Story #2 - "Just" a dream of aliens changing my brain

Hello, I hope the summer is treating you well. I have started writing the most intimate and private stories of what I went through in the jungle. In case you have not read it, I wrote the story of my first plant ceremony in Peru, October 2016, where it’s fully legal.

Today I am sharing my second plant ceremony, just a day after in the same place in the jungle. For first-timers, the indigenous recommend doing two or three nights instead of just one, as the experiences always vary dramatically and are never the same.

Nothing is real, just a dream, “visions” or “hallucinations” as some people call them. Nothing to judge here other than a dream.

Is this my imagination? Likely. If it is, it’s pretty cool. I am very grateful my imagination can create these stories, characters, and images. What is imagination anyway? I wrote about it in The Power of Our Own Imagination. Let’s just say that the plants gave me a very rich imagination or creativity, and I enjoy it.

This second plant medicine night was very significant to me.

If the first one was “welcome to a new world” and was very “Avatar-like,” the second night is for me the start of deep transformational work.

This “work” isn’t easy, and not always entertaining. Plant medicine shows you, without prior warning, what people commonly call “bad trips.”

These dreams are an invitation to work on our own darkness, our shadows. I could have refused this work and ended my experience after this harder and darker night. Frankly, it was scary.

My intention is to tell you the story as honestly as I can, including the tough times. I would lie if I wrote only the “good” and entertaining stories.

Plant medicine showed me the way I would heal some parts of myself and see my own darkness. It seemed to show me how to heal my mind and I feel many physical diseases such as cancer mostly come from mind health.

As I could see my issues, I kept going, determined to heal my mind. I decided I would keep going until I stopped purging entirely and stopped seeing darkness. It took me about a year of “purging” through tens of ceremonies to mostly stop purging. Some people who are already clean enough never purge. I continued with the plants after it stopped and it became even better. I sometimes still “purge” and always welcome the opportunity for healing. I wrote about shadow work before, the work most of us never want to do.

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No real work inside our mind is easy. If you went like me through any therapy work, you know what I am talking about.

I have warned you; what follows is a strong story many will call a nightmare. I call it the beginning of a transformation symbolized by the animal that visited me first that night.

This is an invitation to watch a beautiful thunderstorm pass by, and after the storm comes the sun again. This is what I have learned over and over again.

Worry not, it is not that bad, and it gets always better. Each countless plant ceremony I went through in the jungle led me to think I would never see anything more astonishing than the last. Yet, the next ceremony is always more eye-opening, and I learned to see the beauty in every experience.

I hope you will too, even though these words that can never truly describe the real experiences I had. Words are not enough; they are only a limited tool we call language to narrate what cannot be narrated.

Even without plant medicine, I now often have dreams with what Tokyo-based author Andrew Gallimore and many others call “entities” or “DMT entities”. Andrew just wrote a book that I have not read yet, Reality Switch Technologies: Psychedelics as Tools for the Discovery and Exploration of New Worlds. I highly recommend his Twitter account too, @Alien Insect.

The same “sentient beings” (another way they’re often called) come back in several dreams, which makes it particularly interesting. Some appeared repeatedly in the same form or with the same voice in experiences that were months apart. Some come back often, some only once.

It’s like a movie where you’re shown only one scene, then a few scenes, but never the entire movie.

Let’s go.

October 11, 2016

I woke up from the first plant ceremony all excited and feeling absolutely amazing. I wrote tens of pages on my handwritten journal, which I still have. What I have seen (again if you haven’t read it, it’s here) was so beautiful; I was very excited to get back to the new world I just “unlocked” like in a video game.

After the sunset, the two Peruvian shamans were there again with Leila and myself only. The elder shaman, Edinson, smoked Mapacho (strong jungle tobacco) and blew it on us for “protection” then served a cup of the dark coloured plant beverage to each of us. I drank it with pleasure despite the taste as I was excited by what I saw the day before. The moment I put the beverage in my mouth, I felt this night would be different and would be more work than entertaining.

It hit me really fast, about twenty minutes. I immediately laid down and was unable to sit. I started undulating like a snake and got really hard stomach pain going on and off. It was so strong I started making noise as I was physically suffering, and it took me completely by surprise as the first night was so easy compared to this unexpected feeling of total discomfort and sickness in me.

While the “contractions” and the immediate need to purge kept coming, the first visions appeared, also very fast. I calmed down to “enjoy the show,” but my stomach felt like an erupting volcano.

Instead of a beautiful lit “Avatar-like” jungle, I was suddenly thrown at night in the dark of the jungle. I lost my bearings. There was no path home. I was lost and it was scary.