Midjourney – Ayahuasca Retreat with Dogs

While Midjourney has a lot of professional use cases, sometimes it’s just fun to use it for absurd and silly stuff, like this series of photos of an imagined Ayahuasca Retreat With Dogs. This series is (in case it wasn’t painfully obvious) a commentary on the widespread proclivity of (disproportionately highly educated, white, monied, liberal) people to appropriate cultural constructs and practices and turn them into an opportunity for capitalist consumption.

Ayahuasca is a brew used in a variety of religious rituals in South America, including those of Santo Daime, a syncretic religion borne of a confluence of cultural, religious, and botanical paradigms. In the United States, the practice is (kinda-sorta) protected under US law even involving what is otherwise a Schedule I controlled substance, and has been gaining popularity in recent years as many jurisdictions relax their regulation on psychedelic substances given increased acceptance of their uses for potential benefit. Ayahuasca in particular contains N,N-dimethyltryptamine, a drug that is a structural analog to melatonin, serotonin, psilocybin (in magic mushrooms), and, notably, one of the main chemicals that makes poop smell like poop. It is often ingested as a tea, and sometimes combined with a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, a drug that facilitates the prolonged, ahem, tripping of balls, to use a scientific term.