People often casually compare the effects of psychedelics like magic mushrooms, truffles, mescaline, DMT, and LSD to dreams. But what if we could also provide a scientific explanation for that comparison? That is exactly what Enzo Tagliazucchi, a neuroscientist at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina, has done.
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Dream-like states
The use of hallucinogenic substances truly puts people in a dreamlike state, according to research that statistically compared the way people talk about dreams with the way people talk about the effects of psychedelics, including LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), magic mushrooms (psilocybin), or peyote (mescaline).
Of all these substances, LSD is the drug most likely to induce a lucid dream-like state—a type of dream in which the dreamer knows they are dreaming and can often control their actions, according to the study. Comparing the subjective experience of a hallucinogen with a specific aspect of neurochemistry could help explain how the brain spontaneously generates dreams, Tagliazucchi said in a statement.
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More than anecdotes
But to analytically compare dreams and drugs, anecdotes aren’t enough. This is why Tagliazucchi and his colleagues turned to two massive online repositories of experiences with both. They did this on Erowid.org, a site where people can report their experiences with various illegal substances, and dreamjournal.net, which contains over 200,000 dream reports, often noting whether the dreams were lucid or not.
Their findings were interesting, to say the least. They found that the top 20 substances that resulted in experiences most resembling dreams were all hallucinogens, with two exceptions: THC (the active ingredient in marijuana) and MDMA (a stimulant found in ecstasy pills). The 20 substances that produced experiences least resembling dreams were mostly sedatives, stimulants, antipsychotics, and antidepressants, the researchers reported.
In both dreams and during psychedelic trips, people describe visual hallucinations ranging from mild distortions, such as colorful trails trailing behind moving objects, to fully-fledged complex images, Tagliazucchi said. People also reported a sense of unreality and of being separated from their bodies, or in both cases, losing their sense of self and the feeling of oneness with the world.
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Less complex
Some of the similarities and differences likely reflect how psychedelics affect the brain and how dreams are formed, Tagliazucchi said. Psychedelic images are usually less complex than dream images, and people don’t always know they’re dreaming, whereas they typically understand they’re having a psychedelic experience, he said. This may be related to the fact that the neurotransmitter serotonin is not produced during dream states, Tagliazucchi said. In contrast, psychedelics mimic serotonin and act almost identically to the neurotransmitter, which may be what creates the dream-like state of a psychedelic experience.
