Thanks for the responses, guys. :D
This is a pretty complex question. I think psychedelics are a great thing to compare with dissociatives, because they both provide strong hallucinatory trips but by completely opposite means. A psychedelic overloads the senses with light and sound which allows the mind to open up to new conceptual realms while a dissociative achieves this through sensory deprivation. The main difference in the resulting experience in my opinion is the emotional aspect. A psychedelic will allow you to become very emotionally raw and sensitive. This aspect of psychedelics accounts for empathetic absorption of surrounding objects, people, or thoughts. Dissociatives tend to turn emotions completely off, and the trip is much more conceptual and introverted.
I think that most of our normally used emotions are directly related to the state of our bodies, and when our bodies become nonexistant, a whole new set of unexplainable emotions arise.
Hmm.... While I do understand what you're saying here, and I do think it's a very interesting and helpful comparison, I think you're getting at something a little different than what I was asking about. Mainly because, though I totally get how it could seem like I was, I wasn't quite meaning it to sound like an emotional thing, at least not in the sense of being based on empathy induced by psychedelics....
I think this is probably a much better way to phrase this than I did in my first post. When I say that I feel my psychedelic hallucinations, I mean it as basically a sort of synesthesia. In the same way that someone might taste what they see... like for example, something tasting purple. You can't really comprehend this rationally, the concept of what purple tastes like, but during that experience of synesthesia it makes perfect sense because the brain is just damn good like that.... That is to say, the translation from one sense to another is so seamless that despite the strangeness of it you'd definitely be able to tell the difference in taste between purple and blue in the moment, you know? It doesn't seem like it should be possible for your mind to perfectly comprehend one set of sensory information through an entirely different modality than normal, but yet it does so without really much trouble at all (when provoked such as by psychedelics at least). This is what's happening to me when I say that I feel things on psychedelics.... Just as in that example what that person sees is what they taste, what I see on psychedelics is what I interpret as tactile information.
It's because of that that I'm curious if something similar or quite different happens on dissociatives, because I have to wonder if if what I'm experiencing is a result of the part of my brain that handles bodily awareness (no matter how distorted it might be) then would it be muted by anesthesia? I suppose part of what it would basically come down to is that I'm wondering if this is simply how hallucinations feel or is it just something else the psychedelics are doing on top of making me hallucinate, and so it could be absent from dissociatives?
I definitely do agree that our emotions are heavily dependent on our bodies, as I've always felt that the whole mind-body connection runs very strongly in me.... The way you put that feels like it does answer some of the question I was getting at as well. How you say that unexplainable emotions arise without having a body.... I feel that what I'm feeling from psychedelics is (as you said actually) exactly the opposite, though running on the exact same concept. When I feel my hallucinations I experience equally intense of unexplainable emotions, but rather than as a result of having no body it's of receiving bodily information that cannot be comprehended in any normal way. In the same way that someone tastes purple, when I see those entities, or objects or whatever, I feel them as a part of my body. The experience to me is no different than the way I feel my hands or feet or anything else, but the resulting psychological states are significantly more complex because I'm not only physically feeling that visual input but all of the emotions that are tied to it are seamlessly blended into my bodily information as well. The best kind of example I could give would be that if I'm seeing a highly sexual web of psychedelic visuals then I
am those visuals, they are my body, and the way my body feels as a result is similar to and yet incomprehensibly different from the normal feeling of being sexually stimulated, or even more often, of feeling attractive. Similarly, seeing and subsequently feeling/being something of artistic beauty makes me feel aesthetically beautiful as well... and while these feelings may have the advantage of being slightly easier to *attempt* to put into words than something like tasting purple, they honestly really are just as basic and instinctively and unmistakably understood.
In a strange way, I suppose what it really amounts to is that my favorite part about experiencing visual hallucinations is how they translate into tactile sensations through synesthesia. Because of this, and based on what you said, I'm actually inclined to think that dissociatives may not really be the type of trip that really appeals to me....
There's varying depths of anesthesia. At low doses you might just feel entranced and removed from what you're doing, higher doses might cause you to lose sensation of your body, higher still make you less sensitive to sounds and give you tunnel vision, etc. Most recreational dissociative use doesn't cut off all sensory input, it just garbles it in interesting ways by letting only parts of it be transmitted correctly. If you shut off all sensory input with higher dosages, you end up with a K-hole, or eventually lose consciousness.
People still report entity contact on drugs like ketamine though. So I wouldn't rule anything out. Perception of entities is probably more brain-mediated than body-mediated anyway. If you're "feeling" a presence, that's not using all the same brain circuitry as "feeling" touch or pain.
That makes sense, but I suppose I was mainly asking about high doses of different dissociatives. There's really nothing less than hole doses that have interested me about them before, at least not in any really serious sense. My ultimate goal with most drugs is to hallucinate heavily. Though oddly, now based on what I said above and what you say about low doses I'm starting to think that it may be mostly
that level of dissociation that appeals to me the most, but it would probably be mostly to mix with psychedelics and stuff....
The thing about what I said about feeling entities is that it was really just one example, and I refer you to my response to Crashing's post. What I was trying to get wasn't so much about sensing their presence or something, I really do mean I'm *literally* feeling them like you feel any part of your own body. Of course, I know that's still unlikely to be handled by your brain in exactly the same way as normal tactile stimuli, but I do feel that it puts them on a much more level playing field. Like, just contacting entities in the sense of encountering "separate" beings from yourself, perceiving them that way in the same way that you would another person in reality or a character in a dream for instance, would not be what I'm getting at. I'm not referring to feeling them as an individual or being, but truly
feeling them from seeing them, as I said before, in the same way that one might taste purple....
