Any reports on visually impaired people trying hallucinogenics?

[grimes]

Hello, new member here! How are we all?
I suffer from a cortical visual impairment, which effects the vision in my left eye, as well as the connecting nerves in my brain. I have seen some amazing things whilst on hallucinogenics. I remember dropping L once, and simultaneously seeing a black and white checkerboard through the right eye, and a kaleidoscope pattern out of the left... it was all so beautiful and clear!
However, apart from all the amazing visuals, I've noticed that the nerves on the left side of my brain are trying to connect up properly. On top of that, my brain tries its absolute hardest to keep up with the right side, but simply can't. The left side of my body feels weaker and I am unable to use it as much whilst tripping. The whole experience leaves me feeling very emotional the next day.

I've tried to find reports written by people with similar conditions as mine, but have been unable to find any. I'd love to hear your stories

 

[Kaleida]

We grimes, welcome to Bluelight! I'm doing very well, and I hope you are too! Thanks for sharing your story. I cannot personally relate, but I do find this subject very interesting as well, and I'm sure others will have something to say about it! That visual experience you describe does sound quite amazing, and that experience with your body being weak is quite unique. Humans are so complex....

For the time being, I do have a couple of things I could post here.

First, there was actually a study done on this which is available on Erowid: Effects of a Hallucinogenic Agent in Totally Blind Subjects.

Here's one particularly interesting snippet from it....

Thirteen of the 24 subjects reported visual alterations after LSD. Eleven subjects reported simple hallucinations, and 2 subjects reported complex hallucinations (faces, persons, furniture, etc.). Five of the subjects reporting simple, and the 2 subjects reporting complex hallucinations described color (Subjects 10 and 14). .... No subjects reported subjective visual phenomena when the placebo trial preceded LSD. However, when the placebo trial followed LSD, 3 subjects reported visual hallucinations. Two of these 3 subjects reported more vivid visual hallucinations in the prior LSD trial. Four subjects reported nonvisual hallucinations when the placebo trial was first and 10 when the placebo trial was second.

And second, there's also this one from Reddit: Blind Friend Smokes DMT.

So like two weeks ago I made a post about my friend's blind brother who wanted to smoke DMT...https://www.reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/3tw6lf/blind_friend_to_try_dmt/ Well I finally got the time to write this damn thing so here we go...

I'll skip most of the boring stuff, basically we were out on the patio and we did the sandwich method with about 60mg and he took three really big hits out of a pipe and yeah... (We shall call him Lukas)

After his last big hit he give us the pipe, coughs a bit, and leans back in his chair. So normally when Lukas smokes weed he gets super stoner eyes, really droopy/barely open and red, but when he leaned back in the chair his eyes were wide open (a rare phenomenon) and they were jolting around crazy like. It was actually pretty cool to see his eyes wide open and him looking around like he was actually "seeing" stuff as it was something I've never seen before with him. This lasted about 5ish minutes and then it calmed down a bit, but his eyes were still way more active than usual.

Another 10-15 minutes go by where he is moving around a bit in his chair, making small sounds (nothing we could understand), and farting. I have no idea why he was farting so much it was like he shat himself or something, but once it was all over we made sure he didn't shit himself and he was miraculously clean...

So once he starts coming back ~30 minutes later me and his brother begin to talk to him about what it was like. Here's how that went (I just summed up what he said, I'll put direct quotes I remember in quotations):

"So how was it?" "That was the most ridiculous thing I have ever experienced" He wasn't really able to talk that well yet so we were just like yeah that's cool and waited a bit more. He just kept saying stuff about how it was crazy and how it blew his mind. Once he began to talk normal we asked the question everyone wants to know...

"So.... could you see?" "I could do more than just see, I could talk out of my eyes" Holy shit... Well tell us about it.

His Story (I'll tell it in first person like I am Lukas, I think it will flow better) When I leaned back in the chair I just kept falling and eventually landed in this super bright room. I could look around and "colors and shapes were extremely crispy." I felt like I was floating and started moving towards "really colorful green." (remember he is blind, but he can still faintly see colors and shades. The doctor has described it as a super light water color painting with a huge brush EDIT That's how the doctor described his blindness because it has to do with his actual eyes, not his brain; however, Lukas has a very severe case so he most likely sees only in shades of grey and possibly tanish/orange from what he has told us and what doctors believe.)

"Wow, so did the colors look better?" we asked...

Yes they were beautiful, I think it is what colors actually look like to you guys. I got pushed into the green and people were running around me, and after a while one of them ran up to me. It looked like a really "spaghetti like person", but it was staring me right in the eyes and I was staring it right back in the eyes. (usually Lukas looks towards the ground/torso or off to the sides when someone is talking to him, so this was different) "I didn't even need to talk, we just looked at each other and knew exactly what the other was thinking" (maybe he could still read emotions of a person's face?) We had an extremely long conversation about my life and how it was different than most other people, but I am who I am for a reason.

"What was the conversation like?" we asked...

No words at all. We kept flying by different things that happened in my life. I could actually see from a 3rd person view what was happening (I kinda paraphrased here, he was having a tough time describing the 3rd person concept, but I think I understood what he was trying to say pretty clearly).

The first stop was when I was a young child and I was moved to a new school because I couldn't see. I saw all my teachers and friends with me. "I relived the moment with vision."

The second stop was when we got our first dog. I was playing with the dog and I could see him, I saw him with me and my family. I was able to understand why we had this random, furry animal in our house.

The third stop was a Christmas dinner with me extended family. His brother chimed in, "The one with Aunt and Uncle ____ and the _____'s?" Yes yes!!! We were all together and one of the coolest parts was the food. The food was so colorful and I could taste the food I had that day. The textures were so defined and distinct.

Back to me Alright, I have to stop there, got somewhere to be. There was about 3 or 4 more stops in his journey that I will add really soon. Hopefully you enjoy this, I thought it was very interesting for him and me. I'll be with him saturday if you want to ask him any questions comment, I'll ask them for you then get to the responses as soon as I can.

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EDIT NUMERO UNO

I'm back bitches... Alright, so, I read through this again and also read most of the comments, so before I have to go to the gym I'll add some more stuff.

Lukas is very physically touchy. So you know how we have the five major senses; sight, touch, smell, taste and feel... I think that about 20% (twenty percent of 'brain power'?) is the maximum for every sense we have, but because Lukas doesn't have sight, the remaining four get boosted up to a 25% maximum. I have no idea if this is scientific, or even true, but hopefully you get what I'm saying.

Because he is very touchy, that's how he learns a lot of what he knows. For example, he would be rubbing the ground and we would tell him, "that's grass, it's green, cows eat that shit" you know whatever... So for the part when he "saw" green, maybe he was experiencing a grass texture or leaves or something??? and his mind created the color "green" for him.

Time for one more stop in his trip...

This one was probably the most touching. He was in middle school and that's when all his friends started to get into sports and other activities that Lukas couldn't do too well without eyesight. The kids began to make fun of him and Lukas was becoming mad, not mad at the kids but mad at "god" for not giving him eyesight. This was a tough period in his life, but after support from his family and lots of his brothers friends (yeah, I know, I'm awesome), hahaha but seriously, when we started including him in our activities he became a whole new person.

So when he was watching this "scene" with the spaghetti man, they started talking about why he was blind. He reached the conclusion that, "if everyone was the same, life would be boring." He said that being blind makes his experiences so much different from all those around him, but also everyone that knows Lukas lives a different life as well. Having a blind person as your friend is a pretty unique experience that not many know about.

I'll be back.

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Hope those will satiate your curiosity for a little while.

 

[nau5ea]

I regularly trip with someone who's colorblind. he loves shrooms and 4-HO-MET but he's never described any colorblindness-specific effects

 

[Vastness]

I have a visual field defect which affects my peripheral vision, especially in low light conditions. In my experience, this does exacerbate the visual component of all psychedelics, presumably because my brain becomes less capable of compensating for the areas where there is a lack of true visual data and the resulting distortions end up spilling over into the rest of my visual field. Also in my experience, and compared to normally sighted friends, the visual effects persist longer after the mental effects have mostly faded, but paradoxically, although I experience a higher intensity and duration of visual distortions (tracers, objects, breather, shimmering, the usual) I believe I am less prone to full blown hallucinations, in the true sense of the word. This is something that I attribute to the vision processing areas of my brain being more practiced at constructing workable visual information from incomplete data, making them more resilient to some of the more pronounced changes that occur in the midst of a psychedelic experience while at the same time, as mentioned, being more vulnerable to more minor distortions because of a reduced amount of "true" visual data.

This is usually not a problem, in fact in many ways it is an asset as I do love psychedelic visuals, but as the light intensity decreases the effect becomes exponentially far more pronounced until it can be physically difficult to see. In this case it is usually means that moving around too much is a difficult task to the point of being anxiety inducing. For this reason I now prefer to always trip in the day in bright sunshine, or in at least a familiar and not too dimly lit setting inside.

Although this condition was not actually diagnosed until my mid-twenties I believe even in the very early stages in my late teens it affected my experience of certain substances, when I used to go raving I used to always trip hard from MDMA alone, I know this is not too unusual but again, in my experience, it was more pronounced than the experience of my friends, and I now attribute it to the same comparative lack of visual data although at the time it was not significant enough for me to notice when sober. Unfortunately I cannot go raving anymore because the near darkness combined with flashing lights and crowds of people moving in different directions mean it is difficult to walk around safely, at least without assistance. Obviously even sober this is not an enjoyable experience, add hallucinogens to the mix and it is basically game over. I can still enjoy MDMA in calmer settings however. I would probably also enjoy a daytime rave although I have yet to test this theory.

 

[fractal fountain]

Logged in just to post on this thread. I've been lurking for a long time.

Anyway hi, yes I am a hearing impaired person who has tons of experience with psychedelics. I have cochlear imlants now though. But I remember tripping on Morning Glories and HBWR seeds the spring before I got my first implant. My hearing was pretty bad. I started losing my hearing when I was about 10 years old. I'm 28 now. Then as I went through high school and the first semester of college, I realized my hearing was areally big barrier to communicating with people and got really depressed. Eventually I tried Morning glories in spring 2008 and went off to space. Then I thought I was God. Then I had the thought "Why is God deaf?" Obviously god should be perfect so God shouldn't be deaf.

Anyway, since I was about 12 years old, I've always had musical hallucinations. These musical hallucinations tended to be music I remembered from movies or games or stuff I liked to listen to, eventually expanding towards jazz and classical as I listened to more music.. But the musical hallucinations have always been there, matching each of my moods so closely, secretly, andintimately.

Some of my strongest and most profound trips had a strong element of playing with that internal music. I remember a particularly strong ++++ on 4-aco-dmt where my brain merged with the pattern of the revolving gem fractals and the mjusic playing at the same time.

A lot of the time, in the days after I trip, special music will come through me, rejuvenating and refreshing me. I often vape weed to help the muusic flow in a more creative direction, but I am definitely always hearing wonderfully creative music in my head, even at this point a year since my last trip. I really want to start making music and creating it all. It's something hat I haven't been able to find anywhere else really. And it's like video game synths played to match and compliment moods, from happy to sad to reflective. So much variety of emotion in the sound.

The cochlear implants have helped me regain a lot of my hearing back to the point where things sound normal and I can understand people well enough if they speak close enough and clearly enough to me. But when I take my implants off or the batteries go out, and I'm smoking or vaping, the internal psychedelic music starts to flow in a direction that can only be achieved through sensory deprivation.

hope my contribution helped! It's been a few years since I logged in :D


Edit: Now that I seee the thread is about VISUALLY impaired people (sorry I jumped he gun) but I also am defiitely visual impaired. I don't have the eye brain differences that OP has, but mainly just gradualy blurring and getting worse. currently my vision is like a 20/100 or a litle worse, with best glasses. I tend to think of the visuals mainly mentaly. But eyes closed, and at the most intense, they can be incredibly vivid and large and bright and colorful. I feel like my eyes get a bit more better in the days after tripping - more detail noticed,more colors popping, more attention to movement.

I mainly focus on the visual aspect (even with the music and associated synaesthesia) with my mind's eye.

 

[nuube]

ON the DMT side of things I had a friend who lost his peripheral vision after a stroke. After taking DMT his field of vision expands to what it used to be like and this lasts for a while after the hit. That's all I can add.

 

[Lifefrequencies]

I have an eye condition which heats up the rods and cones in the eyes and causes nerve damage. It leaves me with a seemingly pixelated amorphous area of my visual field. It is more partial to the left eye much like the posters. This strange disruption of my visual field can oddly enough, be focused on is some way and watched. I've noticed that even without drugs, the shape of the visual disruption can morph based on certain brain functions and mishaps - not sure how to properly describe those. For instance the hypnagogic imagery before falling completely asleep, prints itself in this pixelated area, if that makes sense?
when it comes to psychs, this means a whole new layer of cevs and they're high def.
im also left color blind from this condition with issues with contrast, which psylocibin somehow fixes while in effect. I have no problems with colors on shrooms, I'd say I see colors better than the average when trip time comes. I tend to see some purple-ish sort of color on a clear day in the sky- this usually tells me that the magic has started.