Mugwort

Who else uses this lovely invasive?  We do harvest it and take it to market as people just like the Harry Potteresque name.  In tea it does lend to lucid dreaming.  We have started adding it to salves as a gateway of sorts to help the other herbs get in there, and in a salve on its own for pelvic area discomfort from myriad reasons.
Also, any good uses for regular (not milk) thistle besides pulling and using it as a dynamic accumulator mulch?

Years ago, I used to infuse wine with mugwort, worked like a mild hallucinogen, lovely to get into a certain headspace.

Here's a video with 10 uses for mugwort! Looks like a good addition to any herb garden.

I found that burning mugwort—not smoking it—causes vivid or lucid dreams. Also, making tea from it. Or smoking it, as I tried for the first time last night, but I think it’s probably healthier to simply burn it, getting the same medicinal parts and less of the toxic qualities of smoke.

Nevertheless, it was an interesting experience. I paid close attention to my consciousness, and it seemed a little more centered in the body, as if there were an ethereal light permeating the body: centered around the heart, but expanding throughout.

Before going to sleep, there were closed-eye visions of a person who seemed to have an appearance resembling mugwort, maybe a visualization of some plant spirit or “mugwort deity”.  

I also experienced a rare state (or one forgotten by morning) I call sleep-cognition, wherein there is a brightness to consciousness, and thought is concentrated around a single thought perceived as profound and ecstatic, but the waking mind tends to find it difficult to comprehend. Lucidity, flying, and passing through solid walls resulted as well.

I think that maybe chrysanthemum has similar dream herb characteristics. One, the leaves are similar, and the plants are related; two, I have had vivid dreams after rubbing the leaves and smelling them.

A friend of mine has had strange mental effects like distortion of space and time just from touching the mugwort plant, thus they avoid it. It seems like the active components are very asimilable aerially or topically; mugwort pillows and so on are used for the same purpose, if I remember well.

I was harvesting lots of mugwort today to dry, and made some mugwort tea as well.

Something about mugwort is, yes, it does help dream lucidity and recollection… but I find that, so far in my experience, the dreams that I remember more vividly with mugwort are not usually the particularly meaningful ones. There is a quality to meaningful dreams that makes them memorable inherently.

As the name suggests,  it's a great ingredient in a wild ferment brew, on its own or with other good stuff. One of my favorites is mugwort, autumn olive and honey for a wild local mead!