Lion’s Mane
Substance: Dementia runs hot in my genetic inheritance and so I first started taking Lion’s Mane mushroom extract a year ago as a means to ward off this terrible mental fate. Science suggests, but is by no means conclusive, that taking Lion’s Mane promotes brain health, such as the prevention of Alzheimer’s and dementia, stimulation of nerve growth factor, enhanced memory, and an increase in cognitive ability. Lab work claims that these benefits are due to the active compound erinacine with its ability to break through the blood brain barrier and work upon the central nervous system itself. Traditional Chinese medicine has used Lion’s Mane as a longevity supplement for some thousands of years while claiming many of the same benefits. Subsequent benefits of this nootropic supplement are an aid to sleep, alleviation of depression and anxiety. Lion’s Mane is a saprophytic fungus that grows on dead or dying Maple, Beach and Oak trees, decomposing the wood and extracting the nutrients that have accumulated over the tree’s lifetime.
Affect: Whether or not I am preventing my own mental demise is to be seen: check back in thirty years. What has been apparent is an increase in the intensity of my dreams. Upon immediately taking Lion’s Mane my dreams became very large. They drew out in length over the course of a given night; the dream space itself expanded to world-size; the landscapes became absurd, like the landscapes of video games; all of my dreams collated into one super-dream that I now understand I have been visiting my entire life. The Lion’s Mane allowed me to realize, or recall, that all previous dreams, meagre and small as they were, had been merely discrete moments of this much larger dream that I now return to night after night. Subsequently I have better sleep and am much more attuned to sleep patterns than I had been previously; I have begun to sleep through the night for the first time in memory. Sobriety has risen along with the intensity of sleep for I am now more aware of how much alcohol affects my sleep and less inclined to drink, driven by the new motive of maintaining long REM cycles and their attendant dream-cinema. I believe that my short-term memory has improved but I cannot prove this. A less appealing effect, but perhaps more radically therapeutic, is that long term memory has improved so that past traumatic events from my life have become present in conscious awareness and have forced me to remember them, as if for the first time.
Theory: Considering these results, a series of paradoxes arise: Do we sleep to dream? Or do we dream in order to sleep? Freud claimed that dreams are the guardian of sleep. But one might likewise claim that sleep is the guardian of dreams. We should recall too that some persons do not wish to dream; their dreams are unbearable. Further questions arise: do we dream to remember? Or do we sleep to forget? If we have a lifetime of lousy sleep and few to zero dreams, will our memory ultimately fail? Lion’s Mane seems to further entangle this intimate trifecta of sleep, memory and dream; it is as if these three zones are folded over and through one another without end. This force of entanglement is typical of mycelium across ecosystems: any given ecosystem itself could be considered as a necessary entanglement and knotting-into of a host of organisms precipitated by the mycelial network. We may conclude that the human body also, as organism, is no less susceptible to this force of entanglement. From this standpoint then, does it not make sense to think of the individual human organism as a mobile ecosystem in which the psychical and the physical are folded over and knotted into each other without end? One might speculate then that Lion’s Mane continues this folding of the human on into the dream life of trees. In the last instance I value utility and feeling far above any knowledge or theory. If I can bring my organism into a more integrated set of functions by eating a mushroom, then I will eat the mushroom. The kingdom of sleep, at the end of the day, makes its own demands; I am only just beginning to listen.
