I was just checking out erowid and came across Datura. It seems like a pretty cool drug.
"All hallucinations on Datura are a result of changes in the brain stem. The brain stem controls dreaming. "Reason" is not something the brain stem understands, and hallucinations reflect that."
From what I can understand it induces lucid dreaming while your conscious
"I have noticed, after speaking with Datura users, that at higher levels, it is impossible to discern between sleeping and wakefulness. This is said to happen to insomniacs, who actually dream they are awake (and thus arent really insomniacs). Things happen that users label as hallucinations when in fact they may be only dreaming.
Someone posted the following message to the alt.drugs newsgroup regarding atropine and dreaming:
" If the purpose is to get high, try drinking a tea made from a 1/3 of teabag worth of leaf. Of course nightshade, belladonna, and jamestown weed are unpredictable, having a lot to do with growing conditions. If you are planning on tripping, start within the lower half of a teabag. If your intention is to kill someone, or yourself
EAT A PLANT, or three. You can expect a very drythroat, lucid reality dreams, and a loss of balance. Effects last at least 12 hrs. Lock yourself in your house, and explore the inner realms of the ancient plant. Think of flying! Thats it. Now float."
"After about age 18, the brain begins to lose cells at a rate of near1,000 cells a day (the cause for this is still unknown). In order for a loss of that rate to completely destroy your brain, you would have to be alive more than 12,000,000 days, or close to 33,000 years. I suppose logic indicates that no human has ever lived 33,000 years, and as such, "killing brain cells" shouldnt be too much of a problem. There has been talk that smoking marijuana (and in fact other smoked "drugs" -- curiously not tobacco) causes increased loss of brain cells. It is important to know that even a loss of a million cells (which could never happen from smoking anything once or twice) would not even do serious damage to your brain.
Damaging specific areas of the brain through trauma (car wrecks, et cetera) is much more dangerous, however.
It is said that the brain uses 10% of its mass. That means that roughly 120,000,000 cells are used. The brain's approximate mass of 12,000,000,000 cells, minus 120,000,000 is still 11,880,000,000. Now, its not true that brain damage (from various activities: contact sports among them) occurrs exclusively to the part of the brain you don't use, but you still have over _eleven BILLION_ cells to kill. Interpret that as you see fit."
This is what I found REALLY INTERESTING!!
Lucid dreaming starts as a slow process, beginning with (in castanedian dreaming) looking at one's hands. Other sources will tell you to, throughout the day, look periodically at written text, and then look back again in a second or two. Eventually, you become trained to do this and you should find yourself doing it in your sleep. The brain stem is not really able to understand written text, so if you find you are doing this and the text is distorted or missing or different, it is a good indication you are dreaming.
From that point, there are various things you can do. Some include meeting with entities in your surroundings, some include simply recreation such as flying, and other activities. Basically, like hallucinations, dreaming can be treated as a recreational state or a shamanistic state.
Dr. Stephen LaBerge, of the Sleep Research Center at Stanford University, came up with a process he dubbed MILD (Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreaming). It includes the following steps:
1. When awakening from a dream, review it several times until it is memorized.
2. While still in bed, say "The next time I dream, I want to remember to recognize I'm dreaming."
3. Picture being back in the dream, yet realizing that it is a dream.
4. Repeat the second and third steps until falling back to sleep.
Just thought this was pretty cool, the full article is here
http://www.erowid.org/plants/datura/datura_faq.shtml#6c