Miscellaneous Sober "CEVs" vs. Psychedelic CEVs

[xdrc]

This is a question I've been thinking about from time to time.

When I close my eyes - particularly when I'm relaxed in bed - I will have imagery with closed eyes. This imagery is of very random nature. Sometimes it is related to things I've done on that day (e.g. when I play lots of video games -> scenes from that, sometimes about things I thought about, etc.), but more often, it is not. It will often include seemingly random transitions, for instance animals morphing into other animals, shapes, changing their colour. Often, the scene is set in a specific artstyle and stays like that for the duration of watching it. It may be drawn in crayons, it might look natural, it may look flashy like out of a video game, or like a 90s anime, whatever. These images are not particularly vivid, it is not like looking through my own eyes, rather a bit desaturated (yet colourful) and there is a bit of static involved. The state may be related to hypnagogic imagery, but I've also found it to occur when closing my eyes while walking, so I'm certain it is more towards the edge of being awake rather than asleep. Sometimes I tell my girlfriend what I'm seeing, and she'll be astounded by the randomness and creativity of my subconsciousness. And even I myself wonder most of the times why or how I am exposed to certain imagery with seemingly no relation to what happened on that day. It may be important to note that while I regularly take various drugs, most of my life I am sober. And I know these states from when before I started taking drugs. I certainly don't have HPPD, to my understanding, it is not the same anyways.

Now comes the question - to which extent do you people experience the same? How does it differentiate for you from psychedelic-induced CEVs? I have a hard time separating the two and I often wonder whether or not imagery experienced on psychedelics are just my regular closed eye visuals (for lack of a better term), or caused by the drug's action.

To me, it seems like most of the times the only change psychedelics bring about is a more spiraly, twisting nature to the scenery, often pulsing to the music. Four exceptions of CEVs which I'd call out of the boundaries of my regular imagery would be cannabis -> induces a pitch black scene, with 3D figures, fireworks, etc. drawn on top; 2C-E -> once induced the imagery of flying through a 3D cyberspace city while walking through the park in bright daylight; DMT -> much more saturation than usually possible with my imagery, LSD -> open or closed eyes made no difference, my reality was fully replaced with whatever the LSD needed to show me. All my other CEVs I remember could have easily been brought on by these very regular, and both voluntarily and involuntarily states of imagery.

Should I just increase the dosage more to get to know *real* CEVs?

What do you people experience? How do you differentiate it?

I'm interested to hear some more thoughts.

 

[foodcrisis]

my experience with psychedelic induced closed eye visuals is that they are more defined and bright with the higher the doses. i also start to feel like my body is apart of them... like everything i see sober or when stoned is just kind of like on a black screen and one dimensional or flat like a television screen, with higher dosed psychedelics it can feel like i'm moving along the outside of a rounded image or something, and it's more like i'm traveling than just random transparent kind of images popping up. like i said it's also a lot brighter, and usually the back ground color with sober/stoned is black. it can be other colors when i'm tripping... on even higher dosed tripping, i've been through cartoon like time travel portals and ended up in different realities. at that point i can't even tell if my eyes are closed or open... i took a video of myself doing salvia and i thought my eyes would've been closed with how the visuals were totally unlike reality, but on the recording my eyes were open. sometimes on higher doses, vision just shuts down, and a person goes inside their head i guess.

 

[pupnik]

@xdrc
yes differences are clear among CEV's when affected by strong hallucinogens, in hypnogogic states, and when just visualizing.

As a visually playful person, you have the benefit of "voluntary" visual thinking which you can experience either as faint overly to open eyes or as a second visual screen with open eyes not interfering at all with live visual feed.

Vision in the brain is not just in one place, i.e. not just corresponding to the live visual feed in the occipital cortex associated with eyes, but also in the parietal temporal lobes where we process space, trajectories, as well as body feeling and movement, and these can appear as visual neural activation - visual experience is also tied into neuron activity throughout the cortex including the frontal cortex which you could consider raw associative imagination and thought, although those kinds of experience also tie into neuron activations throughout the cortex.

Hypnogogic states like meditative jhana states, samadhis, emotional states and psychedelic states involve a slight change in brain chemistry that makes it easier for neurons to be re-triggered.
Psychedelic drugs last longer than the other resonant state changes, but the effects can be identical with regard to CEV's, OEV's, and full on manifestations. Moreover, some drugs affect visual areas directly (enhancing thalamo cortical feedback) producing the seeds of geometric surface abstractions of a granular type, while others are more active in the temporal and parietal area producing abstractions that resemble spatial geometries.

In General terms when in any of the resonant/hypnogogic states of mind perception becomes more extensive or ramified, i.e. associations arise that include what this is like and what happened last time with it etc. but also those keep on resonating with the original input and other associations arise that include what this was like etc in reference to the previous association. A particular example might be that a beautiful face appears from the marble floor, and that face keeps becoming clearer and more beautiful and more ecstatically enthralling, and more radiant every 1/10th of a second until you are distracted and that whole cascade of ramified embellishments is replaced by another scenario. In these cases, I find that if I am not fascinated by something that appears then it does not ramify into anything more spectacular. Sometimes by following my breathing and keeping very still, I manage to stay in the unfolding vision. but that is just a game - it does not mean anything, just fun.

Vision has evolved to suppress what is not changing - i.e. hunters can easily spot and track small moving prey in a largely static field of vision, and prey can usually spot a moving predator if they are not moving too slowly - again against the non-moving background.
With salvia I think there is extra emphasis on the changing visual contents (which could be stale visual contents that changed several seconds ago and are still resonating) So in salvia I often experience fragmented vision and the fragments become extra deep so that their edges take on spatial forms that never would occur. This is different than spatial and surface abstractions, but it becomes spatial after first being raw visual fragments.

I think that in meditation, by trying to maintain awareness of an unchanging field of mental contents (not just visual) the limbic system kicks in, as if we are on a hunt, and that causes the chemistry changes that can produce visual artifacts. Otherwise, anything can trigger an emotional shift in resonant state of mind.

In any case, all of these kinds of visuals can be accessed by any of the drugs, emotions, etc but the character of them may fall into categories to some degree, while they are all fundamentally the same.

 

[dopamimetic]

I have aphantasia and never ever saw stuff with the exception of when I was high on something psychedelic. I envy you guys

 

[Esperighanto]

I have aphantasia and never ever saw stuff with the exception of when I was high on something psychedelic. I envy you guys

I have "deep aphantasia" where there's no voice of thought nor inherent visualization, though I've been getting better at visualizaing/audiating things when I try to. Psychedelics were super pivotal in figuring out what it felt like to see/hear something in my mind, and the more that I meditated while tripping, the easier I could escape the deep aphantasia when sober. HPPD is a big part of that though, tbh.

 

[dopamimetic]

I have "deep aphantasia" where there's no voice of thought nor inherent visualization, though I've been getting better at visualizaing/audiating things when I try to. Psychedelics were super pivotal in figuring out what it felt like to see/hear something in my mind, and the more that I meditated while tripping, the easier I could escape the deep aphantasia when sober. HPPD is a big part of that though, tbh.

I remember some guy telling that taking Ayahuasca had turned his imagination on. This makes me curious as somebody who never took DMT. I also vaguely remember having CEVs on early teen DXM experience but it went away after I was put on paroxetine, and later venlafaxine. Makes kinda sense because these drugs block serotonergic psychedelics but the aphantasia was there all my life. I'm now finally off the antidepressants and feel better lol but didn't yet try to trip again.

 

[Esperighanto]

I remember some guy telling that taking Ayahuasca had turned his imagination on. This makes me curious as somebody who never took DMT. I also vaguely remember having CEVs on early teen DXM experience but it went away after I was put on paroxetine, and later venlafaxine. Makes kinda sense because these drugs block serotonergic psychedelics but the aphantasia was there all my life. I'm now finally off the antidepressants and feel better lol but didn't yet try to trip again.

The back of my eyelids has looked like the visuals associated with a DMT breakthrough in intensity, but the "flavor" of the visuals aligns most to my most recently used hallucinogens it seems? Deliriants and psychedelics both impact it greatly, I've got probably some of the most intense HPPD I've ever heard of outside of psychosis-inducing cases. The back of my eyelids currently looks like iridescent snake skin slithering in a circular, all-encompassing sort of shape that blooms in and out of itself, reminds me a lot of taking enough 2C-B to knock myself out into a trip that involves hopping and and off of the karmic wheel. Mescaline, MDA and allylescaline look similar, it's a very phenethylamine-y kind of aesthetic, which makes sense given that most of my recent trips have been phenethylamines. Despite this, indoles do make a more significant impact that lasts longer, idk why.

MAOIs kick up my "sober CEVs" intense, I can be mentally unaffected while the backs of my eyelids get their brightness and the speed-of-visual-change turned up to 11 by 20-30mg of harmaline, despite the fact that when using it for tripping I take 250-300mg of harmaline.