Very interesting. Intense altered states show you the power of meditation in a clear way cuz you get immediate results. On substances, so far I've tried it on cannabis and ayahuasca and couldn't do it in either case. Actually I tried it on a PCP analogue and it was extremely easy. Has anyone here tried meditating on dissociatives? I usually find meditation tricky since I'm a newbie, but on dissociatives I'm like a meditation master, I can sit there indefinitely observing. I'm a newbie to meditation. But theres another altered state where meditation happens to work insanely well. I get this thing called sleep paralysis, its when my body falls sleep but my mind is still awake. So I'm laying there paralysed and I start getting bombarded by hallucinations (they call them hypnagogic hallucinations). Its fun, interesting and disturbing at the same time. It can get downright terrifying at times, to the point that I learned how to pull myself out of paralysis to escape it (that takes massive effort, I wouldn't put that effort in for nothing). I've been getting it for years and tried all kinds of things to make myself immune to the hallucinations (they prod me in the back, cover my eyes, bite me, and on occasion even sodomise me lol, so they can be a pain in the ass) and after trying a thousand things that had little or no effect, I eventually I figured out something that works. Its to simply lay there and observe everything, without reacting to any of it, or analysing it. A few years later I was at a Buddhist retreat and learned about meditation and figured out that this is called Vipassana meditation.
If anyone here gets sleep paralysis, try meditating and see what happens. With me, the nature of the hallucinations instantly change and I become immune to everything, nothing can make me react in any way. It makes it much more interesting too because its like when I don't react to the hallucinations, they lose interest in me so they go off and do their own thing and I can watch them doing their own thing. Well, I can't see them I don't get visual hallucinations in sleep paralysis, I get auditory and tactile ones so I can hear trippy things like conversations, music playing and trippy alien sounds. Sleep paralysis is amazing, its like a whole new type of altered state that we can access without substances (although I find opioids make me much more likely to get it) and we can see things you can't see anywhere else. Like how dreams start. Buddhists talk a lot about the power of breathing, I thought that was all nonsense before, but lately I realised that by slowing my breath in sleep paralysis I can intentionally transition myself into a dream. Makes sense since we fall unconscious when we don't get enough oxygen to the brain, and when we sleep we don't breath as much since we use less oxygen. But theres more to it than that. Its not just about using less oxygen, the breath is actually what controls our ability to enter dreams. That means the Buddhists are right, by controlling our breath we can alter our consciousness.
We need to find a way to induce sleep paralysis, because psychonauts here would love it. Its as mind blowing as any psychedelic I've tried, and thats saying a lot. I managed to induce it once so far, I did it with affirmations I said in my head "I WILL REMAIN 100% CONSCIOUS AND LUCID WHEN I FALL ASLEEP TONIGHT AND REMEMBER EVERYTHING". The very first time I tried it, and that night I went into sleep paralysis for the first time in months. I tried it 5 times after and couldn't replicate it, but if it worked once, then its possible, we just need to find the right technique. Affirmations work really well for lucid dreams, but I had never heard about them inducing sleep paralysis thats real interesting stuff. There are techniques online for inducing sleep paralysis, they sound pretty difficult, I never bothered trying them since I get it naturally but I'm gonna use my natural tendency for this to try and uncover some mechanisms and find a way to induce it. I'm 100% sure breathing is an essential aspect to it. I get sleep paralysis all the time on opioids, and opioids induce respiratory depression. I also have naturally low blood pressure and pulse and sometimes when it gets really low, I get a bout of sleep paralysis. So oxygen supply to the brain has something to do with it. When I'm in sleep paralysis, if I breath fast the hallucinations get less intense. If I slow my breath, the sensations get really heavy and I rapidly go into dream mode. The body panics at first, you feel like your suffocating but you're not, when the body is paralysed it doesn't need as much oxygen. Sorry for derailing the thread, I'm gonna transfer this to a thread of its own.