What the study found
The researchers asked whether psychedelic reports resemble dreams, meditation, or aspects of both. They compared patterns in the language of reports, including themes related to personal growth.
Psychedelics and dreams shared similar language.
At the level of whole reports, the Psychedelics category was closest to Dreams in semantic similarity: a measure of how closely the meanings of texts align.
Psychedelics and meditation aligned on personal growth.
A separate analysis of predefined altered-state themes connected Psychedelics with Meditation, including the Personal Growth theme. Similarities depended on which aspect of the reports was being compared.
Cannabis showed a different pattern.
Cannabis reports were semantically closer to Meditation, but did not show the same alignment with Personal Growth. This describes the language in this dataset; it does not establish whether cannabis has therapeutic benefits.
ALTERD’s contribution
ALTERD supplied the app-based reports analyzed in this study. The research draws on experiences documented in the Psychedelics, Cannabis, Meditation, and Dreams categories of the ALTERD mobile application.
Sam Suchin and Max Suchin are coauthors with ALTERD affiliations. The author team also includes researchers affiliated with the University of California, Los Angeles and Psynautics.
For ALTERD, this is a concrete connection between personal journaling and consciousness research: recorded experiences become material for asking how different states are described and where those descriptions overlap.
Learn about research participation, data access, and privacy at ALTERD.
How the researchers studied the reports
The study used computational language analysis to compare report meanings, identify recurring topics, examine descriptions of visual experiences, and assess alignment with predefined altered-state themes.
Different analyses answer different questions. Two categories can share similar descriptions while differing in their relationship to a theme such as personal growth. That distinction is central to the paper’s findings.
The full preprint provides the methods, statistical comparisons, figures, and references needed to evaluate the work.
What the findings can—and cannot—tell us
This is a naturalistic analysis of self-reported experiences, not a controlled clinical trial. Participants selected their own categories, and the study did not independently verify substance use or standardize when experiences were recorded.
The authors identify self-selection, broad experience categories, and the assumptions behind using dreams and meditation as comparison states as limitations. Findings concern the structure of reports from this sample.
A theme is not a treatment outcome.
Language associated with personal growth does not demonstrate lasting improvement in mental health. The study does not establish that a substance causes insight, is safe, or treats a condition.
The paper was posted to bioRxiv as a preprint on August 4, 2026. As of this page’s update, it has not been certified by peer review.
Explore the experiences behind the questions
Read publicly shared experiences in ALTERD’s community. These pages are separate from the study dataset.