From ancient shamanic traditions and Indigenous use of psychedelic plant medicines to Tibetan “dream yoga” practices, the desire to expand and explore our consciousness is an ancient, deeply rooted part of the human experience. For millennia, people have sought to transcend their ordinary, waking consciousness and enter non-ordinary states of perception to gain access to other dimensions of reality, the sacred, and the more-than-human world. This article explores the underlying connection between lucid dreaming and psychedelic states, examining how both represent pathways to expanded awareness and self-insight.
Understanding Lucid Dreaming and Psychedelic States
Dreaming is perhaps the most common non-ordinary state of consciousness, sleep being something that we all have to succumb to on a daily basis, with each of us spending an estimated third of our lives sleeping.
Lucid dreaming, however, takes this one step further, allowing us to become aware that we are dreaming, thereby granting us the ability to alter and direct the dream as it unfolds. While some people experience lucid dreams naturally, it is a skill with time and effort that can be developed by anyone.
While ordinary dreams can occur during any stage of sleep, lucid dreams typically take place during the most active phase of the sleep cycle, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. REM sleep is marked by an increase in brain activity, an increase in heart rate, a quickening of breathing, rapid movement of the eyes under closed eyelids as well as high-frequency beta and gamma brainwaves, with brain activity similar to waking consciousness. It is during this phase that the most vivid and hallucinatory dreams occur, laden with symbolic imagery and non-rational elements.
Similarly, psychedelic substances like the visionary Amazonian brew, ayahuasca, the sacred peyote cactus, and psilocybin mushrooms have been used by Indigenous cultures for centuries to access non-ordinary states of consciousness. These plant medicines have long been revered for their healing and divinatory purposes. As author David Jay Brown notes in Dreaming Wide Awake, during these altered states, shamans report telepathic communication with plant and animal spirits, ancestral beings, and higher intelligences.
Regardless of whether the entities encountered in these states represent aspects of our own psyche and unconscious or independent sentient forces, they often understand ourselves and the world more deeply.
Brown explains that the landscape of our dreams, and the visionary worlds accessed through psychedelics, can be seen as a “living intelligence that we can communicate with.”
He explains, “This living intelligence is what psychologists ironically call the unconscious or what Jung calls the collective unconscious, and it appears to be the same entity that, depending on one’s cultural context, some people describe as their higher self, the Other, an alien, the dormant parts of the brain, divine intelligence, the mushroom spirit, the Mother, DNA, the Goddess, or God.”
The Benefits of Lucid Dreaming and Psychedelic-Induced Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness
A 2017 review study examined the differences and similarities between psychedelic states and dreaming, highlighting both states’ capacity to spark visionary experiences that produce profound effects on perception, mental imagery, emotion activation, fear memory extinction, and sense of self.
These non-ordinary states, though often overlooked or marginalized in Western culture, have been integral to many societies worldwide, fostering well-being, cultural cohesion, and spiritual connection. As interest in these states grows and they regain acceptance in the West, more people are beginning to recognize their profound potential for healing, creativity, and expanded awareness.
In fact, a recent review article explored the relationship between psychedelics and creative insight, drawing comparisons between psychedelic states, dreams, and hypnagogic states (the transitional phase between wakefulness and sleep). The authors highlighted the historical role of these states in contributing to scientific breakthroughs, suggesting that part of their benefit is helping us to attain creative insight in multiple domains of life.
For example, Nobel laureate Francis Crick famously credited LSD with aiding his discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. Similarly, chemist Friedrich August Kekulé experienced a breakthrough in a hypnagogic state, where he envisioned molecules forming into a serpent devouring its own tail—an image that led to his realization that benzene’s chemical structure was a closed ring.
They go on to explain how psychedelics, dreams, and hypnagogic states have long been valued for their problem-solving potential. For example, many Indigenous cultures have used psychedelic plant medicines as diagnostic and divinatory tools to address emotional, psychosomatic, and mental health disorders, while problem-solving through dreams has been cultivated through ancient dream incubation practices.
According to Czech psychiatrist and founding father of the field of transpersonal psychology, Stanislav Grof, “Although pre-industrial cultures also have had various herbal and other naturalistic remedies and interventions, healing for them has always been associated with non-ordinary states of consciousness.”
Through offering the ability to perceive situations from different angles, both lucid dreaming and psychedelic states serve to help individuals navigate challenges on practical, emotional, and psychospiritual levels, making them powerful tools for personal transformation and healing, opening the door to creative problem-solving and deeper self-insight.
Research on Dreams, Lucid Dreaming and Psychedelics
To date, most of the research on psychedelics has focused on their therapeutic potentials in treating mental health conditions such as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and addiction. However, researchers are now exploring the phenomenological and neurobiological similarities between dreaming and psychedelic states. This exploration suggests that so-called “psychedelic” experiences may be far more common than previously thought, occurring naturally in dreams and lucid dreaming.
A 2018 study published in Frontiers in Neuroscience investigated the phenomenological (the first-person perspective of “what it feels like” to have an experience) similarities and differences between lucid dreaming and psychedelic states of consciousness.
Researchers used a language processing technique known as latent semantic analysis to conduct a direct qualitative comparison of trip reports detailing the effects of 165 psychoactive substances, collected trip reports from the educational and harm reduction website, Erowid.org, with dream accounts gathered from Dreamjournal.net to determine experiential overlap between psychedelic and dream states.
Each substance was evaluated based on its similarity to high-lucidity versus low-lucidity dreaming. The findings revealed that psychedelic substances—such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, and mescaline—bear the closest phenomenological resemblance to lucid dreaming. Comparatively, substances like depressants, sedatives, opioids, stimulants, and antidepressants were found to have the least similarity to dream-like experiences.
Another study demonstrated the underlying shared neurophysiological similarities between both states. In particular, dreaming and psychedelic states are both associated with a decrease in activity of the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), a key brain region involved in maintaining self-referential thought and regulating consciousness, typically activated when people are asked to think about themselves.
This decrease in activity of the PCC has been positively correlated with the experience of vivid, dreamlike experiences, potentially linking to experiences of self-transcendence and ego-dissolution that many report on psychedelics.
Ancestral Supplements to Aid Lucid Dreaming
Oneirogens, derived from the Greek óneiros meaning “dream” and gen “to create” are a class of plants and chemical compounds which help enhance dreamlike states of consciousness as well as improve dream recall, similar to the way in which psychedelics are able to induce visionary states. Examples include Calea zacatechichi, otherwise known as the “dream herb,” and Artemisia vulgaris, more commonly referred to as mugwort, both known for their effects on the dreaming mind.
According to Jonathan Ott, oneirogen is a drug that stimulates dreams or hypnagogic phenomena in superficial stages of sleep, where hypnagogic refers to drowsiness, or preceding sleep, or early, light stage of sleep. Based on Drugs of The Dreaming Book, Claude Rifat proposes a distinction between “pre-oneirogen” or “hypnagogic” and “true oneirogens“.
Pre-oneirogens increase the production of hypnagogic imagery (perceived in transition between wakefulness and falling asleep) as well as hypnapompic imagery (perceived in the transition between sleep and waking up).
In this context, Zacatechichi or Mugwort are true oneirogens, while the active compound in Banisteriopsis caapi vine and Syrian rue known as beta-carbolines, Salvia divinorum (at low dose) and ibogane (the active principle of Tabernanthe iboga) are categorized as pre-oneirogens. The term hypnagogen is used as equivalent of pre-oneirogens.
Our Mang Lucid Dreaming Supplement is formulated with extracts of espand (Syrian rue or Peganum harmala), an ancestral plant used by Zoroastrian priests of ancient Iran in rituals to see into the realm of souls as well as Qian Ceng Ta, a plant used in Traditional Chinese Medicine.
In particular, Syrian rue contains beta-carbolines, alkaloids that have anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective effects. Additionally, beta-carbolines are produced endogenously in the brain’s pineal gland. Early researchers have suggested that the phenomenon of dreaming may be linked to the production of beta-carbolines and other tryptamines, such as N-N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), otherwise known as “the spirit molecule” in the brain’s pineal gland whilst we sleep.
Similarly, beta-carbolines are also present in the Amazonian hallucinogenic brew, ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is an admixture of two plants, one of which contains DMT, a psychoactive molecule credited for the brew’s visionary potency. Although beta-carbolines are hypnagogens and psychoactive themselves, they are widely known for their monoamine oxidase inhibition (MAOi) effect that potentiate the psychoactive potency of DMT, making DMT more readily available in the bloodstream.
Mang Lucid Dream ancestral supplements have been shown to increase high-frequency (beta and gamma) brainwaves during REM sleep, similar to those produced in waking states, helping to produce higher degrees of lucidity and awareness, and more vivid recall of dreams.
As we have explored, lucid dreaming and psychedelic states share significant overlaps, both representing pathways to gain insight into our psyches, expand our creativity, and deepen our awareness of the mystical plane. However, compared with psychedelic experiences, lucid dreaming is both completely legal, free, and accessible to anyone with the time and effort to develop the practice.