Welcome to the Psychedelic Blog. I write about the impact of Psychedelics on Grieving, Relationships, Culture & Death.
This Week: For most of my life, dreams felt random & forgettable. Then they started to feel like rehearsals.
May, 1979.
As he gazed out over the airport, watching planes take off one after another, David Booth noticed an American Airlines jet taxiing down the runway. Its metallic silver fuselage bore the classic “AA” logo, framing the image of a bird. It was a beautiful plane.
At first, everything seemed normal.
But moments after takeoff, the aircraft banked sharply to the left. It suddenly looked completely out of control. Within seconds it began descending rapidly before crashing nose first into the ground, erupting into a massive fireball. David was certain there could be no survivors…he had just witnessed a tragedy.
He jolted awake.
It had been a dream, but unlike any he had ever experienced. He was drenched in sweat & convinced what he had just seen was real. It only got worse. David would continue to have this exact same dream for ten consecutive nights.
The experience felt so vivid & so visceral that he eventually called the Federal Aviation Administration. To his surprise, the agent who answered actually listened…he was not dismissed as a crank. But without a flight number, or any real specificity beyond a vague sense that the crash happened in Chicago, there was nothing they could do.
A few days later, on May 25, 1979, American Airlines Flight 191 crashed shortly after takeoff from Chicago.
The details were hauntingly familiar.
David was not the only one unsettled leading up to the crash. One woman, traveling with her mother, had a powerful premonition about Flight 191 crashing while at the gate & changed their booking at the very last minute.
The Nights That Changed
I did not think much about death until my dreams began to change. They became intense, immersive & far harder to shake off once morning arrived. Instead of fading with the first cup of coffee, they lingered in the background of the day, like something unfinished.
Revisiting Booth’s story recently no longer felt like encountering a strange historical curiosity. It felt more like a reminder of how thin the boundary can be between imagination & finality.
At some point I realized this essay is not really about prophecy at all. It is about what the mind quietly rehearses when it believes no one is paying attention.
My Prophetic Dream
Yesterday was my late brother’s birthday. Since his passing, he has become a regular presence in my dreams. It is both beautiful & torturous at the same time. There is one moment that stands out in particular, mainly because it did not feel like a dream at all.
It came the night after my first journey with Samadhi, a potent Psychedelic similar to Ayahuasca. In the dream we spoke on the phone…I remember feeling an overwhelming sense of relief when he told me I could still call him.
When I woke up, the experience stayed with me in a way that felt almost unsettling. It made me wonder whether dream reality can function as a kind of passageway, a place where connection with the dead is possible. Or was this the medicine trying to show me something I needed to hear, or was it simply another dream, no different from the countless others we are meant to forget by morning?
The Time I Traveled to Someone Else’s Dream
On my second journey with Samadhi, something happened that I still cannot fully explain. The morning after the ceremony I woke up to a message from a former lover. She told me I had appeared in her dream the night before and that I seemed calm & peaceful.
What made this unsettling were two details. Calm & peaceful were the exact words the facilitator had used to describe my demeanor during my journey with this medicine. And this was not someone I had stayed in touch with or shared a particularly deep bond with. The probability of hearing from her was close to zero, let alone in connection with a dream that mirrored what had just taken place.
I do not claim to know what this means. I only know that experiences like this make it harder to dismiss dreams as meaningless psychological noise.
My Recurring Dream
Since I began working with potent Psychedelics, my dreams have taken on a strange consistency. Almost every night they unfold in the exact same setting: my childhood home.
I have spent a great deal of time trying to make sense of this. At one point I even had ChatGPT analyze the pattern through a Jungian lens. The interpretations were interesting but ultimately unsatisfying, which made me suspect I might be asking the wrong question altogether.
Trying to extract definitive meaning from a dream can feel similar to trying to understand why certain people enter our lives, or why they leave long before we are ready. There are aspects of existence that defy explanation. Dreams seem to belong firmly in that category.
What the experience has convinced me of, however, is that dreams are not merely random disturbances of the mind. They are not easily reduced to the idea that neurons are simply firing without purpose. Something is unfolding in these states. We just do not yet have the language or framework to fully understand what it is.
My Experience with Death
5-MeO-DMT may be the closest a human can come to experiencing death while still alive. I have worked with this powerful Psychedelic four times. Each time, when the experience ends & you begin to return, it is customary for the shamans & ceremony-goers to shout “Happy Birthday.” The message is simple. You have died, and you have been reborn.
After a decade of working with many different Psychedelics, I can say with confidence that 5-MeO stands in a category of its own. Nothing else I have encountered produces the same level of dissolution. The experience feels less like a vision & more like the temporary disappearance of the one who is having it.
This is part of what makes the encounter so unsettling and, at times, so liberating. It raises the possibility that the final moments of life may not be experienced as a violent rupture, but as a kind of release from the structures we spend decades believing are permanent. If that is even partially true, it suggests that much of what we fear about death may be rooted more in imagination than in reality.
Where Psychedelics Deepen the Question
Psychedelics did not give me answers about dreams or death. They removed the distance that once made both feel abstract.
In ordinary life, the mind rehearses quietly. Loss appears in fragments, fear softens by morning. We are able to move forward without fully confronting what is being practiced beneath the surface.
Under potent Psychedelics, that protection disappears. Memory can feel immediate. People who are gone can feel present. The line between imagination & perception becomes far less stable than we assume.
Some researchers suggest these states resemble aspects of dreaming while awake, where internally generated images & emotional memory shape experience more directly. If that is true, then altered states are not revealing hidden prophecies…they are exposing the way the mind slowly prepares itself for separation.
What Dreams Are Doing
Dreams are not random noise…they are simulations.
Recent research suggests Psychedelics may temporarily push the brain toward a state that resembles dreaming while awake. In animal models, these compounds reduce the dominance of incoming sensory signals, allowing internally generated imagery & emotional memory to shape perception more directly. The mind begins to “fill in reality” using its own material.
Sleep seems to rely on a comparable mechanism. During REM, emotional networks activate while rational oversight softens, creating a contained space where the mind can rehearse loss, threat & instability.
In this state, internally generated imagery & memory can be revisited without the full physiological intensity those experiences carry in waking life.
Fear of Disappearing
There is a particular kind of fear Psychedelics make difficult ignore. It is not simply the fear of physical death…it is the realization that the person you believe yourself to be may be far less stable than you imagined.
In ordinary life, identity feels continuous. You wake up as the same person you were yesterday. Your memories align, your relationships reinforce the story you tell about who you are. Even loss, as devastating as it can be, usually unfolds slowly enough that the narrative holds.
During a powerful Psychedelic journey, that continuity fractures. Thoughts may stop feeling authored, emotions can surface without context, time loses the structure that normally helps you orient yourself. In those moments, the familiar reference points that define you — your history, your name, your plans — dissolves into sensation.
What begins to emerge is a quieter understanding. Disappearance is not reserved for the end of life. It happens in smaller ways all the time. When my brother died, it was not only his absence that unsettled me…it was the parts of myself that disappeared with him. Roles that no longer existed, conversations that would never continue, versions of the future that vanished overnight.
Seen this way, the fear that surfaces in altered states is not irrational. It is a confrontation with how provisional continuity really is. Who we are may be less like a solid structure & more like something constantly being revised long before death arrives.
Death as the Final Altered State
In Tibetan Buddhism, death is not framed as a sudden extinguishing but as a transition through states of consciousness known as the bardo. What is striking about this view is the suggestion that dying can be approached with a kind of training & awareness rather than pure panic or collapse.
In The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche recounts the passing of the Gyalwang Karmapa in a hospital in the United States in 1981. Doctors expected the familiar sequence of physical decline. Instead, they were unsettled by how often he appeared to stabilize when they believed the end was near. Even after he was declared clinically dead, aspects of his body did not follow the progression they anticipated.
The attending physician, Dr. Sanchez, later recalled:
“They brought me into the room about thirty-six hours after he died. I felt the area over his heart, and it was warmer than the surrounding area. It’s something for which there is no medical explanation.”
Accounts like this challenge the way death is commonly understood in the West. Rather than a pure interruption, it is described as a final altered state the mind is capable of preparing for. Seen alongside dreams & Psychedelic experiences, the parallel becomes difficult to ignore. All three destabilize the self. The difference is simple: death is the only altered state from which no one returns to describe what happened.
Learning to Return
If dreams rehearse disappearance & Psychedelics intensify the rehearsal, then ordinary life becomes something else entirely. It becomes the place where we practice coming back.
Returning is not just opening your eyes after a journey. It is the slower process of stepping back into a self that no longer feels completely permanent. The world looks the same, but your relationship to it has shifted. Plans feel more provisional & identity feels less fixed than you once believed.
This is where the real work begins.
To return is to participate in continuity while knowing how fragile it can be. We show up for conversations, responsibilities & relationships even as we sense how easily the narrative could dissolve. Altered states are not escapes from life…they are exposures to its structure.
We wake up, we make coffee, we go about our day. Not because we are certain of who we are, but because returning again & again is what allows a life to keep unfolding.
This week’s Sunday Insider: What If I Remember It Wrong? After writing about dreams & death, I started questioning something even more unsettling…whether the memories I’ve built my identity around are actually accurate. Consider upgrading to read the full piece.
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