As a person with aphantasia, the only time I'm able to "see" pictures is while dreaming (including day dreaming), but daydreaming has a weird effect of completely blocking out my vision. My mind is still actively processing cues from my vision, but I am unable to see anything but the daydream.
I didn't even realize that aphantasia was a thing until a couple of years ago when a YouTube video popped up on my feed about it.
When people ask what I "see" in my mind when told to "picture" something, is basically auditory database of descriptions in my inner voice.
I feel like we are only scratching the surface of what "aphantasia" means.
I am nearly always a lucid dreamer. The only difference between daydreaming and night-dreaming for me is focus. I play along with my dreams, and laugh at how absurd and illogical they are.
There was one time that I was dreaming so deeply that I could actually see. It was incredible. I decided to fly, and nearly woke myself up from the imagined (but realistically experienced) change of balance.
Outside of that one experience, my inner eye is nearly blind. Consider the experience of walking down the street: you can see what is in front of you, and you can remember what is behind you. My dreams are much more like an invented memory than something seen.
But what about audio? If I could pull the data of my inner (metaphorical) ear, and plug it into a speaker, I could play you a reasonably high-fidelity copy of Metallica's black album (good luck suing this nap-ster) from front to back. Honestly, it's a bit frustrating that I can't. Playing a musical instrument requires a lot of patience: I can hear any sound I want to at a moment's notice, but making you hear it takes hard work and years of practice.
I have been nearsighted since I was a child. I wonder if living that way - without corrective lenses - played a part in my development.
I don't have aphantasia, quite the opposite, I see things constantly in my head and have to work hard on my environment and myself to be able to focus on the present moment or what's in front of me. I also learned about it from some random internet content (possibly here) and have a hard time imagining what it would be like to NOT picture things in my head. Much like you probably have a hard time imagining the reverse.
I can pull up an image of any place real or "imaginary" at a moments notice, see myself walking around in first or third person view and imagine any number of people or entities in the space. If I'm working on a physical object like a home project or building a piece of furniture or wiring a circuit, I usually start by visualizing it much like 3D modelling software, spinning it around in my mind, looking at it from all angles and modifying as needed before putting my ideas down on paper. Interestingly, this makes using actual 3D modeling software incredibly frustrating because I'm very much a novice and the speed and fidelity of the software in my hands is so much slower than my imagination.
I think I am pretty similar to you. When I was younger I used to build all sorts of things with paper and cardboard and used to imagine the whole thing in 3D and design its cutout template all in my head. I learned about aphantasia a few years back and it sounds very inconvenient to me.
I also have a habit of playing around with imaginary worlds and stories in my head and I pretty much visualize whole scenes and sequences in as much detail as possible. I wouldn't be able to do that with aphantasia.
I can't relate to any of this nor OP's description. I can definitely remember imagery (animated or static) and imagine new imagery. But it's all very vague and "bursted". So, for example, if I want to remember a moment in time, it'll just be short vignettes like a chaotic movie scene. Or, if I want to remember a specific tree, it's just a fairly indistinct object.
Now I'm trying to imagine what either of your internal thought processes are like.
> "and have a hard time imagining what it would be like to NOT picture things in my head"
funny this reminds me of when trying to sleep when my brain is still active, i try to focus on what i "see" in 100% darkness; i try to set my brain to visualize "complete darkness" - and then i try to "hear nothing" until i eventually fall asleep; sometimes its hard as hell, but something ive "practiced" for some years. Otherwise my brain is jamming to whatever song i was listening to and scheming some plan in whatever game i was playing last..
It's fascinating to me that (as far as I'm concerned) we mostly learn about it by self-reporting but then those reports vary pretty wildly.
I myself don't have aphantasia I think but I feel like I really have to work on "drawing things up" when I try to picture something with my eyes closed.
Or maybe that's just the normal amount of effort for the complexity and detail I'm trying to capture?
Actually it's easier to "imagine" things with my eyes open which I always thought was weird before I read this comment about daydreaming blocking out vision.
Which still sounds extreme to me, but maybe not more extreme than all those other reports that claim they can procure fully detailed houses / places / system architectures / electrical diagrams / etc on a whim.
Conversations around this kind of thing are so fascinating to me, because they seem to present this fundamental breakdown in human communication - how impossible it is to convey what 'really is going on' inside your mind.
The idea (to me) that people can just see full-fledged lifelike photos in their mind is crazy, especially with low effort. I can't really draw things in my mind very well but I can 'pretend' I see them, blurring the line between 'knowing I'm seeing something' and 'actually seeing that thing'.
But, is that the same thing as actually visualizing that object? It feels like it for most use cases, but then there's some task that actually would be way easier if I could legitimately 'see' that thing, and suddenly everything becomes more complicated.
When I was younger I used to draw constantly and I'd say that was the only period in my life when I would often picture images. Looking back it was more flashes of angles and line shapes and how it would feel to draw them.
This makes me wonder two things:
1. Apart from understanding how a mechanical object functions or recalling how to get somewhere what other query benefits from visualisation?
2. Do people with aphantasia dream in images?
For myself, I don't think I have aphantasia, unless it is something that can come and go. There are times where I daydream and experience vivid visions akin to psychedelic closed eye visuals (except actual visions, and not geometric patterns). Most of the time when I daydream, I can picture something in my head, but it doesn't have the depth and detail of what I experience when deep in thought.
I'm also not very much of a visual learner. I appreciate well written text to a graphic or diagram when trying to understand something new.
This was just my anecdata to backup your statement about self-reporting, and how any one individual can experience this vastly differently than the next person. I also think that phenomena like this is what is going to end up holding back artificial intelligence, as far as trying to map human mental processes on to computing. We have a long way towards understanding our own minds before we can fully conceptualize true artificial intelligence (although that doesn't make current AI not useful).
I think it might be a literacy that can be honed. A 100 years ago a curriculum was devised to develop commercial art skills.
Part of the curriculum I went through required 6 hours of life drawing a week for 2 semesters. The likely result is a strong visualization skill that can be expressed on paper
The overall goal was to really see the way the world is perceived.
Sure, they are usually something like “imagine an apple on a table” and then some questions about it like its color. There are also fMRI neural signatures.
Aphantasia is also often linked with SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographic Memory).
Yes there are tests, an MRI. Anyone claiming to have it is probably self-diagnosed and full of it. I'm tired of the self-diagnoses of everything trend over the last 5 or so years, sorry if my tone isn't the best.
I just assumed that everyone has "aphantasia". What does it mean to "picture things in your mind"? How would one explain to another what that meant? How would one be tested to determine if one could do that?
Some people like it to call it the “Mind’s eye” - Basically you can create images in your mind by just thinking about them. Like if I wanted to “see” a golden retriever, I can just imagine one because I’ve seen them before, so my mind knows what to do. You can also manipulate those images; so for example instead of the golden retriever being gold, I can imagine it in a purple or green color, etc.
A good analogy is that the human mind can have it’s own internal stable diffusion or Midjourney, complete with the ability to give it a “prompt” i.e. thinking about what you want to imagine.
I was surprised to learn a while ago that not everyone can visualize things in their mind. As far testing for it, I don’t really know how that would work. I don’t think you really need to test for it, I assume most people who can visualize things in their mind know that they can.
My wife doesn't have it, so when we discovered I had it, she was gobsmacked by the fact that I don't see a green apple when told to picture it. I always though when someone would say "picture it" it was just describe it in as much detail as possible, like reading about it in a book.
A person without aphantasia can experience thoughts as though they were literally seeing the things being thought about. There are varying degrees to it, and this, or something like it, makes the rounds on social media from time to time: https://i.imgur.com/gpN7EcP.jpeg
I'm about a 2-3 when I'm just idly thinking about things, and can get to about a 1-2 if I really concentrate on an image. Subjectively, the images I'm experiencing in my mind aren't exactly the same as actually seeing things, but they're pretty similar.
What I imagine it's like is if you can "replay" a song in your head, you don't literally hear it, but it's a very similar feeling as actually listening to the song.
Why would you assume that everyone has the same mental capacities as yourself just because you can't imagine having an ability you lack? Have you never hallucinated, day dreamed or become aware that you're dreaming? How about visual memories? Because even if you can't will yourself to imagine a visual object, you can see them in those other cases. It means the same thing as seeing an external object, except without the external source. Your brain creates a visual experience independent of a visual sensation/input from the eyes. There's also ways to induce this with electrodes and magnetic resonance applied to the visual cortex.
It's fascinating how different minds can process information. I myself have a photographic memory - only one of my kids has it as well. The two of us are constantly being asked where this and that is lying around, and we can always tell while the others in the family wouldn't be able to guess even if they just saw whatever they were looking for. It's simply amazing.
I can fairly easily picture “something,” but it’s always extremely protean. During meditation for example I sometimes picture Calvary, but the forms are just constantly shifting around that theme. I certainly can’t just picture an apple and just hold it still in my mind’s eye. Although I do suspect if I spent around 10,000 hours at it I could get considerably better. The point of all that is I rather suspect aphantasia is very much a spectrum.
I’m really not a visual learner for the most part, and maybe that’s why? On the other hand I’m quite good at shape rotation and other such problems. That and there are times where I find the visual interpretation to clarify my understanding of the abstract concept. The standout example of that is the marvelous Visual Complex Analysis.
I wish I could block out my vision. Whenever I try to imagine something, even if my eyes are closed and I'm in pitch darkness, I still see the darkness. It's distracting. How is darkness distracting? How is it that the color black, no light at all, is still so obnoxious?
It's always in the way of what I'm trying to imagine, and it's so hard to "see past" the darkness. The only way for me to really imagine something is to actually have my eyes open and stare at words describing what it is that I'm imagining. I can vividly imagine stories that I'm reading, or writing. Or roleplay. But if I want to daydream, it's just not happening.
I also have aphantasia. I'm hoping that if they start running these tests on humans that they make sure they bring in people with aphantasia. Something like 1 in 20 of us have it. For example, when I daydream, I lose myself and come back to myself a short time later. It's kind of like highway hypnosis, but I do know what I was thinking about, it just happened "off-screen" so to speak and I become aware of it all at once. It would be interesting to know if the same regions of the brain are lighting up. Maybe we can figure out what aphantasia is, from an anatomical perspective.
I (think, not formally diagnosed) have aphantasia, and I also don't remember my dreams. So I have not "seen" pictures ever. Or I think so, it is so hard to know what others are "seeing".
You've never remembered any dreams, never one bit? I find that interesting.
I occasionally remember dreams. Once, for a few months, I kept a dream diary and started to remember more and more of my dreams. From a few flashes to pages and pages of stuff. It was mostly really boring and nonsense.
thats interesting. So if someone asks you to draw a picture of a lighthouse, are you able to draw it without looking at an actual lighthouse or a picture of it? if yes, then how?
Yeah, I can draw one. I actually took a lot of art classes, so it is kind of hardwired into me how to draw. That said, my lighthouse will not have details in it that someone who can recall a photograph of one might. Here is kind of how my brain describes a lighthouse for me to draw it: cone-shaped, white brick, wooden door at base, a platform on top without walls, a small shingled roof, large rotating light.
As I am drawing the lighthouse the part that I'm working on will have more descriptors popup in my inner voice. Like say I'm drawing the door, I will hear: "vertical slats, arched top, dark weathered wood" and as I drill into each of those, I will hear more words in my head.
Maybe I trained myself to do that over many many years of art classes, but I can't remember that not being the case.
I also have it, I can draw a lighthouse because I know what it should look like. But if I close my eyes and try to visualize it, I don't have any sense that I'm seeing something, in the same way that I have a sense that I'm listening to a song when I play it back from memory.
When I dream there's only a faint visual component, there's no color or detail.
As someone with a terrible memory who grew up with these constant distractions around me, be it a phone or an MP3 player or what have you, I often wonder how much that contributes to my lack of substantial memory about my childhood. While it's not mentioned here, I wonder if the inverse of this finding is true; specifically, if one doesn't have time of "quiet wakefulness", are they likely to experience a larger-than-usual absence of memory?
However, this is about Working Memory. Autobiographical memory is also related to the experience of emotions:
“Much evidence indicates that emotional arousal enhances the storage of memories, thus serving to create, selectively, lasting memories of our most important experiences.”. From: Making lasting memories: Remembering the significant [pdf] — https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1301209110
I wrote a paper on the relationship between the regions of the brain responsible for day dreaming (or the default mode network) and the dramatically reduced norepinephrine levels that occur (80% below waking) during REM sleep and the contents of dreams. It's called Dreaming Is the Inverse of Anxious Mind-Wandering. If it's something that interests you, you can read it here:
I can say that taking Strattera hasn't changed the content of my dreams - they can be pretty vivid but they're never nightmares. Maybe some negative things happen but it doesn't feel like it at the time.
> It is interesting that those who do a lot of mediation have been seen to be less reactive to norepinephrine (a neurotransmitter associated to stress).
> Maybe some negative things happen but it doesn't feel like it at the time.
I sometimes have dreams that any normal person would probably consider a nightmare, but I don't experience a nightmare. I'll wake up, and then realize that the dream I just woke up from probably should've been extremely scary, but I wasn't scared. Maybe it's the autism.
I'm not sure I'm afraid. The best understanding I have is that even though we may not remember our dreams we still do have them (i.e. if you were woken in REM sleep you would likely recall a dream). We remember dreams using the neurotransmitter Acetylcholine. This is responsible for working memory. In the same way that it is difficult to recall a series of random numbers, a dream can quickly slip from memory because of the short term nature of the memory generated by this neurotransmitter. (In my view this supports the view that we act in obviously maladaptive ways dreams in order to highlight this behaviour. If our long term memory was storing these dreams automatically (I think you analyse a dream you do store it in long term memory, but in an intellectual way), we would be reinforcing our maladaptive patterns. By storing the dream in working memory, the brain can highlight the behaviour without reinforcing it.
It has changed my perception on children's "time management"
Children should be allowed to get bored so they can develop their innate ability to be creative, an education expert says.
EDIT: just noticed that article is from 2013 - damn I am old - so are some of my bookmarks.
EDIT2: I like one of the comments made: Our children (generally) are drowning in communication media and internet trivia. Reading, such a nutrient for the imagination because you have to build mental worlds, is a minority pursuit in teenagers. I'm a teacher and trying to get kids to read is like pulling teeth. Yes, an image = 1000 words. So give the kids the words and let them do the mental exercise to build the images, or find the time to read TO your kids if they are too young to read (so they can ask questions - "mum/dad what is XYZ?")
I would be interested in the behaviors that would be included in "daydreaming". For example, Jeff Bezos recently detailed to Lex Fridman the importance of his daily "wanderings". [1]
The drifting off to sleep on the comedown phase of MDMA made me have incredible minds eye pictures each morphing into the next in a kind of word association.
I am capable of minds eye pictures when sober too but this was next level.
I’ve always wanted to try legit LSD but never has it found me. I wonder if people with aphantasia respond differently to empathogenic and hallucinogenic drugs.
My experience isn't quite what people with aphantasia describe, but it absolutely is not what everyone else describes.
I used to take mushrooms pretty regularly. It usually just alters what I physically see, like fish swimming out of the TV into free air or objects moving. I did once have a very intense trip where my senses were entirely blocked out by the hallucination. I was totally unaware of my surroundings.
The experience had a visual component, but it was very similar to the way I visualize ideas normally.
I 'see' outlines and shapes, everything is fuzzy and abstract. Sort of like remembering something from when you were very drunk. The details are missing, but you have a clear impression of what it is. Except for me the details exist in an abstract form attached to the image. Like metadata on a jpeg.
The images I saw had very little information in them, just impressions of ideas. But behind the images was a great depth of conceptual information. I understand perfectly what the images represent, but there's so little visual information that another person would understand the image if I could show them.
Anyway, Vishnu revealed to me the secret structure of the universe. At the quantum level, little spiders hold together the fabric of reality and they are very tired of their job.
Interesting so with you your level of visualization remained similar just boosted.
Same as me. Except I typically have a vivid minds eye so it was turned up to 11. I still remember the barn and farm path leading to it that was built from mind association freewheeling from an Apple to a tree to an orchard to a barn it was one of the most interesting experiences of my life.
I’m too old to move in circles that would sell me mdma now, I’ve got ‘narc’ written all over me, but I’d love to do it again and still hold out hope LSD will find me!
One old hippy once told me ‘it will find you my friend when you need it most’. Then he disappeared in a puff of (pot) smoke wizard style.
As someone who has a very vivid imagination - daydreaming is second nature to me. It’s very useful to me because I can use it to learn stuff by doing my best to simulate how they work step by step, usually all I need is a good description and some background info.
How much of that imagination is real? For example, can you intersect two dodecahedrons at some random angle and see the outline of the polygon where they intersect?
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I didn't even realize that aphantasia was a thing until a couple of years ago when a YouTube video popped up on my feed about it.
When people ask what I "see" in my mind when told to "picture" something, is basically auditory database of descriptions in my inner voice.
I am nearly always a lucid dreamer. The only difference between daydreaming and night-dreaming for me is focus. I play along with my dreams, and laugh at how absurd and illogical they are.
There was one time that I was dreaming so deeply that I could actually see. It was incredible. I decided to fly, and nearly woke myself up from the imagined (but realistically experienced) change of balance.
Outside of that one experience, my inner eye is nearly blind. Consider the experience of walking down the street: you can see what is in front of you, and you can remember what is behind you. My dreams are much more like an invented memory than something seen.
But what about audio? If I could pull the data of my inner (metaphorical) ear, and plug it into a speaker, I could play you a reasonably high-fidelity copy of Metallica's black album (good luck suing this nap-ster) from front to back. Honestly, it's a bit frustrating that I can't. Playing a musical instrument requires a lot of patience: I can hear any sound I want to at a moment's notice, but making you hear it takes hard work and years of practice.
I have been nearsighted since I was a child. I wonder if living that way - without corrective lenses - played a part in my development.
I can pull up an image of any place real or "imaginary" at a moments notice, see myself walking around in first or third person view and imagine any number of people or entities in the space. If I'm working on a physical object like a home project or building a piece of furniture or wiring a circuit, I usually start by visualizing it much like 3D modelling software, spinning it around in my mind, looking at it from all angles and modifying as needed before putting my ideas down on paper. Interestingly, this makes using actual 3D modeling software incredibly frustrating because I'm very much a novice and the speed and fidelity of the software in my hands is so much slower than my imagination.
I also have a habit of playing around with imaginary worlds and stories in my head and I pretty much visualize whole scenes and sequences in as much detail as possible. I wouldn't be able to do that with aphantasia.
Now I'm trying to imagine what either of your internal thought processes are like.
funny this reminds me of when trying to sleep when my brain is still active, i try to focus on what i "see" in 100% darkness; i try to set my brain to visualize "complete darkness" - and then i try to "hear nothing" until i eventually fall asleep; sometimes its hard as hell, but something ive "practiced" for some years. Otherwise my brain is jamming to whatever song i was listening to and scheming some plan in whatever game i was playing last..
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It's fascinating to me that (as far as I'm concerned) we mostly learn about it by self-reporting but then those reports vary pretty wildly.
I myself don't have aphantasia I think but I feel like I really have to work on "drawing things up" when I try to picture something with my eyes closed. Or maybe that's just the normal amount of effort for the complexity and detail I'm trying to capture? Actually it's easier to "imagine" things with my eyes open which I always thought was weird before I read this comment about daydreaming blocking out vision. Which still sounds extreme to me, but maybe not more extreme than all those other reports that claim they can procure fully detailed houses / places / system architectures / electrical diagrams / etc on a whim.
The idea (to me) that people can just see full-fledged lifelike photos in their mind is crazy, especially with low effort. I can't really draw things in my mind very well but I can 'pretend' I see them, blurring the line between 'knowing I'm seeing something' and 'actually seeing that thing'.
But, is that the same thing as actually visualizing that object? It feels like it for most use cases, but then there's some task that actually would be way easier if I could legitimately 'see' that thing, and suddenly everything becomes more complicated.
This makes me wonder two things:
I'm also not very much of a visual learner. I appreciate well written text to a graphic or diagram when trying to understand something new.
This was just my anecdata to backup your statement about self-reporting, and how any one individual can experience this vastly differently than the next person. I also think that phenomena like this is what is going to end up holding back artificial intelligence, as far as trying to map human mental processes on to computing. We have a long way towards understanding our own minds before we can fully conceptualize true artificial intelligence (although that doesn't make current AI not useful).
The overall goal was to really see the way the world is perceived.
Sure, they are usually something like “imagine an apple on a table” and then some questions about it like its color. There are also fMRI neural signatures.
Aphantasia is also often linked with SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographic Memory).
...
Most people say red or green.
If you don't see a colour then you have aphantasia.
A good analogy is that the human mind can have it’s own internal stable diffusion or Midjourney, complete with the ability to give it a “prompt” i.e. thinking about what you want to imagine.
I was surprised to learn a while ago that not everyone can visualize things in their mind. As far testing for it, I don’t really know how that would work. I don’t think you really need to test for it, I assume most people who can visualize things in their mind know that they can.
I'm about a 2-3 when I'm just idly thinking about things, and can get to about a 1-2 if I really concentrate on an image. Subjectively, the images I'm experiencing in my mind aren't exactly the same as actually seeing things, but they're pretty similar.
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I’m really not a visual learner for the most part, and maybe that’s why? On the other hand I’m quite good at shape rotation and other such problems. That and there are times where I find the visual interpretation to clarify my understanding of the abstract concept. The standout example of that is the marvelous Visual Complex Analysis.
It's always in the way of what I'm trying to imagine, and it's so hard to "see past" the darkness. The only way for me to really imagine something is to actually have my eyes open and stare at words describing what it is that I'm imagining. I can vividly imagine stories that I'm reading, or writing. Or roleplay. But if I want to daydream, it's just not happening.
I occasionally remember dreams. Once, for a few months, I kept a dream diary and started to remember more and more of my dreams. From a few flashes to pages and pages of stuff. It was mostly really boring and nonsense.
As I am drawing the lighthouse the part that I'm working on will have more descriptors popup in my inner voice. Like say I'm drawing the door, I will hear: "vertical slats, arched top, dark weathered wood" and as I drill into each of those, I will hear more words in my head.
Maybe I trained myself to do that over many many years of art classes, but I can't remember that not being the case.
When I dream there's only a faint visual component, there's no color or detail.
"Edinburgh: “I can remember visual details,” he commented, “but I can’t see them”."
In this one, they show step by step how the artist does it: https://aphantasia.com/article/stories/visual-artist-with-ap...
Edit: I'll bet my next paycheck they are self-diagnosed.
* Attention and working memory: Two sides of the same neural coin? — https://research.princeton.edu/news/attention-and-working-me...
* Professor Wayne Wu (CMU) on 'Intending as practical remembering' — https://youtu.be/okk-fpwcdbY
However, this is about Working Memory. Autobiographical memory is also related to the experience of emotions:
“Much evidence indicates that emotional arousal enhances the storage of memories, thus serving to create, selectively, lasting memories of our most important experiences.”. From: Making lasting memories: Remembering the significant [pdf] — https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1301209110
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/k6trz
It was discussed on hacker news here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590
> It is interesting that those who do a lot of mediation have been seen to be less reactive to norepinephrine (a neurotransmitter associated to stress).
But from your older comment, that applies to me.
I sometimes have dreams that any normal person would probably consider a nightmare, but I don't experience a nightmare. I'll wake up, and then realize that the dream I just woke up from probably should've been extremely scary, but I wasn't scared. Maybe it's the autism.
It has changed my perception on children's "time management"
Children should be allowed to get bored so they can develop their innate ability to be creative, an education expert says.
EDIT: just noticed that article is from 2013 - damn I am old - so are some of my bookmarks.
EDIT2: I like one of the comments made: Our children (generally) are drowning in communication media and internet trivia. Reading, such a nutrient for the imagination because you have to build mental worlds, is a minority pursuit in teenagers. I'm a teacher and trying to get kids to read is like pulling teeth. Yes, an image = 1000 words. So give the kids the words and let them do the mental exercise to build the images, or find the time to read TO your kids if they are too young to read (so they can ask questions - "mum/dad what is XYZ?")
[1] https://youtu.be/DcWqzZ3I2cY?si=6wR1HMnjxqxOqHAP&t=1300
The drifting off to sleep on the comedown phase of MDMA made me have incredible minds eye pictures each morphing into the next in a kind of word association.
I am capable of minds eye pictures when sober too but this was next level.
I’ve always wanted to try legit LSD but never has it found me. I wonder if people with aphantasia respond differently to empathogenic and hallucinogenic drugs.
I used to take mushrooms pretty regularly. It usually just alters what I physically see, like fish swimming out of the TV into free air or objects moving. I did once have a very intense trip where my senses were entirely blocked out by the hallucination. I was totally unaware of my surroundings.
The experience had a visual component, but it was very similar to the way I visualize ideas normally.
I 'see' outlines and shapes, everything is fuzzy and abstract. Sort of like remembering something from when you were very drunk. The details are missing, but you have a clear impression of what it is. Except for me the details exist in an abstract form attached to the image. Like metadata on a jpeg.
The images I saw had very little information in them, just impressions of ideas. But behind the images was a great depth of conceptual information. I understand perfectly what the images represent, but there's so little visual information that another person would understand the image if I could show them.
Anyway, Vishnu revealed to me the secret structure of the universe. At the quantum level, little spiders hold together the fabric of reality and they are very tired of their job.
It was actually a really fun ride.
Same as me. Except I typically have a vivid minds eye so it was turned up to 11. I still remember the barn and farm path leading to it that was built from mind association freewheeling from an Apple to a tree to an orchard to a barn it was one of the most interesting experiences of my life.
I’m too old to move in circles that would sell me mdma now, I’ve got ‘narc’ written all over me, but I’d love to do it again and still hold out hope LSD will find me!
One old hippy once told me ‘it will find you my friend when you need it most’. Then he disappeared in a puff of (pot) smoke wizard style.