's known to bind to bind dopamine as well. In fact, with this in mind, I would say that it's quite possible that mescaline is the closest natural chemical, at least that we know of, in both pharmacology and structure to dopamine, and may create its entire spectrum of effects even more fully than a drug which binds only to the D1 through D5 receptors. In this way I feel that you could almost even separate these two categories of psychedelics into totally different categories, one as serotonergic psychedelics and the other as dopaminergic psychedelics, and that could account for such large differences between tryptamines and phenethylamines, and lysergamides which are actually sort of a combination of the two. But I feel that this also calls for other theories for the clarity of mind than what I mentioned before, which is of course how I got to this point in the first place. When we take these drugs, these "false" neurotransmitters, what we're doing is changing the natural ratio of receptor activity in our brain. Those different ratios that account for different hallucinogen effects have a natural state as set up by our natural neurotransmitters, and the more of a false one we take the more we shift our neural activity in that direction. Given this, and given that bufotenin is the most similar to serotonin in structure and function while mescaline is the most similar to dopamine, is it not entirely possible that they each get their clearheaded mindsets due to the fact that they're the most similar to the states that our brains are used to maintaining for normal functioning of consciousness? That doesn't necessarily rule out what I said before either, but it does make it harder to suggest that GABA release may be one of the only significant factors here. It doesn't deter me, though.

Since my last post I've been trying to tie this all into my last big theory about serotonin, which revolves around causing the hallucinogenic side of near-death experiences. The idea would be both just to try to get a grip on that and to explain why drugs such as DMT are so well-known for creating those kinds of trips. And now that I have this GABA-based dream theory, I think I can begin to pull it all together nicely. Normally, it's bad to raise serotonin too much, as evidenced from things like serotonin syndrome following a MDMA overdose. However, it is known to cause hallucinations despite not causing the normal psychedelic sensory syndrome, and if enough GABA was released then this could logically happen at high enough concentrations anyway, as it would stimulate those GABA(A) receptors enough to cause the dopamine facilitation I mentioned before. You don't normally ever have your serotonin levels this high, except for one situation which would raise them in the brain but not body and ignore these physical hazards: during states of high carbon dioxide detection. To monitor if you need to take a breath (to survive), your body actually keeps track of how much carbon dioxide you have in you rather than how much oxygen you have in you, and these receptors that detect carbon dioxide are called chemoreceptors, or chemosensors if your prefer. Serotonin neurons specifically in the raphe nucleus in the brain, and receptors in some other areas as well, act as carbon dioxide chemoreceptors, and the raphe nucleus is the major source of serotonin neurons in the same way that the ventral tegmental area is the major source of dopamine neurons. Because of this, when carbon dioxide detection is very high serotonin will begin to fire all over the brain, including the hippocampus. This is of course what would happen when you stopped breathing, whether or not you died by suffocation. Interestingly, there's also a quasi-psychedelic mixture known as carbogen which had been used in psychiatric settings to test peoples' reactions to psychedelic states of mind before letting them try LSD, back when it was still spreading to people like Timothy Leary. This is a mixture that contains 30% carbon dioxide and 70% oxygen, which means it gives you more than enough to survive perfectly well, but it also makes your brain think you're suffocating and it begins the same chemical cascade that reasonably could be behind a near-death experience. Accordingly, it is known to cause dissociation which feels sort of similar to nitrous oxide in the way it's administered and begins with an out-of-body experience, but it much more colorful and psychedelic with spiritual and reflective themes and vivid scenes.

I love bringing this all together for my theory because it allows me to categorize each chemical nicely. Dopamine is at the source, more of an imagination-generator than anything. GABA would be the chemical which enhances that imagination circuit to the point of creating the dream world. And serotonin is the chemical which activates that dream world circuit in a way designed specifically to create near-death experiences, while carbon dioxide releases it to start off that whole chain. I think there logically must be another path that eventually leads to GABA for regular dreams too, but that's another issue.... Interestingly, serotonin should also then directly modify the way imagination works at the source through activating some of the same receptors as dopamine, and this could logically play into the different kind of experience. This also fits well with the way you can divide up the different hallucinogens. The dopaminergic psychedelics are more abstract, pure euphoric fantasy, and just chaotic. On the next level up, muscimol, which is really the only natural GABAergic hallucinogen we know of, creates dream-like experiences. Then, you have the serotonergic psychedelics which recreate near-death experiences in high doses. What all of these would come down to is that they activate these same processes in the brain, only with some differences, and that's why they can get so bizarre, but still create experiences which are so similar on various levels. Following this logic, I have to ask myself if it's possible for a serotonergic psychedelic to have the exact right structure to shift the simulated near-death experience to a more lucid level of thought than even serotonin itself, by just having the exact right ratio of receptor activity but taken even a step further than how serotonin achieves it? If this was possible, and if it did so particularly by releasing GABA as I mentioned before, then I think it could reasonably account for an experience that was both spiritual and intense like the near-death experience should be, but had an even more powerful and vivid dreamscape with more of a potential for lucid awareness and control than the natural experience should have. As far as I'm concerned, following this path of activity would be the first step towards creating some of the most incredible states of mind we're possible of reaching and further understanding the intricacies of our minds.

And that's why I'm so excited about tryptamines. Bufotenin seems like it could logically do this to me, but it would be foolish to rule out any tryptamine because you never know when they might have just the right structure to make it happen. So again, thank you so much for the anecdote about 4-HO-MPT! It is very much appreciated! :biggrin:

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Originally Posted by Ksero

On the role of GABA, my first intentional lucid was after I took a 100mg pill of GABA before a WBTB attempt, I am aware that GABA does not cross the blood-brain barrier when taken orally, but it definitely does something, if taken before bed I have extremely vivid and intense dreams, sometimes becoming lucid without reality checks.

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This has played into my suspicions as well, it's definitely something to consider. Thanks for that too, you've been very helpful! :)

^^ Here's a practical thought that just occurred to me, Alyzarin: Are any of these drugs/chemicals legal in the doses you might envision (especially if GABA, for instance, needs to be taken some way other than orally)? Will they need prescriptions to be acquired?

These sorts of questions may seem silly or premature when you're still in the academic phase of considering the drugs, but if they represent classes of chemicals that are pretty much out of your average LD'er's reach, perhaps that should be noted? Or is it too soon?

Of course, if these things are available OTC or online, never mind!

Well, I can only really say for sure about the US since the laws are going to be different everywhere, but LSD, psilocin, mescaline, DMT, and bufotenin are not legal to possess in any amount, though the last three are easily quasi-legally obtainable if you know what you're doing, and psilocin grows in mushrooms all over the place. But of course, directly taking psychedelics would be a pretty bad idea for lucid dreaming, as they work in several areas of the brain not involved in hallucinations as well and usually involve a strong physical component which can keep you wired and awake even for hours after the trip ends. Muscimol, on the other hand, has sedative properties due to working through GABA receptors, and is perfectly legal. If taken in incredibly large doses it may be hard to sleep through too, but in more reasonable (and less hallucination-chasing) doses, it has actually been known to be used as a dream supplement. Some even describe going to sleep shortly after dosing and before the trip kicks in, as it often results in a state of lucid and incredibly bizarre dreams. It is the principle chemical component of the mushroom Amanita muscaria, the big red one with white dots which was a model for the Mario mushrooms, supposedly for Alice in Wonderland, and some other stuff, and is essentially responsible for all of its effects. This practice doesn't seem to be incredibly common anymore, at least not in the mainstream lucid dreaming communities, but it is still valid and sometimes explored by the druggier side of the scene, or by those wishing to expand beyond the normal supplement database. I personally have quite a lot of interest in it, since I don't really trip anymore but I would still like to use these hallucinogens to my advantage for these things.

As for the chemicals they effect, those are reasonably already being used. GABA of course is sometimes used directly, as mentioned before, but it's not thought of as the best method. I haven't tried it much with it, but picamilon is easily obtainable and legal, and it's basically a fusion of GABA and niacin (vitamin B3) which allows for stronger blood-brain barrier penetration for GABA. Dopamine is also being used by way of L-phenylalanine, L-tyrosine, and L-DOPA, which are all precursors for it. The same can be said of serotonin with L-tryptophan and 5-HTP. However, there is something to consider here particularly with the latter two, but possibly with the first as well. No matter what drugs we take, they're not going to be as selective in action as those released specifically at their site of effect in the brain. For instance, cannabinoids (CB1 receptor agonists) injected directly into the hippocampus generate REM sleep, but taking them exogenously, such as when smoking weed, inhibits REM sleep. This is because it's only those CB1 receptors in the hippocampus which are favorable, while those in other parts of the brain lead to chemical reactions which will ultimately impair our ability to properly generate dreams and those brainwaves. In a regular dream this doesn't matter because the brain might only be releasing endocannabinoids in the hippocampus and nowhere else, but currently it is incredibly difficult for us to get this type of specificity with drug administration. This could be said of the dopamine and serotonin precursors as well, which, while they may be enhancing dreams to some smaller extent due to increased neurotransmitter availability, are actually known to inhibit REM and therefore get their most potent effects as those neurotransmitters are metabolized and removed from use, allowing for REM rebound.

Arguably, the best way to go about increasing these neurotransmitters that we know of right now would be to increase their biosynthesis cofactors, allowing the brain to make them more efficiently and direct them to only the correct places for use. This is the end of result of taking, for example, vitamins. Several B vitamins, particularly B6, and vitamin C are all involved in the synthesis of dopamine and serotonin. Some minerals such as zinc, iron, and magnesium also play a role. B6 is also used as a cofactor for GABA synthesis, so it's not hard to imagine why it could be such a useful supplement.

Aside from that, this information is mostly for the goal of understanding at the moment, or for experimenting with hallucinogenic states which would be induced exogenously rather than something endogenous like a dream, as those are really the only ones that we have the ability to control scientifically at the moment. However, that doesn't mean that the proper theories couldn't help us get to that point some day!

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Originally Posted by Sageous

^^ Here's a practical thought that just occurred to me, Alyzarin: Are any of these drugs/chemicals legal in the doses you might envision (especially if GABA, for instance, needs to be taken some way other than orally)? Will they need prescriptions to be acquired?

These sorts of questions may seem silly or premature when you're still in the academic phase of considering the drugs, but if they represent classes of chemicals that are pretty much out of your average LD'er's reach, perhaps that should be noted? Or is it too soon?

Of course, if these things are available OTC or online, never mind!

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The legality of these vary by country, and while I know it is possible to get 4-HO-MPT (as well as many other tryptamines and phenaltheylines) online in Canada, I'm pretty sure it is covered under the Federal Analogue Act in the USA, being very similar in chemical structure to illegal drugs. I believe this is because they are just for recreational use at this point, if it was medically relevant or had some positive therapeutic effects it may be reclassified.

You can get straight GABA pills at pretty much any health foods store in Canada, there are also a bunch of online retailers who you can get pure powder from (which is way cheaper), but you would then have to weigh out specific doses and put them into pills your self.

Alyzarin there are a few more experiences I would like to let you know about, the first was with 2-CI which is a synthetic analogue of mescaline, It was extremely clear headed, and filled with geometric type hallucinations, very cool, also had that kind of trip control that I had with 4-HO-MPT, I would have been comfortable going about doing my normal daily tasks, like going out to the store while under the influence. Unfortunately, it seems to be classified as a Schedule I drug now in the US, so that might make obtaining difficult/a bad idea.

The other is diphenhydramine, available in OTC gravol/benadryl, when taken in high doses it has this weird effect where you will fall into a sleep like state without noticing it, while a hallucination takes over as your primary sense of reality. for example you could be sitting at your computer writing a post a dreamviews, finish it, hit the post button, then go to your room, get undressed and tuck yourself in to go to sleep, blink, and you are back sitting at your computer, you haven't actually done anything, but the hallucination was 100% convincing, very similar to schizophrenia. A friend of mine thought he was in his best freinds basement while he was walking around our residence in my 1st year of university. It's a real mind****, the downside is it has an extremely heavy body load at these dosages, including lowered heart rate and difficulty breathing, as well as you look completely retarded to anyone on the outside. Would not recommend this to anyone, but I would be interested to know how it achieves this effect.

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Originally Posted by Ksero

Alyzarin there are a few more experiences I would like to let you know about, the first was with 2-CI which is a synthetic analogue of mescaline, It was extremely clear headed, and filled with geometric type hallucinations, very cool, also had that kind of trip control that I had with 4-HO-MPT, I would have been comfortable going about doing my normal daily tasks, like going out to the store while under the influence. Unfortunately, it seems to be classified as a Schedule I drug now in the US, so that might make obtaining difficult/a bad idea.

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Thanks again for the input. :) 2C-I is something I happen to have experience with as well, and it is indeed, through relation to mescaline, quite similar in structure to dopamine. It is remarkably clearheaded too, and I can say at least from personal experience that this remains relatively true even at doses as high as 90 mg. Most phenethylamines seem to be pretty clear compared to most tryptamines, and I would wager that if what I theorized before is true then this could be explainable by the fact phenethylamines would be more on the level of effecting imagination and euphoria at the center without much need for emotional changes, whereas tryptamines would be recreating an entire transcendental experience which would of course take you a little further away from normal consciousness.

For the record, I wouldn't recommend taking 90 mg of 2C-I since we know so little about the safety of research chemicals, I'm kind of reckless lol. But the experience was quite intense, the body feeling was like an orgasm times a thousand, and I even saw entities. There were these ghostly blue girls in trippy outfits who were constantly phasing through me and moaning as they did, and as they moved through me I felt their touch within me just as if I had actually been touched, which would cause every atom in my being to rupture with incredible euphoria, which would also cause shockwaves that would then do the same to every other atom in the immediate vicinity, and so on and so forth.... I was completely 100% aware of what was going on at the time, no significant mental inhibitions at all. I feel that my experience, yours, and others' collectively support my theory pretty well.

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Originally Posted by Ksero

The other is diphenhydramine, available in OTC gravol/benadryl, when taken in high doses it has this weird effect where you will fall into a sleep like state without noticing it, while a hallucination takes over as your primary sense of reality. for example you could be sitting at your computer writing a post a dreamviews, finish it, hit the post button, then go to your room, get undressed and tuck yourself in to go to sleep, blink, and you are back sitting at your computer, you haven't actually done anything, but the hallucination was 100% convincing, very similar to schizophrenia. A friend of mine thought he was in his best freinds basement while he was walking around our residence in my 1st year of university. It's a real mind****, the downside is it has an extremely heavy body load at these dosages, including lowered heart rate and difficulty breathing, as well as you look completely retarded to anyone on the outside. Would not recommend this to anyone, but I would be interested to know how it achieves this effect.

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First, I would like to reiterate the last point here for anyone else reading. Do not use diphenhydramine to hallucinate. (Heck, I wouldn't even recommend using it for it's intended medicinal purpose.) Diphenhydramine is part of a hallucinogenic spectrum I have not yet mentioned here, the third major category which is generally placed next to psychedelics and dissociatives, known as deliriants. While there are some who consider these drugs useful for reasons such as astral travel, generally only in the most severe and reckless groups of psychonauts, most drug users will actively warn you against deliriants even while recommending wholeheartedly everything else because they are well-known for their potential to create incredibly long-lasting deficits in memory, motor control, and visual systems (up to and including lingering hallucinations), and often for negatively effecting vital organs, which increases with every use. Diphenhydramine in particular has been shown to have detrimental effects on heart function, which could go from only happening during the trip to something more permanent if it's used too frequently.

That being said, deliriants are something that interest me greatly. They are directly anticholinergic in nature, they work by blocking the activity of muscarinic acetylcholine receptors, usually (but not always) relatively non-selectively. It's because of this that they cause severe disruptions in the way memories are encoded, understood, and recalled, which greatly contributes to the state of frank delirium from which these drugs get their name, a state in which blackouts, confusion, amnesia, and an overall mindset similar to non-lucidity occur. I actually did touch on this briefly I believe in my first post, when I mentioned that anticholinergics were one of the drugs which could cause your consciousness to blackout without making your body totally shut down. These drugs also don't cause even slightest amount of euphoria, in fact they pretty much make you feel like shit, unless you take so much that you have absolutely no idea what's going on anymore. They've even been used as poisons throughout history because they're so effectively disabling and toxic, through mechanisms unrelated to their psychological effects. There's not really much desirable about these drugs at all, other than that they do cause very vivid and realistic hallucinations. But that alone is enough to bring people who have an insatiable hunger for experimenting to try them out, people like me.

The highest dose of diphenhydramine I ever took was 1000 mg, which amounts to 40 of the basic strength Benadryl pills they sell here. I also took it on several occasions in doses between 300 and 700 mg, usually not very close together (thankfully). The hallucinations are extremely realistic and often completely indistinguishable from reality, at least until you've tripped on it enough to recognize the subtle differences and learn how to combat the delirium. They also work remarkably similar to dreams, including various things such as people walking into the room and talking to you, scenes randomly changing, and a similar feeling to "freedom" from the normal constraints of reality which I relate very much to just observing things in a lucid dream. There is also a distinct similarity in the kinds of hallucinations produced by deliriants versus psychedelics, minus all of the raw sensory stuff, though it can be difficult to understand without actually experiencing them both. However, what really interests me here is the way that people often say that muscimol also has a deliriant aspect, and that anticholinergics are really the only thing it can be related to in that regard. I haven't personally taken a large dose of muscimol, but I have taken enough to experience some of these deliriant-like effects, and I must say they are quite similar in many ways.

The anticholinergic that you see in research articles will almost universally be scopolamine, the most hallucinogenic chemical in most plants that contain tropane deliriants, such as datura, belladonna, brugmansia, henbane, mandrake, and etc. Diphenhydramine sometimes appears, but mostly just for antihistamine research. Scopolamine is much more selective in its action, and has been used safely in very low doses (relative to hallucinogenic effects) for things such as motion sickness, insomnia, anesthesia, and occasionally in small quantities of datura seeds as a dream enhancer. What's interesting though is that scopolamine, and by extension you can assume other anticholinergics, directly enhance the release of GABA in the hippocampus. It's possible that it does this by disrupting a system that acetylcholine has in place which works as sort of a flood control for GABA. When acetylcholine levels are very high then GABA levels can be lowered, unless they're also being directly increased by something else even more strongly, which would be the case with something like psychedelics, or dreams and near-death experiences if my theories are correct. This likely plays some role in regulating resting levels of consciousness, among other things. But because of this, when the receptors that cause this control, certain muscarinic acetylcholine receptors, are blocked, they facilitate more GABA release than is normally occurring, which could allow for heavy GABA(A) stimulation and all of the same things I've been talking about up to this point. Given the dream-like hallucinations and the comparisons to muscimol, it wouldn't surprise me at all if this is how they get their hallucinogenic effects.

So yes, anticholinergic deliriants actually could be another good example of this that would support what I'm saying. However, they should definitely not be considered for recreational use like the rest of these drugs might be. It is possible, though, that some of the dream-enhancing effects of scopolamine come from this increased GABA release, but any drug that blocks muscarinic acetylcholine receptors would be quite counterintuitive as far as becoming lucid goes.

I am not sure it is true that you can do everything in your dream because then you would be able to time dilate.

I had a fantastic dream this morning, and for the first time ever it told me how long it lasted (not sure if accurate or not but still cool). I was at my first day of work at an amazing restaurant in California. I for some reason thought in my dream this would be really hard to keep. After what felt like a long time in the dream I got fired and my boss told me I lasted 2.3 hours which actually seems accurate in what I did in the dream. Pretty cool, maybe there is a way to tell your brain the amount of time you want to spend in the dream.

Time Dilation is possible, you can whether ask your subconscious to stretch time.

I also have been thinking about other apparent time dilation events in hopes of improving my expectation for them in LDs. I spoke at length with a guy who survived a plane crash and claimed that he had one of those near death experiences. When you Google "life flashed before my eyes" there are many examples of people who saw their entire lives flash before their eyes in the couple of seconds it took for a car crash to happen. Seems to me that if these "life review" accounts are true ??? then obviously our brains have the capacity to process a whole lifetime of events in a few seconds. I can't see why we can't dream a whole lifetime of events in a few seconds.

A few more thoughts, I'll try to keep this one shorter so I don't keep torturing you guys....

I looked a little more into the way natural REM generation works during sleep. I've known for a while that it's mainly activated by a cluster of different areas in the brainstem, which is also involved in REM atonia (sleep paralysis). It seems that areas known as pre-locus coeruleus and medial parabrachial nucleus, which are located in the same area as the pons which is usually studied for REM sleep, project to the medial septal nucleus. This last one and the hippocampus actually have reciprocal GABA and acetylcholine connections, and so activation of the medial septal nucleus like this causes theta wave activity to begin during REM sleep due to these projections, and is involved in it during waking states as well. The neurons which begin this process in the brainstem areas seem to be glutamatergic in nature, and both glutamate and acetylcholine neurons in brainsteam have been known for a while to be REM-on switches, while serotonin neurons there are REM-off. This whole process would be I think so far the most likely explanation for how the brain could cause the excitatory GABA action during regular REM sleep dreams.

Aside from dreams, another thing that recently came to mind is sex. Hallucinations can sometimes occur during "regular" sex, but are much more likely during practices such as BDSM and activities to awaken kundalini, in which phenomena such as out-of-body experiences and psychedelic alterations in perception of self can occur. The last two of these both involve heavy focus on sensual pleasures to get the most you possibly can out of the experience, and this should cause releases in oxytocin and vasopressin. I actually found a study last night that suggests that these two together may cause a GABA switch from inhibitory to excitatory during hyperosmotic stress, but even without that, what I'm interested in is the fact that oxytocin releases GABA in both the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex. The latter could be responsible for some of the psychedelic identity distortions of sex, but the former would of course be significant for the out-of-body experiences. Oxytocin is released from physical touch as a pro-social hormone, and is involved in the feelings of trust, connection, and euphoria from sexual activity. It would make sense that in someone particularly sensitive to it it could have stronger effects potentially leading to hallucinations from regular sex, but as the BDSM and kundalini practices are actually focused on pushing it as far as possible, it wouldn't surprise me at all if they get their effects that way.

Lastly, I've been thinking more about the connection between anticholinergic deliriants and dreams. In certain psychonaut communities it's becoming more well-known of a practice to mix small amounts of tropane deliriants, like datura seeds, with plants that contain a chemical called scopoletin. This causes the hallucinations to come out at a much lower dose at relatively full strength, without any of the normally-associated delirium or toxic symptoms of use. Scopoletin is actually remarkably similar to galantamine in the way it works, the two have actually been compared in scientific literature before, and I can't help but relate this in mind to galantamine enhancing dreams. Most importantly for us here, it works as an acetylcholinesterase and either an agonist or a positive allosteric modulator of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. This always amazed me, because why in the world would a compound with raises acetylcholine, which is known to be used for anticholinergic overdose reversal, be able to enhance the hallucinations of an anticholinergic drug? But, I think I have a possible solution for it now. In the hippocampus, muscarinic M2 receptors serve as acetylcholine autoreceptors, which are that same kind of flood control working, too much acetylcholine begins to inhibit its own release. It's known that anticholinergic block this autoreceptor, because they actually cause a release of acetylcholine this way. However, those presynaptic M2 receptors are also known to be the most direct method of acetylcholine's GABA flood control as well. My main thought here would be that scopoletin causes reactivation of muscarinic acetylcholine receptors, but if the dose of a deliriant is small enough to only significantly block those presynaptic M2 receptors without yet hitting the postsynaptic ones, it may shift this activity both so that acetylcholine levels stay high and keep you lucid but the ratio of GABA to acetylcholine is higher than normal. And because those acetylcholine levels have gone up, it may be worth considering that the already-increased GABA will begin to shift even more toward excitatory due to the downstream inhibition of carbonic anhydrase I mentioned before, which could cause the hallucinations to become more likely without dosing high as to adversely effect cognition.

So that's what I've been thinking about since I last posted. I'm really hoping that if I can get a really solid framework for this down then I'll be able to get a lot more out it, hopefully in areas such as here with time dilation.

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Originally Posted by Lucidpotential

I also have been thinking about other apparent time dilation events in hopes of improving my expectation for them in LDs. I spoke at length with a guy who survived a plane crash and claimed that he had one of those near death experiences. When you Google "life flashed before my eyes" there are many examples of people who saw their entire lives flash before their eyes in the couple of seconds it took for a car crash to happen. Seems to me that if these "life review" accounts are true ??? then obviously our brains have the capacity to process a whole lifetime of events in a few seconds. I can't see why we can't dream a whole lifetime of events in a few seconds.

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I've had this in mind, too.... However, I have to point out that it probably wasn't literally his whole life that flashed before his eyes, or anyone else's. I would bet that if you asked him deeper questions about it would mostly relate to important events in his life, which would obviously be on your mind at the time, and I think could relate to how I said that the hallucinations your brain makes will just depend on your state of mind as they would in regular levels of imagination. For instance, I'm sure he saw the things that mattered the most to him because he was worried about losing them, but I would bet money that he didn't relive every meal, shower, and bathroom break he ever experienced.

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Originally Posted by Lucidpotential

I also have been thinking about other apparent time dilation events in hopes of improving my expectation for them in LDs. I spoke at length with a guy who survived a plane crash and claimed that he had one of those near death experiences. When you Google "life flashed before my eyes" there are many examples of people who saw their entire lives flash before their eyes in the couple of seconds it took for a car crash to happen. Seems to me that if these "life review" accounts are true ??? then obviously our brains have the capacity to process a whole lifetime of events in a few seconds. I can't see why we can't dream a whole lifetime of events in a few seconds.

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issue here is your assuming its our brains responsible. Science hasn't confirmed that consciousness is created by the brain, despite many attempts. More and more healthy skeptical scientists are gravitating towards the filter hypothesis, where the brain reduces and filters consciousness, like a TV set picks up signals from satellites or ground cables and filters and displays them. If you smash the Tv, you didn't erase the signal. Whats crazy is this hypothesis explains a lot that the brain based hypothesis can't and explains what the brain based one can as well. We don't know what consciousness is. People who have NDE's report linear time not existing at all, where they see feel and live they're whole life at the same time, in a totally paradoxical way, and they feel what the people and beings felt when they harmed them in some way, as a way of learning, etc etc. True NDE's change peoples lives and are very intense

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Originally Posted by tofur

issue here is your assuming its our brains responsible. Science hasn't confirmed that consciousness is created by the brain, despite many attempts.

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Which attempts are these, exactly?

trying to locate memories stored in the brain, the source of electrical activity in the brain (we can trace it to a certain point, but can't figure out what gives rise to the first bit of activity, it gets to a point where it seems to come out of nowhere and some unseen force outside the brain is creating it), etc. I don't pretend to be as intelligent as the people dedicating their lives to this kind of work, I just read what conclusions they have come to. The ones who aren't attached to the dogmatic materialist view on things are shying away from concluding the brain produces consciousness, as crazy as that sounds. True science doesn't care if it sounds crazy, it just follows the evidence. At the moment nothing is set in stone, we just dont know enough and we've been very held back by the rigid views of classical physics and peoples resistance to where the evidence is leading. Pretty standard response though, nothing new in humanities history.

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Originally Posted by tofur

trying to locate memories stored in the brain, the source of electrical activity in the brain (we can trace it to a certain point, but can't figure out what gives rise to the first bit of activity, it gets to a point where it seems to come out of nowhere and some unseen force outside the brain is creating it), etc.

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I'm not even sure what you mean by that.... Electricity in the brain is generated from the incredible amount of chemical reactions occurring simultaneously. Science is well aware of this. You're going to have to be more specific on that if I'm misunderstanding something.

As for where memories are recorded, I recommend you read this: Optogenetic stimulation of a hippocampal engram activates fear memory recall. This is a study which tests individual neuron clusters in mice as a theoretical basis of where memories are stored. They condition certain rats with fear memory and then label the brain cells in the hippocampus, long thought to be a major memory center, that were activated at the time of the conditioning. When they stimulated only these specific clusters later, the mice which were not conditioned showed no reaction but the mice which were began to react as if the fear-inducing event was happening again. When they later removed the neurons, the mice lost this reaction. The conclusion was that these neuron clusters seem highly probable as a place where memories (or memory fragments, as memories are known to not be stored as a whole regardless of where they are) are recorded, and as a focus of how memories could be theoretically removed. If you can find any theory or information which has more weight than this, I'm all ears.

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Originally Posted by tofur

I don't pretend to be as intelligent as the people dedicating their lives to this kind of work, I just read what conclusions they have come to. The ones who aren't attached to the dogmatic materialist view on things are shying away from concluding the brain produces consciousness, as crazy as that sounds. True science doesn't care if it sounds crazy, it just follows the evidence. At the moment nothing is set in stone, we just dont know enough and we've been very held back by the rigid views of classical physics and peoples resistance to where the evidence is leading. Pretty standard response though, nothing new in humanities history.

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Evidence supporting something and lack of evidence against something are not the same thing. Just because there has been, up until recently, some issues in discovering the location of memories in the brain doesn't mean even slightly that they must be stored somewhere else. The brain is unbelievably complex and so much of it is beyond our knowledge that the thought that we should have figured out everything about it by now is completely laughable.

You are right in saying that "true" science follows the evidence, no matter what. So where is the evidence that what you're saying is correct?

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Originally Posted by torfur

issue here is your assuming its our brains responsible. Science hasn't confirmed that consciousness is created by the brain, despite many attempts. More and more healthy skeptical scientists are gravitating towards the filter hypothesis, where the brain reduces and filters consciousness, like a TV set picks up signals from satellites or ground cables and filters and displays them. If you smash the Tv, you didn't erase the signal. Whats crazy is this hypothesis explains a lot that the brain based hypothesis can't and explains what the brain based one can as well. We don't know what consciousness is. People who have NDE's report linear time not existing at all, where they see feel and live they're whole life at the same time, in a totally paradoxical way, and they feel what the people and beings felt when they harmed them in some way, as a way of learning, etc etc. True NDE's change peoples lives and are very intense

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The problem I see with the idea that the brain is merely the filter for, rather than the origin of, the mind, is that this idea is inconsistent with the fact that if you were to 'smash' only part of the brain, then that person loses or suffers impairments in whatever function that region of the brain was responsible for (i.e. those lacking a hippocampus lose the ability to create new explicit memories). Where if it were true that the brain is merely a 'filter', destroying part of it should let more of the signal through, but this does not appear to be the case.

I would agree with you that consciousness itself is rather mysterious, and it's plausible that science will never truly understand it, simply because it's so difficult to study. But what we can study rather well are the contents of consciousness (thoughts, memories, emotions), and I don't think it's premature at all to assert that those contents are coming to us straight from the brain.

Still...

Ever try to use a clogged filter? Maybe when you are "smashing" a portion of the brain, you're merely causing it to be unable to filter a certain portion of conscious activity into physical reality? In other words, consciousness is intact, but its connection to waking reality is frazzled.

Just a thought...

It would seem to me in that case, Sageous, that if the entire brain was destroyed, experiencing conscious states would become impossible because their connection to the real world would be permanently out of order. I can't say for sure, but I doubt this is what advocates of the brain as a filer/reciever hypothesis believe, as the whole point of their idea seems (at least to me) to be to present a reasonable non physical basis for consciousness, that isn't completely at odds with neuroscience and, most importantly, allows for experience after death, which doesn't follow if a functional brain is needed for the 'signal' to be experienced.

The filter hypothesis also seems to be inconsistent with the fact that we can induce certain conscious states quite reliably by stimulating certain brain areas. For instance, if we can see that the amygdala is active while someone is in a state of fear, and if we can induce a state of fear by activating the amygdala, then we have more than a mere correlation, but clear cause and effect. I don't see any room for an outside signal here, if you don't think that our activating the relevant brain region to induce fear is actually where the fear is coming from, then I guess you could claim that the outside fear signal is coming in at the exact same time that the activation is taking place, but this is obviously an unparsimonious explanation. All we need to explain the fear is the brain activation, you're adding an extra, unnecessary, dimension.

I agree with sageous on this. Think of the brain to the mind as the body parts to the brain. If you smash part of it, or you cut the nerve to a body part, it will stop working, weather the info is there or not, since the connection is lost. So you smash part of the brain and nothing can travel through it anymore. Hope I am making sense and understanding this concept. :P

Something else just occurred to me in relation to time dilation. This is probably going to get a bit more metaphysical than my previous posts on the subject, so be warned. I was thinking about deliriants more when I thought of this. I've mentioned my views on what perception is, in that what we are experiencing is simply our memories being recorded into existence. I also stated that I believe that our perception of time is the measurement of the measurement of change. I now feel that this is an incomplete view on my part. It's suddenly struck me that our awareness of the situation must be seriously considered as well, as this is in its own way a measurement of our perception. Which, yes, means that the way we experience time would actually be a measurement of a measurement of a measurement of change.

I actually owe this train of thought to the above discussion. Because of this, I'm going to attempt to briefly explain my views on what awareness is before moving on. In relation to the topic of whether or not the brain acts as some sort of instrument which either communicates with or creates some plane of existence which is beyond, but interwoven with, our physical perception, I feel that this is true in at least some way. I believe that the fact that we perceive at all is proof of this. I feel that this point may not be very clear, so let me try to explain with a metaphor. If you program a robot to be able to act relatively human, do you think it will actually have a subjective point of view like we do as living beings? Or is it simply a machine that's running as it's told to, with nothing actually being experienced by it? Similarly, the human body is simply a network of chemical reactions which is working how it's supposed to, and this relates to how I mentioned before that you can shut off perception with depressant drugs while the body remains in motion. However, memories will not be recorded, and that brings me to this point. Somewhere in the process that encodes memories, life is born. A subjective perspective emerges seemingly from nothing, and is locked into that one network. This process is incredibly important to our regular functioning as well, as it allows our brain to pick and choose in a sense which perceptions it pays attention to. But what conceivable process is the brain tapping into which allows for such an incredible occurrence? How does it manage to achieve something which has baffled humankind for so long? Now, I'm not going to say no one will ever know... but personally, I would not be surprised if it could be lumped into the same category as trying to figure out the beginning of all existence. We live in universe with rules, and those rules have to have been defined by something constant, but for that something constant to exist it must have been defined by rules as well, which must have been constant... ad infinitum. Infinity is something that the human will never be able to comprehend, because either we didn't require it to exist or because it simply isn't possible with what we were given. As far as I'm concerned, there's no reason that the same might not be happening with life, with awareness. Even if we one day come to understand the chemical reactions with bring it about, it doesn't mean we'll ever be able to directly measure it, or that we'll ever be able to understand what makes one subjective perspective different from another ("Why am I me and not you?"), and it may genuinely be impossible as the brain simply didn't need to learn how to integrate it into the world we see as a part of our evolution. And thus, subjectivity remains ever elusive to us.

Hopefully I made my point on that well enough... but feel free to ask questions if I didn't. So, back to deliriants. I was considering how I'd mentioned before that they increase the release of GABA in the hippocampus by blocking the activity of muscarinic acetylcholine receptors. Because of this, though they would feasibly cause enough GABA stimulation to make the inhibitory-to-excitatory switch, they still cause severe deficits in memory. But it is in addition to causing dream-like hallucinations, which suggests that they are still causing the same downstream effects as the other drugs and experiences I mentioned. This could imply based on what I'd said so far that deliriants should cause time dilation as well, but they often don't, despite being able to cause these same intense and removing experiences. In fact, they often cause time to pass by much more quickly. This relates to how memory is important in time dilation, as I mentioned before with the thought that brought me to research more about GABA in the first place, but it made me think a step further this time. Up until this point I've been thinking about this with awareness and the amount of information your brain is processing at once being tied together, but they're not. GABA may be able to inhibit or enhance memory based on how it's working, but just as how it works downstream through dopamine to effect hallucinations, so does it work downstream to effect memory. It's not at the core, and if that central core process is disrupted then it won't matter how much upstream memory stimulation you have. This would be why deliriants could constantly increase the amount of information needed to be processed but still drop awareness potentially down to nothing, because acetylcholine is closer to the core of memory. I carried this thought on to the idea that even if your brain's processing power and the amount of information it was recording were completely maximized, it would mean nothing if you had no subjective experience of it. Your perception of time would still be zero.

This leads me to a somewhat distressing thought, that our perceptions of time are directly linked to something we can't understand. Of course, it doesn't really surprise me, but from a scientific view it makes things tough. However, like I said at the beginning of this post, I am willing to reach into metaphysics as well. The first thing that occurs to me is that though I do believe that the chemical components required for generation of subjectivity exist within our brain in the physical planes we have come to understand, the outcome of those chemical reactions (our awareness) may not. This opens up the door for an immense amount of speculation, the most significant to me being that this field of perception that is what we are could be able to hold a much larger amount of information than would be expected by us based on the amount of data that our physical brains are able to "send" to it. I'm not going to pretend to have even the slightest idea of what more specific details this could entail, but just to give an example of what I'm talking about.... The brain picks up or puts together all these raw sensory signals, encodes them, picks important information out of them, and then sends them all to the mental map in the hippocampus to be written into memory, right? Well - and I'd like to very much reiterate that this is not even a theory, its just a THOUGHT that I don't think is entirely impossible, just the track my mind is following to keep itself entertained - what if those incoming signals are actually something of a seed which is then used to cause a reaction which is significantly greater than itself? I can relate this to forms in nature, such as mountain ranges and many plants, which make use of easily identifiable fractal geometry. The brain makes use of this as well, as is easily seen during a hallucinogenic experience, particularly of the psychedelic variety. Especially considering that, what if those signals were just the brain fine-tuning it's basic fractal equations which then are somehow used in the reaction which creates our awareness to generate the world we see? Now, in the waking world I could see some possible issues with this, depending on how you want to spin it. But what about in a totally internal environment, like a dream? Acetylcholine seemingly doesn't make you hallucinate when you're awake, but it does make hallucinations and the dream world more intense and complex. What if, in these internally-generated states, acetylcholine's control over this awareness creation changed so that each linear increase in cholinergic activity amounted to something more like an exponential growth in our subjective experience?

Of course, it's highly likely that an actual process, if one were to work like that, would require more than just acetylcholine to work, but I don't think that's entirely unsupported by what we do know either. For example, one thing to consider could be the idea that even that fractal reaction would be constrained by other factors in the brain such as the amount of processing power our minds are using. In a state such as one induced by a psychedelic or in my hypothetical near-death experience this could be avoided by the simultaneous increase in levels of acetylcholine, GABA, dopamine, and other things. But while dopamine and acetylcholine levels are also high in dreams, it's important to remember other things as well. Despite the higher cholinergic activity, memory is still disrupted by non-lucidity through some potentially even more direct mechanism. Given what I've said, it's possible that non-lucidity actually causes time to flow faster in this way despite what I've mentioned in previous posts so far. Becoming lucid may overcome this by raising acetylcholine levels even higher and making things more vivid, but this is not a psychedelic state. It's very possible that during a dream if acetylcholine levels go up then GABA levels will go down, because of the flood control thing I mentioned before. Normally it would also shift GABA more from inhibitory to excitatory which would make up for some of this, but if GABA is already running strongly in that sense during a dream, then would it matter? If that's the case, I could imagine that that may actually be involved in why random activities in the dream world, and the "bizarreness" of the dream, can drop once you achieve lucidity, because the amount of random information being pumped into it drops. This could also reasonably account for a bidirectional shift in the perception of time, which obviously wouldn't be favorable for our purposes here. It does make me wonder about methods to overcome this though, such as the previously mentioned combination of datura and scopoletin-containing plants which may increase acetylcholine at the same as blocking the GABA-lowering autoreceptor....

Anyway, if you take anything away from this, it should be that just because I'm saying all of this neurochemistry stuff doesn't necessarily mean that I don't believe that there's more going on too, or that these incredibly extreme experiences of time dilation aren't at least potentially possible through things we don't understand. I personally like to keep an open mind about it, so I don't want it to seem like I'm totally against views which express beliefs like that. It really just comes down to perception. I'd also like to point out that I may be hitting a ceiling soon as far as this subject goes.... As you can plainly see, I'm beginning to enter the realm of things that are difficult to narrow down.

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Originally Posted by Alyzarin

I've had this in mind, too.... However, I have to point out that it probably wasn't literally his whole life that flashed before his eyes, or anyone else's. I would bet that if you asked him deeper questions about it would mostly relate to important events in his life, which would obviously be on your mind at the time, and I think could relate to how I said that the hallucinations your brain makes will just depend on your state of mind as they would in regular levels of imagination. For instance, I'm sure he saw the things that mattered the most to him because he was worried about losing them, but I would bet money that he didn't relive every meal, shower, and bathroom break he ever experienced.

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Yes I agree, But ... Even if only some of his life flashed in a couple of seconds it seems to me that information is reaching his consciousness at a vastly accelerated rate. This guy who told me about his NDE in the plane crash took about an hour to tell me all the stuff he saw flash.

For sure, but I think it is telling in the sense that it would probably take me more than hour to describe my entire life lol. I'm not saying it's not possible though, in fact I've been trying to figure out how it might be.

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Originally Posted by tofur

issue here is your assuming its our brains responsible. Science hasn't confirmed that consciousness is created by the brain, despite many attempts. More and more healthy skeptical scientists are gravitating towards the filter hypothesis, where the brain reduces and filters consciousness, like a TV set picks up signals from satellites or ground cables and filters and displays them. If you smash the Tv, you didn't erase the signal. Whats crazy is this hypothesis explains a lot that the brain based hypothesis can't and explains what the brain based one can as well. We don't know what consciousness is. People who have NDE's report linear time not existing at all, where they see feel and live they're whole life at the same time, in a totally paradoxical way, and they feel what the people and beings felt when they harmed them in some way, as a way of learning, etc etc. True NDE's change peoples lives and are very intense

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Ya, I love the idea that our consciousness is triggering our brain NOT our brain triggering our consciousness. Good thoughts on this thread, you guys really have me thinking. But is it my brain that is thinking?