Spiritual Healing in the Dream House

Rocky Caravelli is the Treatment Facilitator and House Manager for the Dream House, a drug addiction detox center in Mexico. In this interview we talk about the powerful sacred plant iboga, the process of curing lifelong substance addiction, the usefulness of dreams in spiritual healing, and the spirit of iboga who watches over the Dream House.

TG: Hello, Rocky, thanks for talking with me. Tell me how you came to create the Dream House. Why did you choose to use ibogaine as a detox therapy? What type of preparation was required to establish the center? What staff do you have running the facility?

RC: Hi Tristan. The center came from the inspiration of my own treatment in 2003. After 25 years of addiction I just couldn't find a way out. I learned from Eric Taub (www.ibeginagain.org) that there was a west coast clinic in Tijuana called the Ibogaine Association. My ex-girlfriend Colleen and I had been using hard drugs non-stop for a year and couldn't get away from it. It took 10 months for us to get it together but we made it to the clinic. In a matter of 12 hours it was over—our addictions to methadone, heroin, and meth-amphetamine. I was physically spent but knew right away this was something big for the community stuck in addiction.

I made a decision to go back to Tijuana three weeks later and volunteer there. I ended up staying almost a year and worked with more than 70 people. I got to see many things both good and bad and asked myself: what could make this a smoother treatment? I couldn't and still can't believe how well ibogaine works with opiate addiction, it just stops the kick. I knew soon this would be accepted by the western world and seen as an option for some people who have been caught in the never ending-cycle of opiate and narcotic addiction. All I wanted was a window, a chance to start fresh, not a cure, just a chance to get my life back. What happened for me was that I got something completely unexpected: I found out that I needed to have a proper relationship with the spirit of iboga by working with it and for it—not only for other people but for myself.

After two years of doing work in the underground, I got to see even more of what could make this treatment work more smoothly. People needed more time so they could get to feeling strong again, and a better environment was needed in which to do the work. It's hard to do treatments in the apartments of people where they've been using for months. It's also hard to bring people you just met into your home or to some other supporter's house. There is not enough medical support if something goes sideways and it's illegal to top it off. These are not the best of conditions to work in and I felt disrespectful to the spirit of the plant.

During these two years, I was in Portland going to Paul Levy's dream group called Awaken in the Dream. We had a good dream group. We went to work on dreaming up this treatment center and three members of the group came down with me to Mexico. We went out of the country to a place we had never been, not speaking the language, not understanding how anything works, not having any money, we just went with it. I had a good source for the medicine, a trustworthy source, and some emotional support from other providers, and I borrowed $10,000 to get this thing moving. Somehow we were guided to a very special location on the ocean, with warm salt water and a beautiful tropical landscape. Sayulita was our first home and eventually we moved three kilometers north to San Francisco/ San Pancho, where there is a hospital with emergency services available 24 hours.

It was of primary importance to find the right doctor to work with us. We needed to meet someone who understood what we were trying to do and who would be open to working with sacred plant medicines. I walked into the office of Dr. Jose Luis Chavez and showed him the documentary Ibogaine: Rite of Passage, with Spanish subtitles. We sat and watched the film together and he recognized me in the film. When it was over I asked, "Tratameinto de ibogaina en Sayulita por favor, y tu es mi doctor?" He looked at me and said, "OK." Jose had just moved to Sayulita, had a small private practice and a little family. I'm so happy to have made a match with him, he really is my brother in medicine.

In the beginning I was amazed that anyone wanted to come here and do this treatment. I'm still amazed. It's a real pilgrimage to make the commitment and come to this work with faith and openness, to go deep inside. I didn't even have a website yet but my partner, Eric Taub, brought in people through his site. It took several moves to get a stable house to work in but it was still better than anything I had done before. After about a year we found this brand new house out in a field away from downtown and started dreaming it up again. Soon a friend/supporter who had done ibogaine a few years ago for alcohol addiction showed up in the picture looking for a good investment property. By December of 2007 we'd moved into the Dream House. It was 90% finished and we have been continuing to finish the remaining 10%. It feels like all we really have had to do is to keep working at it, the path has been cleared. It's been a lot of work to bring this into form, but we're so happy with what's happened. We have a real comfortable treatment house, very grounded, with enough space for three people to come each week and now we have an extra transitional integration house in Sayulita where people stay their second week, to get strong and feel really good. Both towns, Sayulita and San Pancho, have their own special and distinct charm. It really feels perfect.

After the first year, the staff from Portland returned to the States and I began the second season in October with my girlfriend, Mary Ditton, and a core group of people who reside here in Mexico. Mary is a body-worker and certified ayurvedic practitioner. Two of the crew from Portland, Scott Kloos and Marijke Barker, have returned for short stints this season and it's been great to have this revolving staff start to emerge. Scott Kloos is a teacher at the Elderberry School of Medicine and has his own herbal medicine company doing extractions and tinctures of the Pacific Northwest plants. Marijke is a body-worker, an artist in the kitchen, and has a very intuitive relation to the iboga spirit. We have several initiates from the local community who have gone through our process and have worked on their own substance abuse healing and are now working with us preparing meals, taking people out into town or the beach, doing pickups at the airport. It's grown all on its own and we're really happy with it. We have had so much satisfaction from working and making ibogaine available to local people in the community. This is something we can give back to Mexico. We are the visitors and part of the problem is that the United States appetite for drugs has begun to really affect the local community, who deserve the same opportunity to find a way out.

Dr. Chavez practices medicine like the old time doctors who give a really thorough physical and psychological evaluation—very personal, no 'hurry up and get it over with' type of attitude. Together we have worked out protocols to help to address each person's individual needs for a full treatment of body, mind and spirit. We have a therapist in town who does integration sessions with everyone who comes through and we have a massage therapist working with us. It's taken a while to get all the paperwork together for our licensing; a few trips to Mexico City and a lot of strange hang ups, but we're out in the open finally. We are accepted by the community. We make sure to give two treatments a month to people here with no money. We are grateful to be accepted and to be able to operate here.

Please explain to me about the process of how you give clients treatment, as far as the atmosphere of the place itself, the steps that you take them through, how you try to resolve the various issues that people have, etc. Why is ibogaine an effective medicine? What is the advantage of using a natural detox method such as a plant extract like ibogaine, versus prescription detox drugs like methadone which are used in traditional heroin detox centers? What kind of addictions can ibogaine treatment help with?

Well, we have learned a lot about working with this medicine and have grown in intuition and clarity for what protocols to use. Everything is per individual. Everyone is unique in their needs. Sometimes we have to go slow, using many small treatments. Sometimes we need to really push through boundaries or blockages and address withdrawal symptoms. We see people with so many different situations. Hard core addiction to heroin and stimulants like meth-amphetamine require that we provide a strong support in pre-treatment and many additional boosters. Treatment for methadone can go on for days or weeks sometimes. We receive people with emotional issues due to sexual abuse, depression, and, in many cases, just the desire to reclaim their lost sense of self and being alive. Whether people come to us for addiction to substances or for psycho-spiritual development, the truth is that all of what needs to be addressed stems from a spiritual base, and that is why the treatment itself is just the beginning of the process. It takes time for people to process and integrate their session. Sometimes it takes months to pass in order for people to really understand and look back to see what's been changing from the inside out.

Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, a shift of a few degrees of change occurs and the path begins. The ibogaine is territorial. It seems to remove other plant spirits which may be residing in the body. All drugs are plant spirits. Opium /Heroin is a famous, helpful plant spirit. It can help to stop physical and emotional pain, but it is possessive. It demands a commitment and can eventually demand that a person serves only that spirit. It's costly to lose yourself to it. Coca/Cocaine is a powerful plant spirit. It can serve, but it too is moody and possessive and after years of use it won't let go without a fight. All the substances we treat are powerful plant spirits in their own right. Ibogaine seems to be a higher frequency, the plant has its own nature which is particularly good at bringing things to an end and bringing things into newness. This is not the common effect: most plants do one thing or the other. Ibogaine works on a level of the mind associated with desire, where craving, gratification, and pleasure exist. Ibogaine also works on memory. I believe that this memory is in the body, in the unconscious. It is stored as energy in the cells, from this life and past lives. The ibogaine moves through the body and rewrites the script on these imbedded cells, giving the cell a new space which is clear of old energetic implants from both physical and emotional energy.

Other pharmaceutical treatments for addiction like methadone, subutex and naltraxon only seem to contribute to the already imprinted addiction. That is because their nature has been removed. These substances have no plant spirit, so when we treat people wanting to get off of these substances we have to use a specific protocol because ibogaine has more of a challenge dealing with these tremendously sticky synthetic imprints. Ibogaine has less work to do when dealing with heroin or morphine, which are not synthetic. Ibogaine has a presiding deity. There are scientists who want to remove this aspect of ibogaine's "side effects" such as dreaming, throwing up, ataxia etc. It doesn't surprise me at all that someone would want to get rid of the visionary aspect of ibogaine, to wash out those dreams and make it a "stable" substance so it can be packaged and taken to the public for mass consumption... But personally I don't have a lot of faith in this practice of removing the nature of plants any more. Besides, you miss the opportunity to really heal the core of the problem naturally, not just fix the leak. It's the same story everywhere with humans: we forget how perfect nature is.

The healing happens not in days but minutes after ingestion of the ibogaine. One hour after we begin there is a gentle introduction to the medicine so people feel like they have time to relax and get to know what's coming. They feel a sense of the personality of ibogaine. We work with the body's needs. Everyone has a different tolerance and it's important to monitor this sensitivity. We want people to be able to feel safe and be able to go as far as they need to. A real addict's life is relentless and disappointing; they believe that this will never stop; that countless attempts to try something to break the cycle will fail, over and over. These are the people I look for. They are ready to step out, but they are fragile because they can't take another failure, and it feels dangerous to them to take the risk. The experience doing the underground treatments was what really motivated me into creating the Dream House. To be in a place where we can offer just a little time and support, away from the reminders of that world, allow for the medicine do its job—it's so much better. We can't take anything away without replacing it with something or returning something. It's just polite to treat the body and the mind and spirit this way. It's the beginning of self compassion.

The most important factor of really knowing what's going on with someone seeking treatment is their honesty. We have a lengthy application process. If they're willing to try something as radical as ibogaine, they'll understand that we have to be thorough. Because even though we're going to be agents for their healing, they have to be strong enough to do a lot of work independently of our support. The idea here is that people own their own healing. It's between them and the medicine. We make the space for people to follow through with their own decisions. We don't carry people, we just hold the space and tend to their needs. The key relationship is between the ibogaine and the person seeking treatment. We are not to disturb this. It may be very uneventful or very expansive in the expression but it is really about what is happening between the person and the medicine. There are times people feel disappointed by not seeing images or having meaningful discussions with spirit but it doesn't really matter, everyone gets what they need. I myself experienced only a few visions in my first treatment and it was the slingshot into a new paradigm of life!

We try to have some kind of schedule, some kind of structure. But if varies. We have people arrive on Monday, with Tuesday as the day for preparation and intake, and treatment beginning on Wednesday night. But if someone isn't addicted and only has five days for personal development, we bump it to Tuesday. Something can and does come up all the time. If my doctor calls for more tests, we wait. If someone is really stressed out, we have to wait or begin right away. If it's stimulants or even alcohol, you have to do a day with a small dose and wait two days to administer a flood treatment. These things are all about what someone's needs are. In the end, the medicine itself tells you how it's to be administered, as long as you're observing the body and feelings of the person. We try to remember that it's not on our time. We are working for the spirit who does the healing.

One thing that has helped a lot for opiate detox is giving people morphine for a couple of days—as much as is necessary to be comfortable. It's about letting the body rest, to get good nutrition and acclimate in preparation for the treatment. We help people with the constipation that is characteristic with opiates so the treatment can be smoother because the body is not blocked. I can't ask anyone to give something up without replacing it with something. I tried this for years: giving up drugs with nothing to replace it, and it is miserable. Ibogaine simply trades, one spirit for another. It takes care of the hole that would normally be left behind by dropping something that's actually been in place for years.

Your website says that iboga puts people into an "awakened dream state." Can you describe what people experience in this type of state, and how they appear to the outside world? Would you say that during the ibogaine they enter into a trance state? How is this useful for people as a part of the overall treatment?

Ibogaine is an oneirophrenic, a dream creator, and it works in the subconscious, unconscious and conscious mind—a bit like the three are talking together at the same time in the energy body. Not everyone dreams like this. Some don't get a chance to dream at all, but the medicine is doing its work. This is a root medicine, it expresses itself like a root, very grounded both emotionally and physically. During the treatment it's normally not possible to get up without help, you feel gravity a lot. At the onset you often feel as if you are being pulled to the earth and spinning, as if you could feel what its like to be attached to the inside of the planet, kind of a bad drunk feeling for a few moments. People throw up from this sometimes. Ibogaine is not a party drug, it can become very uncomfortable.

Once the medicine gets distributed in the body you begin to see images and people—mostly family members, Africans, shamans and ancestors. This has so many variables but there are many similarities. We use traditional Bwiti music from ceremonies in Gabon. The music helps to keep things moving along in the dreams—it's like going through different chapters. After a couple of hours the lessons and teaching begin, and physical body healing is performed sometimes in actual “hands on” visions by spirits. It's obvious that there is a presence. Sometimes conversation takes place; a lot about language and communication comes up. Then there are sometimes dreams with meaningless images and no real substance. Sometimes people travel to different countries of this world and other worlds. Computer technology sometimes comes in to show our reflection in the new world we live in. It really is up to the medicine what's revealed, and it takes months to interpret. A lot of animals come to people and a lot of information about early civilization. I asked once, "Why do you care about us humans, what's the point of you caring for us?" They showed me a Chinese sweat shop with hundreds of women working simultaneously, so busy working and creating. It's like we humans are cute—like hamsters. When I was a child I watched hamsters run around storing food and humping each other, I just loved them. It's the same kind of love for life and living.

Some people get to return to the exact moment in which they became fixed on a goal or idea. One woman saw herself picking strawberries with her family when she was ten years old. She wanted to pick more strawberries than anyone else. This became her motto for 40 years—I'm gonna do more and therefore I will be seen/loved. It seems like simple stuff, but so much attachment is being formed in these childhood experiences. She understood that she had been picking strawberries on her job in real estate, in her relationships, in just about everything. A life of strawberry picking.

As for an "awakened dream state," it's no different from the dream that we live in waking life. The dream group I attended with Paul Levy was all about recognizing and becoming aware of how we dream things up in waking life, that this too is just a dream and can open up to any opportunity if that state of being awake can pop in. It's no fun trying to stay awake all the time. I love being unconscious in the mental state and taken over by the mind. I also love to wake up in the moment and see where I am. The ibogaine is pretty much the same thing. It helps people to wake up and see that we have been asleep, sometimes for years or all of our life. It can be a shock, it can be overwhelming. It's definitely not for everyone.

From what you’ve said it seems that there is a strong spiritual component of the iboga healing, the plant helps a person see their inner self and helps them realize in an insightful way that they don't need to satisfy their urges in an unhealthy way like substance addiction. According to your website, "Ibogaine therapy is not a quick fix. It is a pathway to a deeper sense of self; an opportunity to establish a new way of being. You are essentially being reborn and the more time your new sense of self has to stabilize, the greater the potential for a full, long-lasting recovery." How would you describe the emotional, non-physical aspect of your treatment? Is it accurate to say that there is a possibility for transformative spiritual experience that is an innate property of the iboga plant? If so, how does this transformation play out in peoples' lives after the ibogaine treatment?

We call this the art of living and pathway to self compassion, joy, and inspiration. The primary goal is to develop a positive relationship to the self. Now this is in the beginning weeks and months after treatment and needs to be a conscious act of development, or nothing will really sink in. The spirit offers clarity and guidance for months, if allowed, and if you listen to the inner voice (the one that had been garbled by the chatter of the busy mind) then the guidance can flow. It's still such a long path with many new hurdles to keep jumping over. This work doesn't ever really stop, it just changes from the old into something new, but the value of having a new path to follow or find is so inspirational, it signifies that we can grow and change, and that's invaluable, to believe we can change, especially after being trapped for so many years. This is true for everyone, not just addicts, it's a reality that we all share. There's no such thing as a magic cure, it's about inspiration and an opportunity to switch lanes. I've seen this happen so much for people—some of the best moments of my life have been talking with people a year after their treatment and seeing where they have gone with it.

On your website you claim that iboga can actually reconfigure the brain's neuro-receptor pathways and heal neurological damage from the long-term abuse of drugs that alter those receptor sites, such as cocaine. Can you explain to me how this works physiologically?

One part of the healing is that the neuro net in the brain—the pathway of unconscious thought, the freeway of daily patterns, reaction and thought—is paved over or broken by running the amperage of ibogaine through it. It's a type of energetic amperage therapy that literally breaks this imprinted map in the brain. People sometimes describe feeling like they don't know who they are for a period. For just a brief moment, they've basically done a reboot in the mind. The neuro pathways are neutralized and they've got to take the windy road of thought for a while. It's actually amazing to experience quiet in the mind of an addict after being just bombarded by thought for years—the thought process that drives someone to get up, to go score dope, to get money to go score, on and on. It's just relentless, fears upon fears… of being caught, of running out of dope, being left with no home, no family. There is a kind of PTSD of addiction from years of fearful thoughts and worry. Ibogaine helps heal this trauma. I don't really have words other than this to describe what happens. I'm not a scientist but I understand ibogaine from experience and observation. Probably the foremost scientific expert on ibogaine is Ken Alper at New York University. He's the guy to interview for the science of the medicine.

With the effectiveness of this new type of therapy and the relative safety of iboga treatment as compared to something like methadone treatment, there must be lots of people who are eager to try ibogaine. How do you screen potential clients?

The fact is people who have used drugs for a long time are a mess physically, and at the same time they need to be healthy and strong enough to endure the ibogaine. I've had three people out of 270 stop breathing and need help starting again. I've witnessed one death due to poor screening while I was a "sitter" during my first year. It's no joke; the body won't have any withdrawals from ibogaine, but it still has to endure the detoxification process. Ibogaine works better than anything else, but it's still hard. There is no easy method to making a full recovery from a long period of addiction. Toxins must be eliminated, strength has to be regained; some have lost their spirit and have difficulty reintegrating back into their bodies. After so many years of spirit separation, some long-time users will have weak wills evident in their heart rhythms, a soft pulse, a slow pulse or just weakened bodies. I just can't work with these people unless they really make a plan of action to support their health before they come here. Sometimes months of preparation are needed, and even then it may not be enough for me to feel confident of offering a safe treatment. Medical EKG and blood work are mandatory before coming, as well as a physical prior to treatment.

I notice two major types of addicts: those who just don't want to be here on the planet and those who just don't know what else to do, so they used drugs. I was one of the ones who just didn't know what else to do to survive. The first type are dangerous—they are already dead. Methadone addicts for example, people who have been on it for 10 to 20 years; they're just convinced that there is no hope of ever getting off that stuff from years of just being shut down. In the beginning I really wanted to help everyone. I saw people's many different reactions to change. It was painful to see people give up on themselves. At times we did multiple sessions—sometimes they made it out. It's hard to decide whether we can really help. I go by my gut and intuition from meditation. I ask for answers from whatever voice you want to call it, and I feel it on the inside. I dream a lot about people who are asking for treatment and I dream a lot about them when they get here. I always do a 2 hour meditation and nap before treatments and I almost always dream of someone getting ready for the treatment that evening. It's like I'm connected somehow, which of course is true, it's just been a new guide to live by.

There have been times after this nap meditation that I've got important insights or warnings or protocols for dosage adjustments prior to beginning. I've never had to turn anyone away that came here, I seem to catch it beforehand. But if I feel it’s wrong for them I don't hesitate to say, "I'm sorry, I personally can't help, there may be other clinics that can." I feel very good about knowing who I can and can't work with. It's gotten easier over the years to be able to disappoint someone. I felt like I was doing it all the time before, that's been one of my own biggest healings. I hated to disappoint anyone and a lot of my drug use stemmed from that. Now I know it's coming from my heart, not my need to use. I have also held people several days before treatment so they have time to physically become strong. Alcoholics seem to be the ones that really need a little time getting stabilized, sometimes a whole week, maybe with a couple of small doses of ibogaine in the beginning to help feel better. Then we go to work. We always taste the medicine together, the initiates and staff, and we try to dial in together and fuse consciousness together. Small tastes of the medicine help us stay up all night and tuned in together.

You mentioned to me something about a tall African spirit wearing a top hat that people sometimes see when taking ibogaine in the 1940's suite of the treatment center. What's the story on this character and why people keep seeing him? Do you think he is a spirit guide for the Dream House?

Some refer to this character as IBOGA. My daughter is very close to this character and has had much dealing with him. He told her his name is Darney. He's shown up a few times. He seems to like us a lot and has told us he really likes the people we bring for him to play with and that he really does have a good time. He can be very serious too. My personal experience of the spirit was a tree spirit who was very, very serious with me. But I knew him from before and was never afraid of him. I do feel he dwells within our group. Our feeling is that we are pleasing him with our actions and simple physical things like the house and location have pleased him also. You can feel it a lot during the sessions, and people sometimes tell us that we are in their dreams with him. We are not shamans. We are a little limited by not having grown up within a shamanic tradition. We are working with ibogaine, not iboga, which has many differences and some greater stability in its effectiveness for what we are trying to do here. I hope to go to Gabon this year and work with a traditional healer. I would like to learn more, and become closer to this spirit and the other spirits that are in the plant.

Finally, do you have any thoughts on plant medicine in general? It seems that we have many addictions in American culture which often go unnoticed and are accepted as routine behavior. Do you feel that there is a potential for these type of natural healing plants to help us radically alter our society away from consumption addiction patterns, towards a more sustainable future?

Personally, I don't think there's enough time or support for the U.S. to pop out of its consumer consciousness. It's like every angle of it is set to bring humanity down to the next step. It's been hard to see this in dreams with the medicine—the fact that this has gotten away from us. I feel that we're not simply a drug treatment center, but a wake-up center for those who really can still hear, even though they may not know what they're hearing. Plant medicines are the catalyst for all development in mankind. Everything we've learned has been through the sacred plants; it’s been going on forever. I know they will help—they keep trying to reach us. I fear for the pharmaceutical drugs' lack of a natural connection and what long term effects that will have on us. It's really dangerous stuff. We may soon experience a new humanity without the balance of nature, or perhaps we already are for that matter. It really is a question of whether or not people even want to find out who they are. Everything is tuned to de-tune, it's everywhere: TV, politics, diet, medicine, oil dependence, on and on. Can people go back to a simpler life voluntarily? Who's going to give up what they have? No, I think there's got to be a tipping point, where we as people just have no other choice but to get simple again and align with the planet. We will see what happens next in a few years... maybe in 2012?

Rocky Caravelli

phone: 503-922-1089

fax 866-826-4485

www.awakeninginthedream.com