The Big & Dandy Psychedelic Synaesthesia Thread

[Solipsis]

I'm okay with getting a hearcut but I definitely freak out over the slightest forms of screetching (chalk over blackboard or trainwheels on bent tracks etc), even when nobody around me seems to mind.
After thinking about it now I guess it's one of many things I can attribute to a syndrome best described by 'low latent inhibition'. Which doesn't seem to be scientifically accepted or DSM-IV but in my opinion a very holistic explanation for the many strange symptoms I've had over the course of years. In short, I think with low thresholds stimuli stream in and can either do nice things like tickle the association process, which can often be useless, inappropriate an involuntary and therefore neutral... but it can also be negative if the stimuli have overwhelmingly high 'gain' levels, chaotic patterns or other offensive attributes. It needs to be shut out by a natural filter or by other means otherwise it can carry over to other mental processes.
Imagine the screetching sound of a train riding on bent tracks carrying over to try and associate ideas and feelings with it. I don't know how that exactly would work but it sounds like a recipe for "disturbance".

 

[daturaface]

not sure if it's synaesthesia, but on a high dose morning glory trip, i left the party i was at freaking out and told my friends i was sick. took me a few hours of writhing around in pain in bed to realise that i'd mentally spliced my mental anguish and stomach cramps into one sensation. i had to consciously separate the two phenomenon. while walking home on that same trip, someone asked me if i was okay and i tried to get it out of my pocket before i realised that it wasn't that kind of thing and walked off. kind of a synaesthesia of abstractions.
on phenethylamines the hallucinatory shifts of colour and movement seem to correspond. walls inhale, room gets brighter. walls exhale, room darkens. another time inhaling walls took the cream coloured walls towards violet through red while exhaling walls sent it towards the yellow-green area of the spectrum.
but most mind blowing synaesthesia was definitely from DMT. with no awareness of my body, my tactile experience encompassed my entire visual field, which was swarming with polymorphic entity/pattern sludge that moved to the suddenly eclectic buzzing in my ears. only after the room calmed down was i able to separate the feelings, sounds and visuals into separate feelings

 

[MyExcuse]

Perhaps this was more of a sensation than actual physiological reaction however:
I had consumed approximately 50mg of 4-AcO-DMT over the course of a few hours and towards the peak I was listening to some classical waltz music (the name of which I cannot remember) and would cry in sync with various parts of the music. The tears would flow like a stream, almost like being forced from my tearducts, and it was incredibly odd yet enjoyable at the same time. The music would just cause this overwhelming pressure to build up in my head and it would explode out of my eyes as tears. The experience was quite profound and I laughed through the whole thing.

 

[notthesame]

This article explains how scientists have related synesthesia to 'healers' seeing auras, not necessarily related to psychedelics but still an interesting read.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120504110024.htm

 

[PandaGun]

On LSD I was sat in my mate's house looking at these blocks of colour. Each colour I focused on hit a 'note' of a rush inside me. Sat there for a good while kinda playing them like they were an instrument and then someone put Borgore on for jokes. "relax bla bla"

 

[Aetherius Rimor]

This article explains how scientists have related synesthesia to 'healers' seeing auras, not necessarily related to psychedelics but still an interesting read.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120504110024.htm

Glad to see my hypothesis about aura's is being researched by other's.

Would be good to see this "confirmed" some how. I speculated this was the cause several months back, and have not seen anyone else with the idea until now.

The way I explained it to people, was that like in video games where allies have a blue/green aura and enemies have a red aura, people in real life who claim to have aura's could be interpreting information about the predicted emotional state or personality traits of the other person.

It is quite possible I believe that any perceptual information, memory, or conclusion about that person could trigger an aural overlay in the visual image seen by the consciousness.

 

[nativenick]

not synasthesia but one time on an acid trip just walking around outside for hours on end i couldn't stop shaking and twitching. it didnt dawn on me that it was because im cold until i seen frost on the window of a car. before that though i had no sensation of being cold even though i was clearly shivering

another time on shrooms i was looking at mold on my bathroom wall for several minutes and started to hear a a very alien guitar type sound eminating from the mold. the only way i could describe the sound is some musical instrument from some other planet lol

 

[Escapedysphoria]

25I-NBOMe, like AppleCore was getting at, multiple dimensions at once. The visuals and body high got so intense I vomited haha. Every reflection of light was a piercingly bright display of the color spectrum. I couldn't even sit outside with the sunlight. I was scared, it was the heaviest synesthesia I have ever encountered.

 

[Dr. Drugs]

One of my top psychedelic experiences was when a friend and I took LSD and programmed a music visualizer in Apple Quartz Composer (a graphical programming environment). We had to analyze our own hearing->vision synesthesia, break down the process happening in our brains, and make the computer do something similar. Essentially, we were making an artificial form of synesthesia.

Psychedelics also consistently allow me to visualize my own thought processes as a progressive geometric pattern, much like a fractal. I can easily trace how my gets from one idea to the next. I can now do this sober as well, which is very insightful.

 

[psood0nym]

Psychedelics also consistently allow me to visualize my own thought processes as a progressive geometric pattern, much like a fractal. I can easily trace how my gets from one idea to the next. I can now do this sober as well, which is very insightful.

Something very similar is the closest thing I have to synesthesia sober (though it's more vivid and frequent while tripping). It's some kind of concept synesthesia. It's most likely to happen during moments of insight or metaphor-making. If I could somehow take a picture of it in my mind and show it to someone else they wouldn't see any connection between the content of my thoughts and the imagery, but during the experience the patterns and colors are imbued with subjective meaning. The most intense experience I've ever had of it was accompanied by intelligible language glossolalia. It was like the images were "spilling over" into an urge to move my tongue and mouth in ways that elicited a sort of strange poetic rendition of the goings on in my head.

 

[XTC_fiend]

After i stopped doing coke, which i was for 6 months, about 1g/week-3g/week, there were several occasions where i would smell coke randomly when there wasn't any around.

This happens to many people who crave a specific drug or have become so accustomed to using that drug... it is almost similar to muscle memory if you will.

this happened to me after I stopped smoking bud and almost 1 every two weeks I swore my parents were lighting up in their room.

The same with PCP... that sharpie smell... MMMMMMMM

 

[[N]osferatu]

At a music festival whilst on LSD I once yawned just as the guitarist on the main stage played this weird chord. I felt the music go into my mouth and effectively ate it. It had particular a taste and everything.

 

[hollywood_cole]

not sure if this qualifies, but i think it does (and didn't really think of it as possibly being synesthesia until reading this thread).

on a number of occasions when taking psilocybin mushrooms (and to a lesser extent, 5-MeO-DiPT), i've gotten this feeling of pressure in my head. the thing i'd most closely compare it to in terms of the way it feels is sinus congestion, except that it's centered in the center of my head (instead of in the top of my nose), it's not unpleasant, and (of course) i can breathe just fine (which is why it isn't unpleasant). this feeling of pressure tends to correspond with moments where i'm especially cognizant of the fact that i'm tripping, moments when the general intensity of the situation increases, and moments that feel notably weird or surreal. especially on the come up. the feeling usually subsides after a few seconds, but i've had it last for minutes. so i guess it's sort of an emotional intensity -> tactile sensation synesthesia, if it does in fact count?

in regular day-to-day (non-intoxicated) life, i get pretty consistent mental associations between the tonal qualities of sound/music and physical textures, but it's not like i actually feel those textures. and texture/temperature is a common jumping off point for descriptive metaphors about musical timbre anyway (which i pretty much have to use since i'm a music nerd who doesn't have the musical or sound design training necessary to use a lot of the technical terms for those things). wouldn't quite call that synesthesia, just because of the relative weakness of the feeling compared to what most of what gets written about as synesthesia, but it does feel like it's on that spectrum (as per psood0nym's comment here: http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/threads/...ncountered?p=10572936&viewfull=1#post10572936).


edit: was re-reading the thread just now, and noticed this in reference to 4-AcO-DMT:

The music would just cause this overwhelming pressure to build up in my head

so apparently i'm not alone on this tryptamine/pressure thing (and with a psilocin analog, no less).

 

[Solipsis]

Posted in this thread:http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/threads/704851-Do-you-prefer-CEV-s-or-OEV-s
which started the tangent discussion about synaesthesia that was moved here (and also led to this thread being mega-merged and put into the central spotlight of PD):

You can't beat synaesthesia though, I would gladly trade 40 units OEV/CEV for 1 unit synaesthesia. For some reason I got synaesthesia the first time I tripped on mushrooms and the first time I tripped on LSD and maybe the first time with other psychedelics as well but other than that it's ruddy rare.

 

[Ganj]

Solipsis can you please explain what synaesthesia is? I was literally reading about it for the 3rd time or so seconds before switching back to bluelight. It appears to be the linking of one sense or *thing* with another? I don't really understand it, or how it relates to drugs.

 

[Thanatos]

^ I don't think synesthesia is all that rare at all. In fact, I experience it to a certain extent when I'm sober or just high on cannabinoids. I've had such odd experiences as tasting time, visuals describing olfactory experiences, etc.

Personally I like OEVs better so I always try to dose high enough to where having my eyes closed makes no difference, I like to be fully immersed into the visual experience. The only drug I prefer CEVs with is LSD dimly for the fact that you can drift off into completely different dimensions provided thr proper dose was taken and good music is playing to guide your trip.

 

[.:Holy::Toast:.]

Solipsis can you please explain what synaesthesia is? I was literally reading about it for the 3rd time or so seconds before switching back to bluelight. It appears to be the linking of one sense or *thing* with another? I don't really understand it, or how it relates to drugs.

It's when hearing certain sounds may say cause you to see certain colours, or being able to feel your visuals.
Simply it's when stimulation of one sense causes a response in another sense, so you are right when you say linking of one sense to another.
It can come from very high doses of psychedelics.
The "feeling visuals" experience happened to me on a sub breakthrough dose of DMT.
I could see the fractals on the roof spiraling down towards me and I would feel them poking my body, it was very strange.

 

[Thanatos]

^ on point! One of the highest doses of LSD I ever took, supposedly 1.7mg-crystal diluted and laid in front of me- caused me to feel like I was floating down a river of melody while listening to shpongle; the melody was the water and the bass/persuasions literally felt and looked like the walls of the grand canyon.

 

[Ganj]

Ah I have had very vauge experiences of that. Once when peaking on a medium dose of shrooms I thought it would be a good idea to hear what the biggest dubstep drop I could find sounded like. After spending a few minutes navigating through the way-too-confusing-when-your-tripping interface of an iPod and finding something bass heavy I turned it on. For a start it just sounded horrible when I thought it would sound awesome, there was no real difference between the drop and the other parts of the song, and on every beat the world vibrated and spikes sort of shooted out of the ground, and i very quickly turned it off haha.

 

[Solipsis]

I disagree that feeling visuals is necessarily synaesthesia, but of course I wasn't the one to experience it in your case. If you can feel or touch the fractals you are seeing that is more like an extra sensory dimension to the same thing while synaesthesia is more like a pure translation of qualia: something that cannot really be expressed like a color or music.
We can sit and nitpick about the semantics of synaesthesia all day and it doesn't really matter but if we are counting stuff like that then yeah it is less rare. But being influenced by music is another league then being aware of it being translated or by experiencing raw data getting processed in unusual ways. I am told that normal/full doses of 2C-E tend to produce states where the senses sort of blend together and synaesthesia becomes common.
By the way: again not trying to devalue any experiences, I'm sure there are a ton of vagaries between us that define categorisation! :D

I still wishI got it a lot more, but on the other hand I am damn grateful how psychedelic experiences can be so surprising if you don't it too often.
Maybe I gotta do 2C-E some more, I only tried it one time I think... screw that body load though, I am gonna need some channeling with meditation or pencak silating, or some good dissociatives