Sleep after ayahuasca journey?

[Warrior]

How long is it generally before you can sleep comfortably after an ayahuasca ceremony? Assume ~6 hours of dose duration before reaching baseline. Can you sleep immediately at the 6 hour mark? Or does it take you longer?

I'm asking because I'm trying to make sense of my own personal experiences. I've found that if I am successful at meditating through most of the session, I come down with a humble afterglow. But contrary to that, if I've found myself fighting aspects of the experience, or have let my overly active mind run in circles chasing every wild idea that comes to mind, then I come down to a very, very "busy" afterglow. It's happy and peaceful, but damn... My mind won't shut up. It feels like the difference between calm clarity and hypomania that borders on a bigger picture problem (assuming I can't quiet the mind and sleep well in the afterglow).

Is the experience with Acacia confusa and Syrian rue generally "activating" in the afterglow? Or is generally sedating after (due to tiredness)?


Important info: I've dealt with mild/moderate insomnia in stages throughout my entire life. I've always, always been a vivid, lucid dreamer (also in waves throughout my life). Remembering and processing most dreams is very easy for me, 98% of the time. So there is definitely an individual biological component to this for me....

 

[vineseeker]

if it is good and not very exhausting for me... i cannot sleep more than a few hours for the next 24h

 

[Warrior]

This is such a powerful thing. It does so much in one go. How people mentally go from one state and back, and picking up the pieces from where they left off and stride back into the daily rhythm of life, with such a profound take-away message to process--it is very interesting to me. It seems like there exists a wide gamut of individual variability in the partial return to autopilot of daily rituals. But that variability is from our conditioned life programming--the seeing, thinking, learning brain's conditioning. The experience itself seems to 'kill the ego' very consistently, but that is also learned. To give one brain function, (and its relationship to structure), a functional clearing and reboot, but not to other experience-derived behavioral fixed action patterns to daily stimuli seems odd to me. Is it a different brain region the drug affects? Or does it have scalpel-like precision to an abstract brain function? Either way, it's bizarre and fascinating. We are very, very strange animals. Rhesus macaques tend to fabricate highly elaborate superstitions when held in captivity, and given mundane training exercises day, after day, after day, after day. The act of creating a system of false beliefs seems to give their active minds something more to engage in, perhaps it may even give them a sense of meaning. They've been stripped from their natural habitat and placed in a strange world they don't understand. False beliefs are a coping mechanism. But why? We seem wired to "believe" in something bigger, and the same can be said about other primates. Our behaviors are so predictable in some ways, and completely bizarre in others. Why one primate can sleep, as though it's the end of a normal day, while others cannot--that fascinates me. It's almost as if some people experience these things on different levels of visceral, physiological engagement, and that level of engagement carries the mind forward, grinding out a story structure, or deriving meaning... Is it all false belief, because we have no point of reference, no measurable, or repeatable experience to quantify?

I almost wonder if there is a direct correlation between the level of sympathetic nervous system arousal and the ability to capture the essence of the experience, and to learn from it in the abstract way I described above: you don't know what the heck this place is, but you're going to integrate the plot, patterns, and novel moments into your daily life narrative anyways. You've committed to not throwing ALL of it out like a passing dream.

But why, for some, does the experience slip away like a forgotten dream, and presumably, low level of sympathetic arousal persists, and sleep can easily commence?

....Or does everyone come out of it like they've just been jacked into The Matrix on steroidal-powered amphetamines? That is my pan-ultimate question.

Please accept my apologies for abstaining from brevity.

 

[adam]

Depends on how strong the brew, for me personally if its weak in harmala content I can generally sleep fall asleep 4-5 hours after ingestion. If it is strong brew, strong harmalas I can be up all night and all next day.

 

[universecannon]

Its hard to say. Sometimes I won't sleep at all that night.. other times maybe an hour or two..sometimes 12 hours (especially if it was a big dose of harmalas)... and still on other occasions I'll fall asleep an hour after it hits or right in the middle of the journey and sleep for a long time

 

[Warrior]

Its hard to say. Sometimes I won't sleep at all that night.. other times maybe an hour or two..sometimes 12 hours (especially if it was a big dose of harmalas)... and still on other occasions I'll fall asleep an hour after it hits or right in the middle of the journey and sleep for a long time

Wow, you can sleep through a breakthrough dose? Wow, fascinating. I feel like I'm still getting a sense of what parts of this are personal and subjective, and which are a standard 1-2 punch.

 

[universecannon]

Well I don't normally sleep through a breakthrough dose no... If the harmala amount is really high and dominates the experience there is a higher chance of me sleeping. And if the dmt amount is very high i'll almost always stay awake

But I have fallen asleep before and woke up basically in hyperspace while on 100g caapi and 16g mimosa 3 or 4 years ago...It was a massive and idiotic overdose, obviously. Way way too much mimosa- these days i drink like 3 grams if that. Needless to say I should have waited longer before the second cup :lol: . I think I was just so far gone in the aya world that I sort of blacked out for a little while.

I've had a similar thing happen while on a high dose of lsd before, back in high school... after 5 or so hours it was still so overwhelming and i was so tired that my brain just shut down and let me sleep

I feel like I'm still getting a sense of what parts of this are personal and subjective, and which are a standard 1-2 punch.

Yeah there is so much individual variation, differences between each experience even at the same dosage, and countless other factors involved, that it is often hard to say really.

 

[Warrior]

...I think I was just so far gone in the aya world that I sort of blacked out for a little while.

I've had a similar thing happen while on a high dose of lsd before, back in high school... after 5 or so hours it was still so overwhelming and i was so tired that my brain just shut down and let me sleep

Yeah, see I can relate to both of your experiences. But to me it wasn't the same as sleep. It felt different. Your body is resting motionless, and your mind has completely surrendered, but is it sleep? I feel like I know what you're talking about. But maybe it's just me, and something I feel with respect to a history of periodic insomnia... Even when I haven't gotten more than a few hours of "sleep" in a number of running days, I am still trying to sleep. I still lay down at a given time everyday, and I commit almost the entire night to sleep. And in that commitment, there are points when I know I'm not sleeping, but time seems to pass more quickly. I feel trapped. My body DOES seem to rest (some), but the mind is run ragged, depleted, empty...

Maybe THAT is the source of this individual variability. One person may be prone to an intermediate waking dream/sleep state, while another can succumb to the need for sleep.