are you familiar with but your own? Indeed, when Descartes began his philosophical career, he wanted to know what he could be absolutely certain about, with no room for doubt whatsoever. Gazing out of an ornate seventeenth-century window, he wondered if perhaps all of reality was a cunningly designed trick played on him by some artful demon with infinite powers of trickery. Entertaining such a sinister scenario, Descartes came to the conclusion that the only thing that he knew to be real for sure was the existence of his own self—he thought, therefore he was. There could be no doubting that at least. This deceptively simple realization became the bedrock on which much of his subsequent philosophy and science were based.
The philosophical belief that only one’s own self really exists is known as solipsism. As weird as it might sound, it is a theoretical stance that many might be tempted to adopt, even for the sake of just playing with the idea in order to annoy and confuse friends. The point of raising this issue is that all of us make a big leap of faith in accepting that other minds like our own really do exist, and this way of thinking “works,” so much so that most people have not the faintest idea what solipsism is and never even come to entertain the idea despite it being an essentially reasonable piece of personal philosophy.
Directly analogous with our tacit assumption that other conscious minds like our own exist is the inference that an intelligent, communicating Other lies at the heart of shamanic visions. This seems unavoidable if one is experiencing powerful visionary effects from entheogenic agents, and this makes it a valid and workable way of explaining the experience despite its distinct tone of grandeur. I would therefore claim that the notion of a transcendental Other is reasonable in light of the remarkably integrative information processing occurring in the entheogenimbued brain. Such chemically inspired modification of neuronal activity is experienced as being so rich in symbology and meaning that for all intents and purposes it can be considered the result of a living, intelligent, and communicating agency made of information, an agency whose intent can become activated and focused should the chemical conditions of the human cortex be so conducive. Information must indeed be in some sense alive.
“Dreamformation”
A similar process to that outlined above would appear to govern dreaming, since complex and often fantastically stylized dream scenarios are something our dreaming selves confront. We literally find ourselves witness to the integrative information processes of our dreaming minds, often experiencing strange and elaborately scripted dream scenarios. But, and this is a major caveat, with dreams our dream self is not generally in a very consciously attentive state, so dreams remain ethereal and forgettable, unlike psilocybin visions, which one is highly conscious of and which are faithfully retained within memory.
It has been speculated that the reason we are unable to retain dream experience is because the normal neuronal mechanisms that underlie long-term memory are shut off during the dream state. This, however, is not the case with psilocybinetic visions, since the neuronal systems that facilitate long-term memory are still operative. Psilocybin is therefore able, perhaps, to bypass those brain mechanisms that normally serve to stop us consciously attending to information arising from the creative depths of the psyche.
The neuropsychologist and expert on sleep processes J. Allan Hobson has developed a model of dreaming that is compatible with the information-integration model outlined in this chapter. Hobson has offered an “activation synthesis” model of dreaming. He reached his theoretical conclusions after having studied in depth the neurochemical processes underlying REM sleep (also known as dream sleep), processes that include, of course, the cessation of the serotonergic raphe system.
On his activation-synthesis model, Hobson writes:
Activation is an energy concept: in REM sleep [dreaming], brain circuits underlying consciousness are switched on. Synthesis is an information concept: dream cognition is distinctive because the brain synthesizes a dream plot by combining information from sources entirely internal to itself and because chemical changes radically alter the way information is processed. So the term “synthesis” implies both fabricated (made up) and integrated (fitted together).{33}
Basically, then, dreams are associated with periodical bursts of firing in perhaps billions of neurons, with, of course, the attendant potential for an incomprehensibly large amount of networked communication (we should bear in mind that dreaming might be due in part to endogenous DMT). This wealth of activity is integrated in such a way that dreams emerge or are synthesized. Dreams are thus constructed of information, the information concerned being embodied in the unusual global firing state of the brain.
As we have already established, a related process appears to take hold when psilocybin is present within the brain. This “waking dream” situation takes place during the eyes-shut waking state, whereas dreaming takes place during sleep. So although the psychedelic visionary state and the dream state take place while the brain is in a different overall state (an awake state versus a sleep state), the general principle of vision generation and dream generation is the same in each case. To reiterate, this principle consists of the patterning and cohesion of vast bursts of neuronal information being generated from internal sources and not from external sources. The advantage of “waking dreams” induced by entheogenic alkaloids over normal dreams is that in the former one remains highly alert and highly conscious of the visionary dialogue, and it is generally not forgotten. Entheogenic visions also tend to be more sacred in character than dreams.
The Varieties of Dream Experience
Often dreams appear to be quite mundane, containing perhaps integrated scraps of information subconsciously perceived during the waking state. By joining these disparate pieces of information, a kind of learning might be facilitated. Indeed, it has been demonstrated that if rats (please excuse the ratomorphism) are selectively denied periods of REM sleep, then they are more likely to forget information previously learned.
Lazy newborn infants spend about sixteen hours a day asleep, of which half that time is spent in REM sleep. This means that they dream about three times as much as adults. As newborns have a strong need to learn about the world, dreaming presumably facilitates certain types of information integration—and hence learning. Through dreams, information acquired through waking perceptions can be sifted, consolidated, organized, and generally “worked out,” so to speak. In short, one theoretical approach to understanding dreaming has it that dreaming allows information to become integrated within the developing psyche, a view fully compatible with my own speculations.
What of dreams not obviously connected with, say, diverse pieces of information, but that concern big themes? Especially those really vivid dreams that leave a lingering emotional impact on us? These might seem definitely to contain some meaning important to our inner wellbeing. Although we in the West do not have a cultural tradition that takes dreams, whether the mundane variety or the moving variety, too seriously, this has not always been the case with our species. It is presumably the phenomenon of significant-seeming dreams that led cultures like native Amerindians and Australian aborigines to take dreams seriously—so much so that dreams would often be discussed and acted on by the whole tribe. Such types of informative dream also led Western thinkers like Jung to conceive of a collective unconscious from which archetypal dream symbols could emerge. Although Jung’s vision of a collective unconscious might be considered fanciful, it does highlight the fact that certain dreams can act as a source of useful information should we choose to contemplate them. Indeed, if this were not the case, then presumably native cultures would never have bothered with dream analysis in the first place.
Considering these properties of dreams, we can see more clearly how the brain is literally an information- organizing device able to continually forge illustrative patterns of meaning both consciously and unconsciously. The only real difference between dreams and psychedelic visions would appear to be the extent and scale of this important process. If information integration is allowed to reach a certain threshold of activation through the catalytic agency of entheogenic compounds, then the ultimate source of the information-patterning process can be
