Sensations of highly dynamic motion/flight with coordinated visuals on dissociatives?

[Beavesmx44]

When I was younger I had the feeling of flying while laying in my bed on high doses of dxm(900mg). This thread reminds me of my past failed attempts to procure some ketamine. From my limited experience dissociatives are less likely to induce panic at high doses and therefore can be taken a little closer to the edge. Feeling as though you can create a projection image of anything you think of in your mind is thrilling.

 

[psood0nym]

^Yes, the degree of volitional control is truly astonishing. It's like a lucid dream, but far easier to stay engaged with. It's hard to believe it's real. Early on I had to get up and go back into the experiences over and over just to convince myself they were happening. It's like a partial simulation of "Christ consciousness" as I've heard the term employed.

 

[Goddess Mode]

It's not letting me quote your post that you responded to me in for some reason, but oh well...

You and I seem to think along similar lines. I have also in the past taken a lot of interest in the balance between acetylcholine and serotonin in relation to sleep and waking states. I think it's interesting to note that psychedelics (particularly tryptamines) also increase acetylcholine level and decrease serotonin levels, and I've always thought that this may be an important part of why those compounds can be so visionary and dream-like as well, even though they can also be paradoxically quite stimulating, probably through directly activating only certain serotonin receptors in certain ways as well. I would note though that breakthrough psychedelics can actually make me feel like I could fall asleep as well in the right setting, they definitely have that hypnagogic feel.... I just took 50 mg of 4-AcO-DMT last night and it was definitely like that, I actually felt tired at the beginning despite being on the edge of hyperspace.

Your experience as a teenager sounds intense, haha. I have experienced those strange proprioceptive sensations as I mentioned, and I know many people do quite regularly, but for me more often than not the slip into an OBE is pretty smooth. I'm also not that great at inducing them though, I never had the patience to get to where I could do it all the time, but it is fun. I used to use lucid dreaming supplements as well to help me with it, and those would color the experience some as well. In that way, I see them as just like using dissociatives or whatever other kind of hallucinogen to achieve them, just through a different mechanism of action. It's certainly a fascinating topic. That's interesting about the wireframe visuals too, I've actually heard people say that about ketamine, but I haven't experienced it personally. The only dissociative I have considerable experience with is nitrous but I haven't had that either, but that one's sort of unique I suppose as well. I actually do experience lots of wireframes on strong doses of LSD, though....

Anyway, I suppose I don't have too much else to add for now, but it a very interesting discussion.

 

[heerutosen]

The feeling of motion thing is very common on dissociatives.
I love the feeling of my bed lifting off the ground and hurtling through space, BEAUTY

Experienced this for the first time last night. So friggin awesome!

 

[psood0nym]

Experienced this for the first time last night. So friggin awesome!

I remember your post in the MXE thread. You said it was your first time using MXE with with friends and first time snorting anything, so I assume you haven't used it many times, correct? I also remember you posting about "seeing through your eyes." I've been calling these closed eye visuals "afterimages," but after another recent very visual MXE experience I'm not sure that's what they are, exactly.

They certainly aren't afterimages the way a bright flash of some pattern can leave an afterimage by causing photoreceptor fatigue in the retina. I attempted the test using a sequence of simple shapes presented at equal intervals I proposed in my second to last post using a looped early education youtube video. Upon closing my eyes I DID NOT see the shapes as I thought I might. This made me wonder why I see things like the carpet, text, or the scene in motion involving the DVD cover I posted about earlier. I no longer think visual memories are being played over at any particular time after they're presented. For example, I could be looking at the television, then stare at the carpet intently for just a few seconds and still see its texture as an "afterimage" upon closing my eyes, which is a far shorter duration than had lapsed between seeing the DVD cover and closing my eyes over 30 seconds later.

I now think in order to appear in a recognizable form the afterimages need to be both relatively recent and familiar. Though I don't often walk past the bookshelf AND look at the particular DVD cover I posted about earlier, I am nevertheless familiar with both walking past the shelf and the DVD. During this last experience I was fascinated to close my eyes on one occasion and see psychedelicized scenes of driving behind cars on the highway, presumably because earlier that day I had spent 8 hours driving! I think these visuals are much closer to hypagogic visuals or the memory consolidating replay we often see in dreams than to afterimages, even if they are often of things we were just looking at.

I'll also note that this is the third time I've experienced intense visuals after dosing high, despite using low dose MXE on two consecutive nights on the second and third day prior to this experience (20mg and 15mg RA, respectively). It appears that, for me, despite quickly redeveloping a moderately mild tolerance when I use daily or every other day for around 4 times or more at any dose, peak MXE effects can still be experienced following this more recent dosing regimen. I've used high dose MXE three times with five to seven days between sessions during this latest period, which followed four weeks of complete dissociative abstinence to regain relative non-tolerance.

 

[[éS]Infinite]

Ketamine is such an interesting drug in this respect. Even in dreams where you can have the perception of motion or flying, there is no physical sensation of motion (at least for me). With ketamine I've experienced a variety of scenarios where the internal visual environment is matched perfectly with bodily sensations (ex. Bed spinning, falling into darkness, becoming a different species and maneuvering through the environment). There is often the distinct feeling of air time or weightlessness that is similar to what is experienced on a roller coaster or in a pool of water.
I found it definitely contributed to the positive outcomes of the trips as it is an enjoyable sensation (for me) yet there is still a sense of removal from the perceptions where you know they aren't real and aren't to be feared.

 

[zn13bt]

I watched The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour for the first time the other day, and there's a part about 18 minutes in (set to the song "Flying", ha) that looks a lot like the kind of visuals we've been talking about in this thread:



(this clip is pretty terrible quality, if you have the blu-ray it looks a lot better)

And then I was reminded of the infamous sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey when Dave Bowman arrives at the alien planet and looks out over the bizarre pastel-colored landscapes gliding beneath him.

(Not that I'm suggesting Kubrick and the Fab Four were hoovering lines of K back in the 60's, of course. )

 

[psood0nym]

You and I seem to think along similar lines. I have also in the past taken a lot of interest in the balance between acetylcholine and serotonin in relation to sleep and waking states. I think it's interesting to note that psychedelics (particularly tryptamines) also increase acetylcholine level and decrease serotonin levels, and I've always thought that this may be an important part of why those compounds can be so visionary and dream-like as well, even though they can also be paradoxically quite stimulating, probably through directly activating only certain serotonin receptors in certain ways as well. I would note though that breakthrough psychedelics can actually make me feel like I could fall asleep as well in the right setting, they definitely have that hypnagogic feel....

With respect to dissociatives (rather than 5HT psychedelics as you're speaking of), I believe that if the theory regarding associations with patterns of sleep regulation is true then I'd speculate that the relevant effects on serotonin and acetylcholine are caused in a more indirect manner than they are by psychedelics. I refer to the following theory, posted earlier:

Another major theory is that the neural bodies that regulate sleep are out of balance in such a way that allows for the different sleep states to overlap [7]. In this case the cholinergic sleep on neural populations are hyper activated and the serotonergic sleep off neural populations are under activated [7]. As a result the cells capable of sending the signals that would allow for complete arousal from the sleep state, the serotonergic neural populations, have difficulty in overcoming the signals sent by the cells that keep the brain in the sleep state

The indirect way I think dissociatives may cause these effects is by simulating natural sleep paralysis by blocking signals from the body to the brain. That is, it is the anesthetic effects of dissociatives that mediate the subjectively dream-like "holing" effects (which may be why the more anesthetic dissociatives like ketamine and MXE are more likely to cause dissociative holing effects). The lack of signal input from the body may be mistaken for REM atonia, which could in turn initiate mental processes affiliated with dreaming. Interestingly, one of the main effects of sleep paralysis is a sensation of movement, which is covered on the sleep paralysis wiki page (such paralysis is very closely related to REM atonia, as it's basically part of the same phenomenon while awake):

There are three main types of these hallucinations that can be linked to pathologic neurophysiology.[9] These include the belief that there is an intruder in the room, the incubus, and vestibular motor sensations.

These sensations affiliated with bodily movement and balance are of precisely the kind we experience in dissociative "holes": tumbling, riding waves or "elevators," flying, spinning, stretching, etc. When one bodily input signal is coming through and others are relatively weaker or blocked there is a lack of coherence or balance in the accurate processing of the information. A signal indicating one is laying still in bed might come in with a relatively higher strength from the right side of the body than the left, for instance, which could conceivably be interpreted as a sensation of "rolling" over, right to left, as is a common sensation during dissociative holes (this example is of course oversimplified for illustrative purposes). This incoherence also enables other sense modalities, such as vision, to more strongly influence our sense of movement, with the effect that "flying visuals" can make us feel like we're flying (resulting in "OBEs"). However, like with most things in the body there's probably a huge amount of interdependence between these phenomena, i.e. it's not just flying visuals that make us feel like flying -- the feelings of movement may likewise lead to visuals of moving through internal landscapes.

I watched The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour for the first time the other day, and there's a part about 18 minutes in (set to the song "Flying", ha) that looks a lot like the kind of visuals we've been talking about in this thread:

Damn that is highly reminiscent of the visuals we're talking about. It's got so many of their qualities -- flying dynamics, luminous, largely monochromatic features, and organic shapes -- nearly everything!

EDIT

Caution: If you experience the sort of sensations and visuals discussed in this thread, resist falling asleep during the experience. It's sort of like nodding off in the hull of a cabin cruiser while your dad fishes. Motion sickness is a real possibility. (I was already up for over 30 hours when this happened.)

 

[zn13bt]

I'm digging up this old thread to mention that I've found that taking melatonin with MXE makes it a lot easier to see the closed-eye visuals being described here. While the visuals remain monochromatic just like with MXE alone, adding melatonin makes the edges of the forms sharper and more distinct, and instead of being composed of glowing lines against a dark background, the entire visual field becomes luminous and shimmering. I usually split my MXE dose into two parts taken 45 minutes apart, and I take 2mg of melatonin with the second MXE dose. Also it helps to trip in the evening after sunset, to avoid watching TV or playing with my phone for a few hours before tripping, and to run f.lux on my computer, as blue wavelengths of light from the sun, fluorescent lights, or LCD screens reduces melatonin levels in the brain. Once I feel the second dose coming on I close my eyes and put on headphones playing drone sounds like this to get into a meditative state, and within a few minutes the visuals will come on every time. The way they're constantly shifting and distorting remind me very much of movies of 3D fractal zooms, or objects rotating through the 4th dimension:





psood0nym mentioned in the first post that they also look like images from scanning electron microscopes. I recently came across this weird and wonderful Victorian-era book, Occult Chemistry: Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements by Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater, which details the authors' experiences with what is known as the "anima siddhi" in yoga, the supposed ability to see microscopic objects (or sometimes described as the ability to shrink yourself infinitesimally small, heh). Several of the things they describe seeing, such as atoms being made of various funnel shapes in the configuration of Platonic solids, and tiny vibrating vortices connected by lines of force moving around within the funnels, I have seen myself numerous times on the MXE/melatonin combo.

 

[psood0nym]

^By coincidence I was coming to bump my own thread with the cut and paste of what follows, but you beat me here! Nice contribution. (I may edit more of a response in later).

The stars aligned and I finally had enough time to devote to exploring my still-developing experience of profound MXE-mediated visuals. This time I have an entirely new phenomenon to report: (suspected) proprioceptive projection of limb imagery into the CEV space (proprioception underlies our ability to feel the position of our limbs in relation to our body).

If I had noticed hints of this earlier I dismissed it as the shadows of my limbs moving across my closed eyelids or as owing to having my eyelids slightly open. But during this most recent experience I found that my arms took on the appearance of “3D shadows” through my closed eyelids! Though largely diaphanous, the definition of the arm imagery was high enough to discern the movement of my open hand closing into a fist and reopening, but not enough to see how many fingers I was holding up.

The most beautiful experience I had experimenting with the phenomenon occurred when I slowly brought my right hand near my closed eyes and stared at where I knew my palm to be. The background imagery at this point was akin to CGI of protein coils against a black backdrop, and to my astonishment I saw red threads growing within my “virtual” hand's projection. These threads never did form the shape of my hand. It was more as if the aesthetic theme already established in the background was being extrapolated into its position.

At one point during these closed eye forays my girlfriend's cat came to lay on my chest, breathing lightly on my face as she purred. I tried in various ways to evoke a projection of her face to no avail. If I'm in the house and she's not sleeping she's following me around, so I'm very familiar with how this cat looks. The fact that I could partially “see” my arms but not the body of another suggests to me that the neurosystemic production of the closed eye projections relies on real-time proprioceptive feedback rather than recall of visual memories.

Proprioception is known to “extend” into familiar held objects, such as a tennis player's racket (this is how we have a "feel" for parallel parking). If these limb projections heighten in definition in later experiences I think I'll try holding a ping pong paddle, spatula, or TV remote to see if anything of them appears in these projections, as if they did it would cement the theory in my mind.

I observed a second novel phenomenon during the trip as well – one potentially much more interesting than the aforementioned because if my theory about its cause pans out I should be able to back it up with verifiable empirical evidence. Unfortunately, I didn't come up with my little hypothesis until sober, but I'll report back on it one way or the other following my next experience.

 

[psood0nym]

adding melatonin makes the edges of the forms sharper and more distinct, and instead of being composed of glowing lines against a dark background, the entire visual field becomes luminous and shimmering. ...

... psood0nym mentioned in the first post that they also look like images from scanning electron microscopes. I recently came across this weird and wonderful Victorian-era book, Occult Chemistry: Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements by Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater, which details the authors' experiences with what is known as the "anima siddhi" in yoga, the supposed ability to see microscopic objects (or sometimes described as the ability to shrink yourself infinitesimally small, heh). Several of the things they describe seeing, such as atoms being made of various funnel shapes in the configuration of Platonic solids, and tiny vibrating vortices connected by lines of force moving around within the funnels, I have seen myself numerous times on the MXE/melatonin combo.

The melatonin combo is intriguing. I'll have to try it. Thanks!

The visuals definitely possess distinct aesthetic tendencies, as many in this thread have noted. Indeed they are very strange, almost "phantasmagorical" in appearance at times, and nothing like 5HT psychedelic visuals. I don't know why they are the way they are, but I do know that some of them begin closer to familiarity as after images or visual memories with their origins in experiences ranging from tens of seconds to hours past.

I find the easiest of these two types to evoke and recognize is the afterimage. I simply stare at a spot for awhile and then close my eyes. Often whatever I was looking at will quickly emerge from the darkness and then decompose into the sorts of luminous amoeba-like forms discussed earlier. I don't know of a way to intentionally evoke a specific near term visual memory, but if I think about what I've seen during the previous minutes or hours I can often pinpoint the source of what I'm seeing.

A few posts ago I mentioned seeing what I strongly suspect were scenes of highway traffic (but with "dissociative impressionistic" glowing red and yellow boxes substituted for tail-lights and license plates) during one visual episode that occurred the evening after a long day of driving, as well as another, "brain video recording," of passing my bookshelf and "Deadwood" box set 30 or so seconds earlier. During this latest trip I saw what was unmistakably a blueprint with precisely the sorts of fine-lined figures I had spent the afternoon looking at. Letters and letter-like characters continue to make faded appearances in my vision even the morning after a night of dissociative visions and reading, long past when the other dissociative effects have gone and when I have been assuming the active compounds would be largely metabolized.

I think there is a memory re-consolidation process that is constantly going on subconsciously (as is clearly occurring during sleep as evident from the content of our dreams) and the experience of dissociative visuals is at least partially a product of an inhibition of the neurobiological systems that route this process away from our normal conscious visual perceptions. That this proposed inhibition seems to continue for some time after we tend to think of the active compounds' being broken down may indicate that the visualization process is being conditioned to a degree sufficient for it to continue for a short while independent of the more direct pharmacological effects that induced it.

As spectacular and fascinatingly bizarre as the "electron microscope" stuff is personally I'm more intrigued by these more recognizable visuals. The fact that I can interpret them and place them in a definite context makes them far more amenable to deductive analysis and, potentially, to the sorts of inner experimental manipulations that hold the potential for telling me more about both what's going on with the drugs and the character of my subconscious self/selves.

 

[zn13bt]

This time I have an entirely new phenomenon to report: (suspected) proprioceptive projection of limb imagery into the CEV space (proprioception underlies our ability to feel the position of our limbs in relation to our body).

If I had noticed hints of this earlier I dismissed it as the shadows of my limbs moving across my closed eyelids or as owing to having my eyelids slightly open. But during this most recent experience I found that my arms took on the appearance of “3D shadows” through my closed eyelids! Though largely diaphanous, the definition of the arm imagery was high enough to discern the movement of my open hand closing into a fist and reopening, but not enough to see how many fingers I was holding up.

I have also noticed that the position of my hands and arms affects the visuals, though I don't usually see them directly. For example, if I put my hands together in the prayer position in front of my chest, then the visuals usually move away from me in all directions and a bubble of empty space forms around the center of my viewpoint. Whereas if I do the abhaya mudra (holding the right hand up, palm facing out, with the left hand resting in the lap) then the opposite thing happens, I tend to move closer to whatever I'm looking at, sometimes getting so close it seems like it's grazing the tip of my nose. At times I've also been shown various mudras to perform; these will suddenly appear as thick lines or handshapes in front of me and I'll get an urging to put my hands in that position. When I do so, the visuals usually change drastically, seeming to accelerate very quickly or to shift to a higher "level", and it feels weirdly satisfying, like turning a key in a lock.

One time I was watching a sheet of streaming translucent bubbles passing in front of me, when a darker object started to stick out of it like an iceberg. Gradually it got bigger and more and more of it emerged out of the stream, until I realized that I was looking at a silhouette of my own right foot! I was sitting cross-legged and it was in the exact same orientation that my real foot was in at the time, but magnified so that it took up half of the visual field. I was so surprised to see this that I tried wiggling my toes while keeping my eyes closed to see if the image would change, but nothing happened. Then I flexed my toes upward, and after a half-second delay the image did the same thing. Then I put my toes back down, and after the same delay so did the image. It was so bizarre.

 

[TheRapperGoneBad]

Part of what makes k so great I tend to deep end it iv with some good music in the dark.

Feel like your flying morphing twisting around crazy shit. Can be pretty thought provoking as well

I always tend to come back focused on one object aND slowly realize I'm back to my bed or wherever.

 

[AA357]

I don't really get 'visuals' from MXE... more like visions.
When I close my eyes and lay back I go places in my head... landscapes appear before my eyelids and I totally forget I'm crashed out in my shed/on my couch.