What Do Ayahuasca Visions Really Mean?

Ayahuasca visions

Ayahuasca is a powerful, indigenous plant medicine preparation that contains the psychedelic DMT and several other psychoactive substances.  The visions that ayahuasca produces can be astounding and life changing but is there any pattern to these visions or are they just the chaotic hallucinations of a drug-addled brain?

What is an ayahuasca experience like?

When we flood our brains with a powerful mind-altering substance, we might expect it to simply scramble our experience.  If this were the case, there would be no relationship between the visions of different people who drink ayahuasca.  In reality, people from a wide range of cultural backgrounds routinely report very similar experiences.  You can find countless ayahuasca trip reports online in which people describe jungle scenes, populated with jaguars and snakes, visions of ornate palaces occupied with different kinds of entities.  Can this mass of subjective reports be condensed into certain core themes that characterise the ayahuasca experience.

The atmosphere

Before considering the contents of the experience, it’s important to note that ayahuasca intoxication creates a particular psychological atmosphere in which the visions occur.  Typically, one feels as though another reality is slowly being revealed.  This goes along with feelings of awe and sacredness.  The brew itself often creates feelings of nausea and wooziness.  The feeling of the ayahuasca in one’s stomach can give the experience an intimate feeling as if the experience can touch the deepest parts inside you.  It is in this context that the visions present themselves.

Geometry

The visual experiences that occur under ayahuasca can happen with one’s eyes open or closed.  They often begin with typical psychedelic visuals, colours become more vivid, geometric patterns appear and build in complexity.  Unlike other psychedelics, however, these visions often seem to coexist with one’s perception of the ordinary world.  Under the influence of LSD, surfaces may seem to melt or may repeat in fractal geometric patterns.  Ayahuasca visions, however, feel as though we are truly seeing somewhere else.  These patterns can build up to the point where these seem to depict palaces, city-scapes or even sci-fi worlds.

Visions of nature & sci-fi scenes

One of the most consistent descriptions of the ayahuasca state is that it often consists of scenes of nature.  Jungle vines, roots, a huge variety of plant and animal life all routinely make an appearance.  While DMT is the psychedelic chemical that powers the ayahuasca experience, the subjective experience of pure DMT typically has a very different character.  A breakthrough dose of DMT, in which the individual's experience is completely taken over by the psychedelic effects, typically has a brightly coloured, smooth plastic or metallic character, with people seeing visions of spaceships and of sci-fi cities.  These experiences are also possible on ayahuasca but most people find themselves being drawn down to the earth rather than up into the skies.

Animals: Snakes & Jaguars

The animals that one sees in ayahuasca visions are not random, there appear to be consistent patterns across people, no matter where they come from.  Snakes are particularly common, with anacondas appearing often.  Big cats too, in particular jaguars, often lurk in one’s ayahuasca visions.  Insects and other jungle creatures may also appear.  One ayahuasca artist in particular, Pablo Amaringo, routinely depicted dolphins in his visionary art.  These experiences are not confined to existing animals however, visions of dragons and other phastasmogorioc creatures can occur too.

Entities

Perhaps one the defining feature of any psychedelic experience powered by DMT is the experiences of interacting with seemingly autonomous entities.  People often report communicating with spirit guides, angels, helpers, ancestors or even aliens.  These entities are typically benevolent, seeking to help the traveller on their inner journey.  They may feel familiar, as though on some level we’ve always known they were there.  

Mother ayahuasca

One entity in particular is often discussed amongst ayahuasca drinkers, Mother Ayahuasca.  This feminine presence is often felt to be the embodiment of the entire experience, the individual whose realm this is.  Some have visions of a humanoid figure that announced itself as mother ayahuasca, some interpret the routing feeling of the experience as mo0ther ayahuasca.  Personally, in my only encounter with her she was a dragon covered in vines.  While the form may vary, this archetype forms a central part of discussions about the ayahuasca experience.

Visionary art

Verbal reports are not the only means we have of trying to share our private ayahuasca visions, art can be a powerful modality for capturing aspects of these experiences.  The ayahuascero-artist, Pablo Amaringo, captured dozens of his ayahuasca experiences in amazing paintings that depict every feature discussed here, and more.  Contemporary visionary artists continue this tradition, attempting to capture experiences that cannot be put into words.

Phenomenology

Science also offers a way of investigating these visions.  In 2002, cognitive psychologist Benny Shanon wrote a landmark study on ayahuasca visions, entitled Antipodes of the Mind.  As a psychologist, he took a forensic, scientific approach to documenting the ayahuasca experience, an approach known as phenomenology.  Having described all aspects of the ayahuasca that can be put into words, Shanon reckoned with the issue of where these visions come from.  One overriding aspect of the ayahuasca experience is its sense of reality, even to a scientifically minded psychologist, this sense of reality is overwhelmingly powerful.  Shanon concluded that the ayahuasca experience represents a “natural cognitive domain”, an aspect of our mind like language or dreaming that has its own self-contained logic.  Why our minds have the capacity to generate these experiences is another matter.

Where do these visions come from? 

Wiler Noreiga Rodriguez is a renowned shipibo ayahuasca from Peru.  According to him, “When we drink ayahuasca we connect to nature through the spirits of nature.  The spirits are the ones that guide you through the world of the medicine, they are the ones that provide the teaching.”  While ayahuasca visions are often interpreted as coming from nature in indigenous traditions, from the scientific perspective these visions are hallucinations created by your brain.  To the person undergoing the experience, this can seem almost unimaginable.  The experiences are so fully formed and seem to be so completely other, entirely autonomous and possessing their own intelligence, that the idea of the visions as random fluctuations of a drugged brain seems laughable.  Clearly if science is going to find a convincing explanation for this phenomenon it will need to account for these aspects of the experience.

Narrative

The ayahuasca experience doesn’t simply consist of the features mentioned here, strung together in a meaningless series of visions.  Typically the experience unfolds with a powerful narrative logic, one might see entire landscapes populated with beings that you interact with as your journey unfolds, seemingly with a logic all its own.  Where does this narrative structure come from?  We know that the brain is a powerful sense making machine, it constantly tells stories to make sense of what we experience.  We see this especially clearly in dreaming, where unrelated imagery gets strung together into a story that seems to make sense at the time.  What if this dream-making ability is triggered by DMT?

DMT & the dreaming brain

In 2019, researchers at Imperial College London recorded electrical activity from the brains of people tripping on DMT.  The electrical activity of the brain is structured in waves, generated by  hundreds of neurons turning on and off in rhythmic bursts.  When awake, an alpha rhythm dominates that peaks around 10 times a second.  When asleep, the brain shifts into a slower theta rhythm that peaks around 6 times a second.  Psychedelics typically suppress the alpha oscillation and DMT was found to be no different to other psychedelics in this regard.  During the peak of the DMT experience, however, the researchers found that a theta rhythm emerged.  This provides evidence that the same circuits that create our dreaming experiences may be received during the DMT experience.

Therapeutic insight

Freud argued that dreaming allows our conscious mind to gain access to repressed material in our unconscious.  Psychedelics may be another route to achieving this.  A common feature of the ayahuasca experience is gaining psychotherapeutic insight into one’s psychological issues, insights that are usually delivered in a narrative form.  If unconscious material is being released when under the influence of DMT and the natural intelligence of our dreaming brain is being harnessed, the logic of the experience that seems to be arising from outside of us may actually be coming from our unconscious mind. Despite the otherworldly character of the ayahuasca experience, it may be that it allows us to peer into ourselves so deeply that, at first, we don’t recognize what we see there.