Dreaming Medicine

There is something that has been happening consistently over the past several months. Yet there is no real beginning or seeming endpoint, just an awareness of a steady increase and recurrence of a phenomenon that calls into question the nature of reality as we perceive it.

Several months ago I ventured, as some of you may have, to the Amazon seeking--seeking something, healing, help, information, a lesson, direction--at the time what I thought I was doing turned out to be something entirely different. Nevertheless, I got there, I sat in ceremony with the shamans, drank the medicine, and I was healed. Incredibly difficult as it was, I left Peru feeling lighter--physically, psychically, and spiritually. I was just more energized, radiant. I sat up for the entirety of my flight from Lima to New York writing in my journal nearly non-stop.

For several months after my return home I was still steeped in the experience. Nothing from my "old" life seemed to have any affect; rather, everything was coated with this kind of radiant glow, even the dirty streets of my neighborhood. I saw God everywhere, in college student filled bars, in the secret smiles of bums on the street picking up cans, in my father's handshake and my mother's wink, in scattered dust and broken pieces of plastic...

But this surreal quality to life did not last. The initial radiance and glow that seemed to emanate from everywhere started to fade as the months passed. Then one day I asked myself, is it gone??? Is the healing, the medicine, the force, just, gone??? Of course, it wasn't, but I felt differently, less connected and less aware. But then something started to happen....

The first time I drank ayahuasca in my dreams I woke up and nearly puked. I felt the medicine leech onto my intestines and stomach and wrench out whatever needed to be let loose. My whole body was shuddering and possessed by a familiar buzzing energy shooting up and down its entirety. It was aggravating in the most positive sense because it was SO real, so much like the actual ceremonies I was in. I was disturbed, and this disturbance forced me to move into action--pure will and intention transformed by the experience of the medicine. The surreal-ality was back in full force.

Months later, it happened again, but this time I didn't wake up. I remained in the dream which was the ceremony. This went on steadily for a few weeks where I would visit the same group of shamans and drink ayahuasca with them perhaps two or three times a week (twice the medicine was peyote, which I experienced only once in "real-time"). The dreams were nearly identical to the ceremonies that I had participated in, with cosmic lessons and free flowing love abound. Each time I had a medicinal dream, I would wake up overflowing with joy and just absolutely astonished that this was happening!

Some of the most profound work I have done with the medicine happened in dreams, in New York, and perhaps even out of body. Incredible things happened. I was able to resolve some of the baggage that I held onto so dearly in the "real" ceremonies because I thought if I let it go I would die. I was able to better converse with the shamans directly without any fear or inhibition. I learned how to work with the medicine as opposed to just using the medicine. Once, they took me to a lodge much deeper in the jungle than what I was accustomed to, and there lying on the floor was my recently passed Grandfather. After being served two cups of dreaming-medicine, my Grandfather woke up with a glowing aura of neon colors around him. He grabbed me by the shoulders and looked piercingly into my eyes and said: " I AM ALIVE"!!!!!!!!! I looked over at the Maestro, and he smiled, and pointed to me, as if saying, here you go, this one's for you. Tears of joy filled ocean basins of love....

And that's not all. These are only a few of the experiences that have happened in this dream-space-time-ceremony. I don't hear much about the relationship between ayahuasca and dreaming, or for that matter, about dreaming as a shamanic tool itself. As an anthropology student I remember coming across a tribe of Native Americans who were known to use ONLY the dream space as the shaman's tool. Dreaming was their religion, their mysticism. That is how shamans were selected and called for. I believe that this medium is one of the most profound and universally accessible tools we have for engaging altered states of consciousness and evolving spiritually--or just evolving. There is ultimate freedom in dreaming. Who can take dreaming away from you? Nobody can. You are your dreams....

Love and Light,
Matt