Blue Lotus / Nymphaea caerulea 

I began working with Blue Lotus, also known as Nymphaea caerulea as a medicine that promotes lucid dreaming after studying trauma psychology. This work was also preceded by a major trauma in my own life, or rather, a series of traumas that took place and that built up into a crisis over the course of about 5 years. As it turns out, blue lotus can be extremely helpful in certain situations to control empathy overwhelm.

I’m going to share my story below in a very abbreviated form and as you read it, inevitably, I expect that you’ll react emotionally to it. You’ll feel angry with me or angry with my daughter’s husband. You might think I’m stupid for being forgiving toward Lydian’s husband. You might think that all of us “should have known” this or that or something else. I know. I know…I’ve had all of these thoughts too. I’ve been angry with myself and I’ve been angry with my daughter’s husband, my daughter, my husband, and anyone else I can think of to try to distribute blame and simply try to rebalance my own emotions. In the end though, psilocybin mushrooms helped me sort through this rubble to help me arrive at a high road where I can, at least, look down on the situation with an open mind. At the moment, though, the biggest issue that I’m trying to solve has to do with Empathy Overwhelm or, Psychic Empathy and the anxiety that comes from feeling another person’s feelings. Empathy, of course, is desirable, but, as it turns out, only in small quantities. The bigger the dose of empathy, the more of a challenge it becomes. Watch a few episodes of “Psychic Kids” to see how the psychic form of empathy (which is very likely the same as the non-psychic version of the same thing – Empathy Overwhelm) debilitates people. 

A lot of people I’ve worked with over the years don’t realize that they pick up other people’s emotions and instead of being psychically overwhelmed, they call this problem “Generalized Anxiety Disorder / GAD”, panic attacks, clinical depression or any number of other mental health issues. Indeed, I would say that most people actually transpose their psychic empathy into a physical ailment. They psychosomatatize their psychic empathy and anxiety into physical symptoms of disease. At any rate though, below I’ll talk just a bit about how my daughter, my husband, and I ended up searching for an herb to reduce empathy as well as our experiences with this herb and when, why, and how we think it helps us.

During this 5 year time period, one of the traumatic experiences that happened to me involved immigration issues. As an American citizen, I had traveled easily all over the world.  I could flash my passport at almost any airport in the world and get a ticket to go to just about any country I wanted to go to. But, about a year before COVID, my daughter, Lydian, fell in love with a man from Myanmar, a country with one of the weakest passports in the world. She and this young man decided that they wanted to get married and within a matter of a few months our family suddenly had to grapple with the immigration paradigm that people in countries like Myanmar, Afghanistan, and North Korea (among others) have to work with. This immigration “situation” with my daughter and her fiancé put us at the threshold of familial refugee status. My daughter and her fiancé could not be together legally in any country of the world for longer than 2 weeks to 6 months at a time. They couldn’t even pass through most of the countries of the world en route to another country. My husband and I dedicated ourselves to their cause. In Myanmar, if they were together, either one of them could be jailed (it was illegal for a local to date a foreigner there). Our only hope was to find a way to get Lydian’s fiancé into Mexico. 

Lydian and her husband figured out how to get married on a remote island in the Caribbean, and after they were married, Lydian’s husband was able to live safely with her in Mexico. It was an acrobatic immigration feat that we accomplished though to make this possible. What we did and how we did it was not for the faint of heart. But Lydian’s fiancé, Naing Naing, soon became depressed and despondent in Mexico and the two of them ended up back in Myanmar together. John and I went with them out of concern for our daughter’s well-being there. All of these events took place in the months leading up to the COVID pandemic.

As an American citizen, I had never dealt with immigration issues like the ones that we encountered as a result of our son-in-law. We learned quickly that you can’t call an embassy in another country to find out what their policies are prior to arriving at the embassy’s doorstep. Embassies do not answer the phone. You can’t contact an immigration lawyer who specializes generally in immigration and movement across the planet. There are lawyers who specialize in the movement of people across one border from one country to one other country, but many of these lawyers are corrupt. And they can’t help with immigration issues pertaining to countries other than the ones they specialize in working with. So, if you’re going to move yourself or a loved one from one country through several other countries to go to an embassy to work through the process of getting a visa, for example, you take a risk that you’re going to fly to that country and be turned away either at the border or, if not at the border, at the embassy. Or, the embassy may simply not be able to make an appointment for you within the allotted period of time that you’re allowed to be in the country – stuff like that. Take a moment now to imagine this situation if you’ve never experienced it yourself. You must either dedicate your life to the immigration process or give up on it entirely. Also, I should note that, if you are dealing with a situation involving a weak passport, you’re traveling to countries that are challenging in the first place. Many of these countries are extremely expensive to travel to because they lack tourist infrastructure. So the expense of such an undertaking is cost-prohibitive. 

A lot of what I learned about immigration came from The Blue Guide. The Blue Guide is not a booklet that I bought on Amazon, but rather, a Spirit Guide who would come and visit me in the middle of the night dressed in full Burmese ceremony garb. I felt like he was, perhaps, Naing Naing’s Spirit Guide on account of his Burmese dress. I was convinced of this because of his appearance and because he was Asian, but I’ve since realized that The Blue Guide is my guide. He’s one of my primary guides, in fact.

This was not the only traumatic storyline that took shape over the past five years. My son-in-law was addicted to methamphetamines too. He didn’t know that he was addicted to a drug, or at least he didn’t have the words to describe his relationship to the pills he was taking. This explained his depression and despondency upon reaching Mexico and his reasons why he felt like he needed to return to Myanmar.

There are no public service announcements in Burma to educate the public about how to “Just Say No” to drugs or anything like that. So he was an addict, but he didn’t have a word to explain his addiction even to himself. And he was ashamed of it. So he kept it a secret from my daughter. We learned about his addiction through our dreams. I have always recorded strong dreams when I would have them since I was a teenager, but I understood dreams back then as something that our minds produce as symbolic in the Freudian sense of things. I would psychologize people when they would tell me their dreams. In other words, I’d listen to a person’s dreams and assume that the dreams were about something in the past, not in the present (or in the future) per se and that these dreams could be interpreted in a strictly egotistical way to describe the dreamer. The dreams, to me, were not a dialogue with a bigger consciousness. The dreams could not tell the dreamer about other people in their life, future events, or about any kind of information that was not already unconsciously known to the dreamer.  But when our family was living in Myanmar, the three of us (John, my husband, Lydian, and I) would often have dreams that were similar at least in terms of symbolism if not also in terms of plot. This got our attention. We started writing down our dreams and paying more attention to them. We spent some time each day discussing our dreams.

Often, in Myanmar, in my dreams I would be standing in a pool of tiny orange, green, and white-colored rectangular “things”. I didn’t know what I was standing in. Naing Naing would regularly be in the distance running away.  

I had a dream that referenced the old movie Alien. I finally watched the movie with John one night. On that night, one of our neighbors went out into the street screaming and yelling and flailing around for several hours. She was screaming about her husband. They’d just had a baby and a group of people stood nearby as silhouettes around her, motorcycles passing by in the street with their headlights illuminating the situation periodically. The group of onlookers appeared motionless and faceless, like paper cut-outs to John and me as we stood in the doorway of our rental. She screamed about shame and what sounded to me to be a nervous breakdown because her husband had done something. John and I peered out through the door, the movie Alien on pause for the moment. The list of things her husband might have done was fairly concise and we considered each one of them briefly together before returning to our movie.

This was, perhaps 1 week before the COVID pandemic struck. 

I couldn’t remember the plot of the movie Alien but when we watched it there, sitting in our very basic, uncomfortable cement house in Myanmar, the message was clear to John and me. Leave. Go now. Take Lydian. DO NOT LEAVE LYDIAN BEHIND. As such, the movie was gripping. We were on the edges of our seats…

We didn’t like the message… 

…but the two of us went to bed and that night, I had a dream that Lydian was dead. Her body was lying on a table and John and I were bathing it and getting it ready for a funeral. John also had a dream that night that Lydian had died. These were not your average dreams. Freudian dream interpreters would say that our dreams were an expression of our fears and sometimes, I can agree that this is so. Some dreams are an expression of fear. But these were dreams that were real and that felt real and they went against our desires (to stay and just support Lydian until she and Naing Naing were ready to return home to Mexico). So, for us, that clenched it. We started packing the next morning and we told Lydian that she should come with us. She was ill. We didn’t know what was wrong with her at the time, but she was very thin (later we learned that she was drinking non-potable water). Naing Naing, her husband, would disappear for a couple of nights every 2 weeks or so and at that time, we didn’t know why. Later we learned that he would take the methamphetamine pills and then avoided her because he knew his behavior was strange and that she’d notice.

He refused to come with her back to Mexico. He refused to give her a reason for his refusal.

So the next day, after John and I had packed our house, I helped Lydian pack her house and we hired a driver and left Bagan for Yangon within 48 hours. In Yangon, there was a calico cat that Lydian and I had both seen in our dreams. She had a collar with a bell on it. In the dreams, the cat had had a key on the collar, but the kitty in the hotel had a bell rather than a key. Nonetheless, this was one of the first real-world signs that we’d seen in our dreams. John, Lydian, and I came to recognize these signs when we would see them as communication from our Spirit Guides that we were on the right track–that we were going in the right direction. We followed them like a breadcrumb trail.

I knew that there would be something pertaining to the game of “jacks” that would be sign that it was time to leave Yangon. One day, John and I took Jaggery, Lydian’s kitten, to the vet to have him prepped for travel back to Mexico. When we returned to our hotel a large black man was sitting on a bench with a cream colored dog. The man leaned forward as we passed by and asked if we had a cat or a dog. We showed him our kitty and he asked for his name. I said, “Jags.” The black man laughed and said, “Really? My dog’s name is Jacks too!” (He’d misheard the name, of course). 

While still in Yangon, on the night before we were scheduled to leave, I finally said, out loud that I was ready to know what all these dreams were about. I woke the next morning with the FIintstones theme song in my head (ya ba da ba doo). By this time, I knew that my dreams were not Freudian. They were not just my mind processing the garbage from the days prior. I sat up in bed, got out my Kindle, and started Googling different combinations of the “ya ba da ba doo” phrase. “Ya ba” yielded telling results. Ya ba is the Thai word for methamphetamine. I looked for images of ya ba. Sure enough, Google served up photo after photos of orange and green pills, just as I had seen in my dreams. I hadn’t ever thought of them as pills.

This explained the pools of pills that I was often standing in up to my knees in my dreams with Naing Naing running away. It also explained Naing Naing’s regular disappearances (methamphetamine cycles of addiction and relapse peaks are usually between 10-14 days) and his total refusal to leave Myanmar to return to Mexico despite the fact that Mexico is much safer than Myanmar, he and Lydi can live there together for indefinite periods, he owned property in Mexico, and had work in Mexico. 

We traveled to Mexico through empty airports in the hours before COVID shut the world down. That cue from the man with the dog named Jacks saved us. We arrived back to Mexico the day after the airport closed in South Korea. Lydian was very sick, but I had the medicine that I needed to make her healthy again once we were in Mexico. Not drinking non-potable water every day also helped her recover quickly. We now knew that Naing Naing was addicted to drugs, though he still didn’t know it. Things seemed incredibly bleak in terms of their marriage.. 

How could Naing Naing overcome an addiction if he didn’t know that he was addicted to something? And how could a Burmese speaking man benefit from “rehab” of any kind? Rehab, and “talk therapy” after all, was the only thing I knew about that could potentially help someone with a drug addiction. I started by reading a book on talk therapy for drug addicts, but quit the book halfway through as I felt it made me feel less and less hopeful about finding a cure for addiction with each word that I read. 

One morning though, I had the idea to contact everyone I knew who had once had an addiction to meth. I knew people, after all, who had recovered from meth addiction. I started with a girl who taught yoga and who had also spent a considerable amount of time in Myanmar. She said, “I drank a lot of coffee to get past the meth addiction.” 

This statement totally changed the trajectory of my thinking. I started pulling up research into herbs that mimic the effects of meth. One night though, I had a dream where my guide handed me a piece of paper with the word “KUZU” written on it. When I Googled this word, I found KUDZU a plant in the Fabaceae family. This plant is famous for its ability to help people with alcohol addiction. Lydian found some Kudzu in Myanmar, ordered it and had it sent to him. This was the first plant medicine that Naing Naing worked with to stop his addiction. He loved it and called it “beautiful”. It works to regulate blood sugar levels in the body.

Later, I found Mucuna pruriens, a bean plant that supplies the body with the dopamine precursors that it needs to produce plenty of this neurotransmitter. Dopamine is deficient in those with addiction. Improving dopamine levels releases many people from addiction withdrawal symptoms. Mucuna at a dose of 6000 mg per day (1500 mg 4 times per day) did the trick for Naing Naing. He took B complex vitamins, magnesium, selenium, and zinc too to make sure that his body could properly process the Mucuna into dopamine. Within about a month, he was ready to leave Myanmar and make the very dangerous trip to Dubai, where we’d stationed ourselves, onward to Africa where he’d have to get a new visa for Mexico.

During COVID, we found the open countries that we could pass through and that Naing Naing could pass through using our dreams. Lydian’s reunion with Naing Naing during the COVID pandemic followed a path through the dreamworld first. We had already been through dream-training in terms of immigration and movement across the world. The Blue Guide had helped us find our way through the countries that Naing Naing could travel to or pass through. COVID made world travel infinitely more difficult, if not impossible for anyone who did not have this “training”. Some people might not be able to swallow this story about how our dreams and spirit guides helped us, but probably, if you’re reading this, you’re having psychic overload and you’re trying to reduce empathy in order to live a normal life. Dreams are just one way in which our human bodies can translate and interpret empathic messages (among other things). There are times when the information is welcome and beneficial and times when it is decidedly non-beneficial and in fact, incapacitating. 

Eventually, our dreams helped us find our way back across the world to Dubai during COVID. They helped us find herbal medicines for Naing Naing that made it possible for him to easily stop taking meth (believe it or not). They helped us then find a path for Naing Naing to meet us in Dubai. And they helped us find the path back home with him to Mexico through Africa at the height of the pandemic. Pretty amazing stuff, but the story isn’t over yet.

Dreams are one of the most important tools that John, Lydian, and I have learned to use to find our way through the world when the world turns dark. When all hope seems to be lost, our dreams can help us find hope to hold onto. We have all learned to categorize our dreams. Some of them are “powerful”. Some involve communication about an imminent world event. Some dreams tell us about other people, specifically, their thoughts or actions regarding us. During difficult times, dreams can help us see other aspects of a situation that we would be otherwise blind to. Dreams can be helpful if we know how to use them, but at times dreams can also be disillusioning, especially if we have trauma stored in our bodies. So there’s learning involved. 

Nonetheless, I started studying the lucid dreaming plants when Lydian became pregnant recently and Naing Naing left her to go back to Myanmar suddenly when she was 6 months along. This time, he’d been away from Myanmar for 2 years due to the coup there and one day, it was like he had a psychotic break. We begged him not to go, but he was delusional and violent. Naing Naing seemed to have multiple personality disorder as well as psychosis. He manifests odd events that look a bit like poltergeist activity at times (burst pipes or electrical outages are common when he’s upset, for example).

Iboga is the lucid dreaming plant that I know the most about, though I’ve never worked directly with it. I’ve worked with microdosing Tabernanthe manii, a plant that’s closely related to Tabernanthe iboga, but I didn’t produce the Tabernanthe manii tincture myself so I don’t know what the dose is and the bottle is not specific about dosing. I haven’t noticed an effect from this tincture. Iboga can be microdosed and taken up to a half of a full dose in preparation for a ritual. and this plant, apparently, can help people get in touch with dead relatives and ancestors to work through ancestral trauma. Some people have endeavored to work with Constellation Therapy in conjunction with iboga microdosing and half-dosing intensive sessions with excellent results apparently. But it isn’t always easy to find iboga. I’m still working on getting iboga to produce my own microdosing tincture here in Mexico.

But while iboga still eludes me (for now), I’ve discovered a variety of other lucid dreaming herbs including:

• Blue Lotus / Nymphaea caerulea
• Calea Zacatechichi
• African Dream Root

I have Calea Zacatechichi in my possession, but I’ve opted to work first with Blue Lotus. So far, the results have not been exactly what I expected. John just recently started working with Blue Lotus too so I’m curious about whether his experiences with this herb are similar to mine. Lydian is still breastfeeding and she has mostly been working with psilocybin mushrooms for postpartum depression, but she finally agreed to take just one puff of a Blue Lotus cigarette (hand-rolled at home) as an herbal remedy for psychic anxiety. The psilocybin has changed her life and this one puff on the Blue Lotus cigarette made her a believer in this herb for psychic protection. 

Naing Naing is in Myanmar and he is mentally ill. He is obsessed with Lydian, but also angry with her. He dissociates and she feels him. She knows that she’s feeling him because his communications with her have proven to her that what she feels is correct. Unfortunately though, often she experiences a feeling of impending doom which is distracting and irrelevant because Naing Naing is not present in her daily life here in Mexico anymore. She’s raising a tiny baby so she needs her psychic space to be free of distractions.

John and I are a part of Naing Naing’s “delusions of persecution”. Though we always functioned as protectors for him in immigration and other settings like work, he now sees us as people who are out to get him somehow. We feel him too even though we haven’t seen or spoken to him in many months now. We’ve blocked him and even shut down our social media accounts because he used other people’s devices to try to get in and see us. He lives a lot of his life in a virtual reality of video games and social media which has definitely worsened his condition. We try to avoid those virtual spaces right now in order to avoid the toxic parts of Naing Naing.

For me, as a lucid dreaming herb, Blue Lotus seems to work like many plants. It has its own consciousness and it decides when it’s going to give me a lucid dream. I started working with Blue Lotus specifically to conjure dreams that might help me, John, or Lydian. I often feel its effects in terms of my sleep or in terms of how it quiets my thoughts, but I don’t always have a lucid dream on the night when I take it. I have, however, noticed that I have had lucid dreams more often in a general way since I started taking this herb once or twice a week as a tincture. I’ve taken it perhaps 8 times over the past month or so, but I don’t usually have the lucid dream on the night when I take the herb. Mostly, I have taken it in tincture form, but recently, I started smoking it too. 

Lucid dreams are cool, but they’re different from dreams that are “powerful” or that give me information I otherwise might never find (like KUDZU). Specifically, lucid dreams feel and seem very real, but they don’t involve a lot of emotion. They don’t feel as powerful as other dreams of power that consist more of symbols and emotional content. Having an herb like Blue Lotus to spur lucid dreams has helped me clarify this point, which has also helped me clarify how this herb works in other contexts too.

I started taking 3-4 puffs on a Blue Lotus cigarette after I had two powerful dreams over the course of two nights where I was smoking the herb. The second dream included information about dosing. In the dream, I opened a cardboard box of colorful little pipes that had a serving size each of about thimble. I chose one of the pipes and put flower petals into it for smoking. That was helpful in terms of knowing how much Blue Lotus to begin with, but as it turns out, smoking the Blue Lotus has been a LOT more helpful to Lydian, John, and me as an herb for psychic protection than taking the Blue Lotus as a tincture or as a tea for lucid dreaming. 

All of us have taken just 1-4 puffs of smoke from a cigarette or even just from “incensed” Blue Lotus to get rid of psychic anxiety. At times, it works really well. It’s like a miracle when it works in this way to get rid of psychic empathy. Within about 10-45 minutes after smoking the herb, we feel centered and clear. However, it doesn’t always work this way. Sometimes, I’ve smoked the herb and it didn’t make me feel better at all. Lydian has also had this experience. John, on the other hand, has had great success with Blue Lotus so far in terms of it being able to reduce psychic input. 

I feel strongly that the tincture or the tea (specifically perhaps the nuciferine) can actually cancel out the psychic protection effects by Blue Lotus. I’m not sure why. This is just my theory based on my experience with combining a few tokes of Blue Lotus with a few doses of the tincture taken later on. I don’t recommend combining smoking Blue Lotus with taking the tincture or tea of Blue Lotus (or Nelumbo nucifera). It’s possible that the apomorphine is what acts when you smoke Blue Lotus based on my research. Apomorphine has an opiate-like effect. Nuciferine, on the other hand, which is very available in the tea and the tincture, reduces dopamine interactions with dopamine receptors. Nuciferine blocks dopamine receptors and thus (as the theory goes), can act as an antipsychotic that’s roughly as powerful as clozapine or chlorpromazine.

It seems that Blue Lotus works best against psychic attacks that take place on the mental plane. In other words, it has been our experience that Blue Lotus works best to counteract other people’s thoughts about us — the words that they use to talk about us to themselves or the things that they imagine in sick fantasies that involve us. Our bodies can react with a sympathetic fight-or-flight response via the autonomic nervous system when we pick up on people talking smack behind our backs, but even if they aren’t talking about us, Blue Lotus, it seems, may be able to help defend against people’s negative thoughts that they send our way.

On the other hand though, it seems that Blue Lotus isn’t able to defend against feelings that people have for us. On the emotional level, Blue Lotus doesn’t do as much. It can’t ward off another person’s feelings of anger or hate toward us even though it might be able to ward off some of the bad vibes created by words or imagined actions. Of course, I’m not 100% convinced of my own theory on this herb just yet. My experience with psilocybin has been that magic mushrooms can untie and straighten out emotional content that has become “twisted” while Blue Lotus can protect us from mental garbage, which is at least something in terms of psychic protection. 

It’s interesting to me that the nuciferine in Blue Lotus tea/tincture could theoretically help Naing     Naing stop having delusions and hallucinations (if he were ever to decide he wanted to do such a thing) while the apomorphine in the Blue Lotus smoke can help us stop reacting to this thoughts. I’ve worked with a lot of people over the years who have had a mental illness or a drug addiction and the two sides of this herb make me curious about what’s actually going on here. Dissociation and depersonalization are common problems in people with mental illness. In the realm of shamanic medicine, depersonalized and dissociative states might be regarded as a type of soul loss. Perhaps in dissociation, parts of the soul travel and perhaps this is how psychic attacks happen. While the nuciferine in Blue Lotus tea/tincture might be able to put the soul back in its place, the apomorphine (or another substance that hasn’t been studied yet, perhaps) might be able to protect people from the psychic attack by the one who is dissociating.

My theory, once again, is that the tincture and the tea can cancel out the beneficial effects against psychic anxiety created by smoking the herb. It takes only a tiny amount of Blue Lotus smoke to reduce psychic anxiety (1-4 “tokes” has been enough for all of us). On the other hand, when I tried using Blue Lotus as a tincture or as an herbal tea for psychic anxiety, I would say it had the opposite effect of making things worse for me. This makes sense if nuciferine, as an herbal antipsychotic, actually reduces certain defense mechanisms that our bodies and brains have against picking up other people’s emotions. On the other hand, I know that apomorphine is often administered intranasally and, though it’s not an opiate, it does interact with opiate receptors. Perhaps the apomorphine breaks the connection between me and another person who is actively thinking about me enough to make it possible for me to regroup and stop engaging unconsciously with the other person’s psychic material. I’m not sure yet, but in any case, John, Lydian, and I have all felt really lucky to have discovered this herb. It’s a tool that we’ve been able to use to get rid of psychic anxiety sometimes. 

John seems to only pick up psychic material that’s oriented toward thought or action-fantasies (where people imagine you in conversation or in some kind of psychic play with them). This might be why Blue Lotus smoke works so well for him. Lydi and I, on the other hand, seem to pick up other things too, like emotional content, I suppose. Blue Lotus doesn’t always work to get rid of psychic anxiety that happens when a person has a strong feeling toward us.

I know that people who don’t acknowledge the role that psychic input has on their daily lives and their physical health will certainly think that what I’m talking about in terms of “psychic anxiety” is nothing but fluff. In reality though, our bodies are calibrated to pick up radiation / energy from other people’s bodies even from a distance. These energies can be picked up through melanin in the skin which is hardwired into the autonomic nervous system by super-thin nerve fibers that also help the melanin talk to the pineal gland about whether it’s light or dark, summer, fall, winter, or spring, and whether the moon is full, waning, or waxing (which is particularly important to women whose bodies decide when or if to ovulate on the basis of such information. Click here to read more about “Lunaception” as a legitimate, scientifically studied way to use moonlight exposure to enhance fertility in women. We don’t question whether the melanin in the skin can know what season it is or whether it’s day or night. Is it really that hard of a stretch to think that our bodies might be able to know when another person is thinking strong thoughts or feeling strong feelings about us?

Click here to learn more about how the melanin in our skin connects us not just to the environment, but also to other people, particularly loved ones.

That being said, Blue Lotus often works for us, it seems, as long as we take it before our psychic anxiety gets too high. I tend to believe that most psychic attacks are actually not an “attack” but an attempt by someone, usually a family member or a close friend, to get another person to do what they want them to do. Essentially, the “attack” is like you’re being psychically pinned down and forced to engage in something on a psychic level that you don’t really want to do. Most of the time, people want to manipulate other people in this way because they want to be “close and connected”.

I tend to believe that everyone is “sensitive” because practically everyone in the world has melanin that allows them to pick up information and energy from other people. But not everyone translates the psychic messages they receive in the same way. I remember, for example, having Generalized Anxiety Disorder / GAD (self-diagnosed) when I was in my 20s.  John also had GAD. We noticed several years after we developed this crippling anxiety that we would pass it back and forth between us. I’d say, “Okay, finally…I feel like my anxiety is letting up.” And he’d say, “That’s funny because I feel my anxiety coming on.” This happened enough times that we started wondering about what we were actually experiencing. Why would I feel it lift as John would feel it develop? Eventually, we began to wonder if perhaps we were picking up some kind of psychic yuck from our parents who were always disgruntled and angry with John and me. One Christmas, I got to test the theory when I was walking through a Walmart with what felt like “insects buzzing around my mind”. As we stood in the checkout line, I decided to do something I’d never tried before to get rid of anxiety – placating the person who seemed to be sending out bad Ju Ju. Usually, when I felt this kind of anxiety and when I felt like it had a very distinct point of origin, I would get angry with the person who seemed to be sending it out. This time, I decided to try a different approach, I dialed my parent’s number and told them I had gotten them a big Christmas gift–I had called them to ask them if they could pick it up. The insects-in-my-mind feeling lifted within moments of the phone call. It was like a miracle. This proved something to me that I tested again and again to my own amazement to find that my Generalized Anxiety Disorder symptoms were almost always due to some kind of psychic input. 

A lot of people don’t experience anxiety as anxiety. Rather, they experience anxiety as a physical illness such as fibromyalgia. Some people develop allergies rather than anxiety. Believe it or not, this is entirely plausible if you take just a few hours to learn a little bit about the autonomic nervous system. This is the part of the nervous system that high school science teachers rarely mention. It’s the part of us that stores stress and that knows when someone is staring at us from behind.

So, without writing a whole book on this topic and in the spirit of being “brief”, let me just say that Blue Lotus is a good herb for psychic empaths, but it should be smoked, not consumed orally, in my experience. It does NOT work every single time in the same way. It does not always allow a psychic empath to shut off their empathic feelings, but sometimes it works so well that it’s hard to even believe it. I do NOT recommend smoking more than just a couple of puffs at a time. For children with psychic empathic abilities, parents might use the blue lotus flower petals more like an incense that they set next to their child for just a few minutes for inhalation rather than encouraging their kid to smoke it as a cigarette. Remember though, Blue Lotus won’t always work if the type of energy coming into the person’s field is of a particular emotional or spiritual type. When it works though, it works very well. When it doesn’t work, my feeling (at the moment at least, though I continue to research this topic) is that psychic empaths may need to work with something like psilocybin mushrooms to deactivate whatever is being activated psychically. Psilocybin will not in any way prevent psychic information from coming in, but it helps clarify the actual intention behind the psychic input. Sometimes it can take a few days before the body and the mind sync up again after a psilocybin trip to release trauma that can, in fact, be caused by psychic anxiety. 

I have not had any negative effects from taking a microdose of psilocybin (up to 0.5 grams) with 1-4 tokes of Blue Lotus at the same time. Lydian and John have not had any negative effects from combining Blue Lotus with psilocybin either, though if you decide to combine these two medicines, exercise come caution. Start with very low doses at first to see how your body reacts to it.

Psychic inputs are there for a reason. If we don’t feel what other people are feeling, we really can’t understand what other people are going through. We can be compassionate, but without actually feeling another person’s feelings, we don’t know what their experience is of the world. I believe that a lot of people would totally shut down their psychic inputs if they could because so many people around them, especially loved ones, are in pain. A build up of trauma makes it so that a lot of people can’t feel empathy anymore – indeed, people who have been sufficiently traumatized can’t even empathize with themselves…I reference models such as Internal Family Systems to explain internal empathy and how, without internal empathy, a person becomes like a zombie who is unable to feel normal feelings or go about life in a “normal” way that involves personal growth and healthy relationships. Indeed, Internal Family Systems can explain a lot of Naing Naing’s behavior toward himself and toward others. It’s a compassionate model and it can be extrapolated into the idea of soul loss that we talk about above.

There’s a lot of fruit-loops-and-windchimes out there online regarding empaths and there’s also a very real effort on the part of Big Pharma and the healthcare system to cover up the fact that empathy overwhelm and psychic empathy are the same thing. There are, however, scientific studies confirming that empathy and anxiety are linked. Whether you believe that empathy is psychic or not, is up to you, but in any case, if you’re trying to figure out how to reduce empathy in order to reduce anxiety, consider smoking Blue Lotus.

Plants are conscious and they have their own wisdom that often far surpasses or, at least, differs substantially from human wisdom, so when a person starts working with Blue Lotus for lucid dreaming, they might have very 1-to-1 effects where they take the herb and then have a lucid dream or a relief from psychic anxiety. Right at the moment, I’m in the midst of a family crisis and I have specific questions and specific answers that I’m seeking when I take the herb. But the situation I’m in right now is at a critical plateau so, I don’t always receive information through dreams because everything is at a stand-still. Having a dream during a standstill is actually confusing for me because I tend to interpret all of my dreams (unless they are extremely clear in terms of their content) in terms of this family crisis and my Guides certainly know this. Smoking Blue Lotus can help me come back into my own life and stop engaging with repetitive familial content that isn’t going anywhere. 

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Blue Lotus: Lucid Dreaming Herb

It’s been hard for me to find quality information about Nymphaea caerulea / Blue Lotus directly via scientific research. Normally, when I do research for medical writing, I look for scientific articles that corroborate the anecdotal information that I’ve experienced myself or that other people have reported to me, but this herb has challenged that process. There’s a lot of information out there about Blue Lotus that’s been “spun”. In other words, people have found an original source and they just copy the information that they’ve found from this original source to create a new article that’s different (in terms of the search engines, for the purpose of indexing) but that doesn’t really give you new or even valuable information. Quality scientific articles about Nymphaea caerulea are hard to find. However, I have been able to find a decent amount of scientific information about nuciferine and apomorphine, two substances that are found in Blue Lotus that have been studied extensively. Of course, finding studies into nuciferine or apomorphine is not the same as finding studies into Nymphaea caerulea as a whole herb, but it’s better than nothing.

Note that Blue Lotus / Nymphaea caerulea contains other substances as well that have not been studied as extensively but that might very well be the active ingredients that make this an herbal remedy for psychic empathy or for lucid dreaming. 

Nonetheless, below I’m providing an overview of the most important facts regarding this plant that would be useful to anyone who would like to use Blue Lotus for lucid dreaming. Though a lot of people work with Blue Lotus as an herb for lucid dreams, Nymphaea caerulea is useful as an herbal remedy for other health issues as well. Below, I’ll talk a little bit about what Blue Lotus does in terms of the body as well as the mind so our readers can decide for themselves if they’d like to work with this herb or not.

Blue Lotus and More: Herbs for Empaths

Psychic empathy can be a gift or it can be a curse. Blue Lotus can be used with CBD oil to reduce psychic anxiety for empaths. It can also be smoked in very small amounts and taken with microdoses of psilocybin. Note that psilocybin will not numb you out. In fact, it can initially  make the psychic empathy worse, but usually within a day or two, it has a stabilizing effect on mood when a person is under psychic attack almost constantly (as when, for example, a loved one is mentally ill or suffering from some type of addiction). If you’re in a life situation right now where someone is obsessing about you and you can feel it, consider taking microdoses of psilocybin two to four times daily. Smoke Blue Lotus up to 4 times per day between psilocybin doses (1-4 tokes). CBD oil can also be administered if the situation is dire. 

Medicinal Substances Contained in Blue Lotus

• Quinoline Alkaloids
  • Apomorphine
  • Nuciferine
  • Nymphaeine
  • Nymphaline
  • Nupharine
  • Alpha-Nupharidine
  • Beta-Nupharidine

Blue Lotus: Medicinal Effects (Non-Psychoactive)

• Used to treat PTSD - Though psilocybin is an excellent natural treatment for PTSD, Blue Lotus can be useful to calm people with this disorder. As a tea/tincture, Blue Lotus may work to reduce psychotic symptoms of PTSD, but as a smokable herb, it can be used to offset empathy overwhelm which can play a role in PTSD symptoms. Click here for more information about Blue Lotus as an herbal remedy for PTSD.
• Used to relax the body - according to some people, Blue Lotus is similar in some ways to cannabis, but to me, the “high” is very different. I wouldn’t even call it a “high”. Rather, for me, Blue Lotus clears my mind and my internal dialogue stops. Blue Lotus doesn’t make me lazy, it doesn’t make me hungry, and it doesn’t make it hard for me to have relationships with other people. So while people make this comparison, my guess is that the main similarity between Blue Lotus and cannabis is the fact that both can dull psychic input somewhat. 
• Improves Immunity -
• Herbal Parkinson’s Disease Treatment - The apomorphine in Blue Lotus is often used to treat “off” episodes at home.
• Promotes Positive Gastrointestinal Effects - (used as a tincture or tea)

Blue Lotus has been studied as a natural cure for Crohn’s disease, Colorectal Cancer, and Ulcerative Colitis.

• Ulcer treatment
• Reduces diarrhea
• Calms intestinal cramping (but can also promote peristalsis)
• Can reduce digestive inflammation

• • Cure Diabetes / Reduce blood sugar levels naturally - Blue Lotus leaves can be administered as a tea – administer with Arctium lappa to treat diabetes naturally. Studies have shown that Blue Lotus stimulates insulin production better than the drug Glyburide.
  • Reduce cholesterol levels naturally - Blue Lotus leaves administered as a tea
  • Lose Weight - Blue Lotus leaves can be administered to promote weight loss

• Reduce Inflammation Naturally 

• Cure Cancer Naturally - Blue Lotus has anti-tumor effects. It should be administered with Trifolium pratense and Arctium lappa to further increase the anti-cancer effects of this herb. Note that Arctium lappa is also an herb that can be used to cure diabetes naturally. Administer as a tincture or as a tea. The nuciferine in Blue Lotus has been studied as a natural cure for neuroblastoma and colorectal cancer, but it is likely that it would have beneficial effects on many types of cancer.
• Treat Psychosis / Herbal Remedy for Schizophrenia - Nuciferine is said to have medicinal properties similar to those of chlorpromazine. Administer as a tincture or as a tea.

Blue Lotus Side Effects

• Priapism / Prolonged Erection (when administered in very high doses particularly in e-cigarettes – I would avoid e-cigarettes of Blue Lotus personally) 
• Low Blood Sugar 
• Dizziness
• Nausea
• Headache

How Long Does Blue Lotus Flower Effects Last?

Blue Lotus effects usually become noticeable within 10-45 minutes after you smoke the herb, drink the tea, or take a dose of the tincture. In individuals who develop nausea or trembling at this time, note that these effects generally stop within another 20-30 minutes. Changes in your perception of the world usually occur within about 45 minutes after you take Blue Lotus based on animal studies. 

As I mentioned above, I’ve had dreams about Blue Lotus where I opened a box of pipes that were fashioned by molding clay around a human thumb. I took this dream to be about dosing the herb for smoking it. In another lucid dream about smoking Blue Lotus, I rolled the Blue Lotus petals in tobacco leaves (Nicotiana rustica). I have combined tobacco snuff as rápe with Blue Lotus, but I didn’t notice any unusual effects yet. Tobacco is used to promote positive social interactions though (think: peace pipe), so I’m hopeful about this combination.

Obviously, I don’t like the idea of smoking herbs all the time just because the smoke can be hard on the lungs. However, if you are hoping to get rid of empathy overwhelm, smoking Blue Lotus is definitely the way to use this herb. In fact, taking it as a tincture or as a tea can actually (at least in my experience), make empathy overwhelm worse.  

Nuciferine Half-Life

A half-life tells you how long it takes for a substance (such as nuciferine) to reduce by half in the body. Nuciferine has a half-life of between 2 - 3.84 hours. How your body processes the nuciferine will alter, to some extent, how long Blue Lotus effects last. The “peak” experience associated with Blue Lotus would likely occur within 1-2 hours based on the half life of nuciferine. Maximum concentration or nuciferine occurs at around 90-110 minutes after ingestion. 

Apomorphine Half-Life

In contrast to nuciferine, apomorphine has a more rapid onset of action and a shorter duration of effect. It reaches maximum concentration in the blood within 8-16 minutes of ingestion and it has a half-life of between 34 -70 minutes. This means that the medicinal effects of the apomorphine in Blue Lotus can be experienced within minutes of ingestion, but they last for a relatively short period of time (about an hour). The peak Blue Lotus experience associated with apomorphine would occur around 15-35 minutes based on the half life.

Blue Lotus / Nuciferine and Apomorphine: Herbal Remedy for Mental Illness

Nuciferine is a substance found in both Blue Lotus (Nymphaea caerulea) as well as in the plant Nelumbo nucifera. This substance has psychoactive effects that have been scientifically studied in regard to a variety of different types of dementia and mental illness including:

• Herbal Remedy for Parkinson’s Disease - Blue Lotus / Nymphaea caerulea, Lotus / Nelumbo nucifera, and/or nuciferine have been used to treat “off” episodes wherein the pharmaceutical treatments are no longer working.  Click here to read more about other ways to treat Parkinson’s disease naturally at home.
• Herbal Remedy for Lewy Body Dementia - Blue Lotus can also work as an herbal remedy for Lewy Body Dementia. It might work best as a tea/tincture as it is the nuciferine that seems to do the most good in treating this disease. Lewy Body Dementia and Parkinson’s disease are essentially the same disease, but where the symptoms express themselves in opposite chronology. Click here to read more about the relationship between Lewy Body Dementia and Parkinson’s disease. Note that there is far more research into cures for Parkinson’s disease than cures for Lewy Body Dementia, but if you know that these diseases are related, you open up a whole new set of possibilities.  Click here to read more about other ways to treat Lewy Body dementia at home.
• Schizophrenia - The nuciferine in Nymphaea caerulea or Nelumbo nucifera acts as an antagonist for a number of serotonin receptors and as an inverse agonist for 5-HT7, as a partial agonist for D2, D5, and 5-HT6 receptors, and as an agonist for 5-HT1A and D4 receptors. It acts as a dopamine antagonist by inhibiting the dopamine transporter.

How Nuciferine Works to Treat Psychosis Naturally

In animal models, nuciferine has been administered at doses between 25-50 mg per kilogram body weight. At the lower dose, nuciferine produces sedation. At the higher dose, it produces catalepsy. 

Nuciferine can strengthen the effects of barbituates and also subanalgesic doses of morphine. It can also potentiate sub-anticonvulsive doses of phenytoin. Nuciferine also prevents amphetamine toxicity. In other words, it can protect a cocaine or meth addict from amphetamine toxicity. Nuciferine functions as a dopamine antagonist by inhibiting the dopamine transporter even while the apomorphine in the Nymphaea caerulea plant works as a non-selective dopamine agonist to promote the function of dopamine. 

How Apomorphine Works to Treat Psychosis Naturally

The apomorphine and nuciferine found in Blue Lotus complement each other in an interesting way. While Apomorphine works as a non-selective dopamine agonist, nuciferine reduces the activity of dopamine by inhibiting dopamine transporters in the brain and body. Apomorphine acts on both the D1 and D2 receptors. Essentially, while nuciferine blocks the effects of dopamine in the body, apomorphine enhances dopamine effects. One might compare the whole-herb effect that one would get from taking it as a tea or tincture as being a bit like a music mixing board. For musicians, a mixing board can make the difference between recording an album that’s full of distortion and poor sound quality or a work of art with every note audible at the perfect volume and not a hint of distortion. When a person takes Blue Lotus, the herb can behave this way in the brain and body to properly “mix” sensory and emotional data that comes into the body such that it doesn’t get distorted. As a whole herb, Blue Lotus is a conscious plant that has the ability to reduce the volume on psychotic notes while simultaneously increasing the volume on sanity. 

Studies have shown that apomorphine is sometimes not absorbed well through the digestive system in subjects due to first-pass metabolism. Smoking Blue Lotus may, for this reason, have more pronounced effects on the body in terms of certain types of psychosis. If you administer Nymphaea caerulea as a tea or a tincture, the body may metabolize the apomorphine before it has an effect on the brain and body. Administering Blue Lotus as a tincture where you allow it to sit under the tongue for a few minutes or administering the blue lotus as a snuff or as smoke may be more effective for some people. Experiment with this herb a bit to see what works. 

Note, of course, that many scientists over the years have viewed schizophrenia as an inability to properly process psychic data through a cultural lens that doesn’t believe in psychic data. But of equal interest would be the fact that schizophrenia can be cured permanently, particularly if it is caused by trauma in the first place. An overload of trauma that isn’t properly processed can make a person who is psychically sensitive seem and feel crazy. This is not, of course, what I was taught about schizophrenia when I did my master’s degree in psychology, but this theory jives more with the idea that it can be cured. I don’t believe that any model of medicine that gives up on its patients, condemning them to a life-long disease that can’t be cured or properly treated is a real system of “medicine”. I mean, I know that the human race has limitations in terms of what we can currently accomplish but most of these limitations are due to our beliefs about what’s possible. At any rate, I know that schizophrenia has been cured in some patients which means it is a curable disease. The challenge now, is for people to figure out how to cure schizophrenia reliably.

Apomorphine can cause somnolence and yawning, a sign that this substance switches the body from a fight-or-flight state into a parasympathetic rest-and-digest state. This fact makes sense in terms of its ability to cure PTSD naturally as it would alter brain-wave states, allowing trauma to rise to the surface and “release”. Note however, that if the dose is too high, it can cause dizziness, nausea and vomiting. Also note that, in my humble opinion, psilocybin is a better choice as a cure for PTSD because it allows trauma to come to the surface with a conscious “guide” (the magic mushroom”) to help the patient process the trauma. Trauma, when it rises to the surface of consciousness, can look a lot like “crazy”. It can look like panic attacks, psychosis, violence, personality disorders, extreme irritability, non-functionality, and more. But taking Blue Lotus between full psilocybin trips can be beneficial in some cases. Just be aware of the fact that anytime the patient moves between an alpha brain wave state into theta and back (or vice versa) can cause the emergence of traumatic memories for release (YAY!) but often with uncomfortable symptoms of mental illness (prepare for this).

Blue Lotus: Herb for Obesity

Scientific studies have shown that the nuciferine in Blue Lotus has an anti-obesity effect on the body. This is an herb that regulates blood sugar levels, it acts as an anti-inflammatory agent, and it is anti-dyslipidemic. Blue Lotus is an anti-cancer herb as well as an anti-diabetes herb. It has been studied by scientists as an herb for obesity because of its ability to specifically fight the obesity-related diseases such as cancer and diabetes.

The nuciferine in Blue Lotus regulates certain molecules and metabolic pathways in the body that affect inflammation, calcium flux, the gut microbiota, programmed cell death, and the development of cancer cells.

Note that the pancreas is a crucial organ in the body that can explain the connection between cancer and diabetes. If you have both cancer and diabetes, read more about Dr. John Beard’s pancreatic enzyme therapy as a cure for cancer. Note also that blood-sugar lowering herbs like Kudzu (the first herbal remedy for addiction that I sent to Naing Naing) can also function as a cure for diabetes as well as cancer and alcoholism. All three of these health problems relate back to pancreatic function. 

Blue Lotus: Aphrodisiac Herb

Blue Lotus was used in antiquity as a sort of “herbal Viagra”. It increases sexual libido and desire and it can improve sexual relationships. In energy medicine, one might say that Blue Lotus helps the Kundalini energy unstick itself and start circulating properly again. 

Blue Lotus: Herb for Parkinson’s Disease / Herb for Lewy Body Dementia

The apomorphine in Blue Lotus has been used by doctors in the treatment of severe Parkinson’s disease. Patients were given apomorphine for use at home to treat acute “off” episodes. Often, the apomorphine is administered twice daily. Note, of course, that Parkinson’s disease, Amytrophic Lateral Sclerosis, Lewy Body Dementia, and Multiple Sclerosis all belong to the same disease family tree which means that often, the same treatments will be useful in all of these diseases. Lewy Body Dementia and Parkinson’s disease are essentially the same disease, for example. Click here to read more about diseases that are on the same family tree with Parkinson’s disease.

Studies have shown that a dose of apomorphine (which is present in Blue Lotus) significantly improves motor function in patients with Parkinson’s disease. Motor function improvements typically occur within 20 minutes of taking the apomorphine. The apomorphine in Blue Lotus also slightly reduces heart rate and blood pressure. Note that apomorphine is not always bioavailable when taken orally. Often, in studies, apomorphine is administered intranasally. This lends credibility to the idea that smoking Blue Lotus as a whole herb may work better as a natural treatment for Lewy Body Dementia and Parkinson’s disease at home.

Click here to read about the role of organophosphate exposure in Parkinson’s disease and Lewy Body Dementia.

Click here to read more about other cures for Lewy Body Dementia and Parkinson’s disease. Note that you should avoid methylene blue when taking Blue Lotus.

Blue Lotus: Herb for Schizophrenia and Psychosis

Blue Lotus contains nuciferine, a substance that has antipsychotic properties that are comparable to chlorpromazine and clozapine. Nuciferine is present in both Blue Lotus and the herb Nelumbo nucifera, which is used in Ayurveda to treat mental illness naturally. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, Nelumbo nucifera is used in Tangzhiqing tablets to treat mental health disorders as well. The use of nuciferine-containing herbs for mental illness in both Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine suggests that many mental illnesses have a common root cause and indeed, this does seem to be the case if you read a bit about trauma-psychology and how trauma is expressed in mental illness. Click here to read this article where I describe my experience with panic attacks and how this mental disorder began with a nightmare that was ultimately rooted in a painful dental treatment that I’d received about a year prior.

Blue Lotus and Mucuna pruriens: Combination Treatment

I take no less than 2000 mg of Mucuna pruriens daily in the morning. Sometimes, I take up to 2000 mg of Mucuna pruriens daily with another two doses of 2000 mg two more times during the day (6000 mg total) if I’m doing a lot of problem-solving work. Taking Blue Lotus with these high doses of Mucuna pruriens does not seem to cause any problems for me though these two herbs would, theoretically have synergistic effects. Mucuna pruriens is also known as the Velvet Bean, a food that can be consumed for its high content of nutritional dopamine precursors.

Mucuna pruriens contains a fairly high amount of the natural amino acid known as L-dopa (do not confuse this natural amino with the pharmaceutical drug by the same name - they are chemically very different though often confused even in the scientific literature). L-dopa is the amino precursor to dopamine (a neurotransmitter) in the human body. Dopamine is the decision-making neurotransmitter. It is also the precursor substance to noradrenaline and adrenaline in the human body. In other words, if you’re low on dopamine, you’ll have trouble making decisions and formulating your thoughts and your autonomic nervous system will likely begin to malfunction as well. Both noradrenaline and adrenaline (the fight-or-flight hormone) will be in short supply if you’re low on dopamine. If you have low levels of dopamine, you’ll be prey to social media, video games, sugar, and a variety of other addictive things in the world. 

Coffee is a substance that many people today use to modify their dopamine RELEASE. Coffee does nothing to impact the production of dopamine and it doesn’t impact whether or not dopamine receptors interact with dopamine. Many people drink coffee because it helps them release dopamine, which can then connect into dopamine receptors. Releasing dopamine makes people feel good and it helps them think. Unfortunately though, when you drink coffee, your dopamine receptors end up releasing a LOT of dopamine all at once which leaves the dopamine neurons empty if you don’t recharge them some way. When dopamine neurons are depleted, this causes a “crash” and “jitters” (which are physiologically similar to Parkinson’s tremors) that many avid coffee drinkers experience. If you have a crash or jitters, dopamine receptors go into a state of drought in regard to dopamine. This can cause receptors to “wilt” and die like flowers that are living through a drought. If dopamine “flower”-receptors die, this can, in turn, make it harder for you dopamine release to help you think…essentially it leads to “tolerance”. Taking Mucuna pruriens provides the dopamine precursor that keeps dopamine neurons charged up with plenty of dopamine. If you take Mucuna and then drink coffee, you’ll find the coffee to be less addictive because your brain will have a constant supply of dopamine. Your dopamine receptors will no longer go into states of “drought”. Drinking coffee won’t be like squeezing blood from a turnip anymore because the neurons will have plenty of dopamine in them with daily doses of Mucuna. Your dopamine neurons will be able to release dopamine without coffee too if you take Mucuna pruriens. It takes about 5 months of high-dose Mucuna for the brain to regrow dopamine receptors (this is why people feel like zombies when they stop drinking coffee if they are not also taking Mucuna).

Mucuna pruriens is an herbal cure for ADHD that you can read about here. It is also a cure for addiction of any kind and you can read more about that here. While Mucuna pruriens promotes the production of dopamine in the body, Blue Lotus promotes balanced release and use of dopamine in the synapses. 

Blue Lotus sometimes acts as a dopamine agonist and it sometimes acts as a dopamine antagonist. This is perhaps why Blue Lotus can be so useful as an herbal remedy for PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). 

Note that if you have PTSD, Mucuna pruriens will help you regrow dopamine receptors. This is good, but it can lead to an increase in flashbacks and the release of traumatic memories (also known as flooding). The release of a traumatic memory is good, but if you have “flooding” this can look like psychosis. Prepare for this process and consider, once again, working with psilocybin mushrooms in microdoses at first followed by full strength doses when the patient is ready.

Ketamine is another option for PTSD treatment.

If you are interested in accessing sacred indigenous medicines such as psilocybin mushrooms in Mexico, contact us at [email protected].

Blue Lotus Dosing

Blue Lotus psychoactive effects vary depending on the dose that you take. At LOW doses, Blue Lotus relaxes the body and produces a state of euphoria. In high and very high doses, in contrast, it can cause hallucinations. 

How to Smoke Blue Lotus

You can smoke Blue Lotus by rolling the flower petals into cigarette paper. I took Blue Lotus as a tincture for about 7 NON-CONSECUTIVE nights before I had a dream that I was smoking the flower by a fire pit. After this dream, I decided to try smoking Blue Lotus to see if the experience was different than taking it as a tincture.

Smoking Blue Lotus flowers causes mild sedation or relaxation and sometimes an altered state of consciousness. Some people smoke Blue Lotus to enhance their meditation experience because this herb clears the mind. It reduces anxiety and it can improve mood. Some people experience a sharper sense of awareness from smoking Blue Lotus which explains why this herb is useful for meditation. 

John, Lydian, and I have all had a similar experience when taking a toke of the Blue Lotus cigarette. We take a toke and then we feel a mild light-headed feeling upon exhaling. With 1-4 tokes of Blue Lotus, these effects are transient. They go away within a few seconds or minutes. A feeling of clarity and centeredness usually follows within 10-45 minutes.

My Experience with Smoking Blue Lotus

My experience so far with Blue Lotus has been that it makes me feel calm and it changes the trajectory of my sleep, but it doesn’t necessarily make me sleep more deeply, at least on the night when I smoke it. I have, however, had a significant change in terms of the quality and type of dreams that I’m experiencing in general since I started working with Blue Lotus. For example, two nights ago, I smoked a very small amount of Blue Lotus before bed. I slept somewhat lightly throughout the night. I had dreams, but they weren’t lucid dreams per se. Last night though, I did NOT smoke Blue Lotus, but I had multiple lucid dreams where I saw my hands (a sign of a lucid dream) and I was more active as a participant in a conscious way. In the middle of the night I wrote the word, Luciferine in my dream journal, a play on the word Nuciferine. I don’t remember writing this word, but I feel like the word play has to do with the plant’s ability to “light up” something – perhaps another dimension or reality, or Truth of some kind. Not sure. I’m still learning.

I’m cautious with the Blue Lotus smoke because I really like to get high-quality sleep and I have no desire to feel nauseated or dizzy as a result of working with any herb, if I can avoid it. So far, I haven’t had that problem with Blue Lotus when I smoke it, but I’m increasing my dose very slowly to make sure I don’t overdo it. My first two dosing sessions using a Blue Lotus cigarette involved only 1-2 puffs and that was enough for me to notice big changes, but not until the next night of sleep.

On the other hand, as I talked about above, smoking Blue Lotus has been somewhat miraculous as an herb for psychic protection or empathy overwhelm (whatever you wish to call it). I believe that Blue Lotus smoke protects us against other people’s “thoughts” and perhaps “fantasies” that they play out where they cast us as characters. Blue Lotus does not, however, seem to protect us from other people’s emotions, which are encoded as symbols by our human brains. For emotional information that we pick up on psychically or empathically, psilocybin is a good choice although I’ve also read that CBD can get rid of empathy overwhelm. I suppose this is why some people get addicted to marijuana (just a theory).

How to Make a Blue Lotus Tincture

Several months ago, I took 5 grams of Blue Lotus flowers and I put them in a jar that I filled with vodka. I let this mixture sit for about two months (with regular shaking to stir up the alcohol with the plant materials) and then I got it out again and started working with it by taking about ¼ of a shot glass of the tincture at night. 

My Experience with Taking the Blue Lotus Tincture

My experience with the tincture was quite different from my experience with smoking Blue Lotus flowers, actually. When I take a bigger dose of the tincture, I often have lucid dreams on the night AFTER I take the Blue Lotus. I don’t know why I don’t have lucid dreams on the night that I take the tincture, but this is how it works for me. The night that I take the tincture, I often notice that my mind is clearer and that I have fewer intrusive thoughts in the middle of the night, but sometimes, I feel intense emotions that are not mine and that have no connection to my daily life in the real world when I take the tincture. Often, I would take a dose of the tincture early in the night and then add another dose in the middle of the night if I woke up “thinking”. Honestly, for me, taking the tincture was unpleasant and I probably won’t work with it again unless I feel like I need dream content that I’m not getting.

How to Make Blue Lotus Tea

It’s easy to make Blue Lotus tea. Use a scale to weigh out 5 grams of Blue Lotus flowers. Put this quantity of flowers in a mug and pour boiling hot water over the top of them. Allow them to steep for 15 minutes. 

I have not yet worked a lot with Blue Lotus tea myself. I have, however, taken the Nelumbo nucifera tea with a standardized amount of nuciferine at 10%. The tea does not have the same effect for me as smoking the herb. This might be due to the fact that apomorphine is more easily absorbed through the nasal membranes than through the digestive system. 

It was the Nelumbo nucifera that made me realize that the nuciferine was not the substance that was helping me as an herb to reduce empathy. Drinking the tea made me feel crazy. I got through half of the mug and I was like, Wow…this is NOT working for me. Meanwhile though, John was downstairs taking a toke here and a toke there of the Blue Lotus as a cigarette and he was praising its effects. So it’s important that people realize that smoking this herb can produce very different effects than drinking it as a tea or taking it as a tincture. I would guess that taking Blue Lotus as an essential oil would produce different effects even still since essential oils are usually composed of very different substances than whole herbs.



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