Somewhat unrelated but has anyone here experience fever dreams where you are surrounded by something you can't quite comprehend and can't do anything but try to comprehend it?
It's almost like a huge maze, grid, or some other pattern but painful to look at. The dream tends to be extremely unpleasant and usually returns after falling back asleep.
I was trying to explain it to a friend the other day and didn't do a very good job.
I think I have experienced something similar, where I have to find the right configuration for some pattern, sometimes grounded in like how my sheets and blanket wrap around my body in order to create or fix some dream machine. It's not a fully formed concept, but I'm trying to fix it and arrange the pattern in my mostly-sleeping state - it's always impossible and I have to recognize what I'm doing, fully wake myself up, and then try to go back to sleep to get out of it.
Yes. I get this. It's kind of a problem some time. My brain gets trapped in a loop of trying to solve some puzzle or system of constraints, but none of it is based on anything. I couldn't even describe it. It's more like patterns of faux-logical systems.
When I recognize it happening, I can usually snap out of it.
I experience exactly the same thing, with me it happens when I am very tired. When I was younger (<10 yr) it made me really afraid. I can remember a new years eve that I was so tired and scared that I was literally terrified and hid in the corner of the room and my parents did not know what was happening to me.
Now I know what is happening and I just take it as a sign that I'm very tired. It's comforting to see someone else describing the same thing that is happening to me.
My "logic puzzle" is moving endless amounts of large, heavy cubes in holes that keep on appearing when I fill them. The visual aspect is only a part of it, the emotional feeling of the endless task is another.
For what it's worth, I instantly see very complex patterns in the visual test.
Yes, this happens to me when I'm very tired. The worst is when I'm about to fall asleep, but this thought pattern keeps my brain just active enough to prevent sleep.
Loop is the right word for me. I’ll suddenly get stuck in a loop of subdividing a cube into smaller cubes over and over, or squaring a number over over. Never accurately, just…visually?
It’s happened to me twice, both times when I was quite sick. It’s absolutely terrifying and feels like my mind is broken beyond repair. I’m getting upset just thinking about it.
I'm so glad I'm not alone in this. My fever dreams are distinctly different from regular dreams, but it is pretty impossible to explain. Sometimes my fever dreams involve innate objects that dwarf me in size, and I gradually seem to feel smaller. That statement doesn't quite catch it though.
I actually get these when I'm over stimulated before bed. I used to take add meddicine in college but would fall asleep after 6 surges and some adderall. And then my brain would just be wheeling away on nonsense. Rarely do I dream like this when I have a fever, usually I'm just out.
I can relate with a very bad dream I had when I was maybe 7 or 8, it involved not a maze but fractal patterns of eggs and gears (although at the time I didn't know what fractal was, so I perceived it as "growing and growing to no end"). This happened once in my life, and it was 40 years ago, but I still remember how terrified I was, and I also remember how I have been scared for literally years after this episode to have this bad dream again.
Over the more recent years, whenever I'd get sick and experience fever dreams, JavaScript paradigms would be what I'd get lost in i.e. asynchronous calls, callbacks, single-threaded nature, etc.
This comes from someone who enjoys the language, too. Weird stuff...
I had episodes like this when I was younger. And had them flare up when I was taking Buspirone for anxiety as an adult. They'd last about 10-20 minutes and I always described them as "pure chaos of the internal geometric space."
Never did find any kind of label for the symptoms. I kept a journal of the episodes for a while. They seemed to come up monthly when I was around 16.
At the very least it's validating to encounter others who had had similar experiences.
It's been decades since I had fever dreams. But my memories include strange shapes and motions and things being somehow upside down or otherwise inverted. Most of all, I remember an absolutely overpowering sense of dread over how everything was impossible. What was happening should not be happening. It could not be happening. The terror only grew as the impossibility continued.
I had those dreams from time to time, it looks equally disturbing like those AI memory images: https://imgur.com/ocplHAy
Sometimes it is very fast morphing shape of objects and events, morphing into other shapes and events ...
But what is most disturbing is that during the dream everything looks logical and known, it is feeling like tapping to some higher source of knowledge, but as soon as I wake up, it seems my brain shrank to regular size and cannot read from the same book, so "symbols"/"letters"/"words"/"sentences" which were understandable there I cannot read anymore. Forgive my lack of words, it is like in those movies where protagonist gets turn to a cat or dog, so he at that point his cat/dog brain cannot understand humans and human talking/thinking anymore...
Annoying part is that, attempting to explain people how does it feel and look like sounds worse than when teen boy trying to talk to a girl he has crush into...
> No home was sweet without a Game Boy in 1990. That year, I stayed "for a week" with a friend in Tokyo, and Tetris enslaved my brain. At night, geometric shapes fell in the darkness as I lay on loaned tatami floor space. Days, I sat on a lavender suede sofa and played Tetris furiously. During rare jaunts from the house, I visually fit cars and trees and people together.
Yes! I had those as a kid. It was like mazes that kept getting harder, like I had to find a solution but can’t. Very unpleasant in a way that’s hard to describe.
My fever dreams involve some kind of impossibly large scale task that can seemingly only be completed by infinite tedium. The task is always very abstract such that I could never say what it was my mind was trying to accomplish, other than that it required this focused tedious repetition.
I wonder if it is the experience of a mechanism the brain uses to prevent damage from the high body temperature?
Right, that seems to be the common thread for fever dreams: something that feels intellectually taxing somehow. For me, it's usually some form of problem solving that can be more or less sensible (from solving chess puzzles to nonsense math to kafkaesque administrative processes).
It happened to me once. The world around me was turning into swiss-cheese holed lego bricks, which was ok. However, it was also 'folding' into some kind of lower dimension (2.5d?), and I couldn't understand the fold, so it became very unpleasant.
Yes, for me I usually get trapped in a fractal maze of whatever media I consumed last. Video games, tv shows, etc. after my second Moderna dose I binged ‘The Circle’ on Netflix, that was a mistake when I dipped into the fever dreams...
I used to have a similar dream all the time. Always felt a passage through time and space with a terrible sense of dread and confusion. Turns out I have sleep apnea and as soon as I got a cpap the dreams went away.
I both dream a lot and have great control over my dreams in general, but when I get sick it falls off the bus.
Once I tried to somehow fit a ball into blue. The two concepts were so different that I just kept on trying and failing.
Recently (also with quite a fever) I had a stack of dominoes that would fall over as I ran my hand over them. But then when I got to the end they were all upright again and I just kept going forward and back with no resolve.
Not quite, but I experience very bad logic and logical inconsistencies in dreams. For example:
- Can't even do basic math, or I solve it wrong (e.g. 2 + 3 = 7)
- Impossible (non-euclidian) spatial arrangement
- Leave out big gaps of details, which I have to fill in if I remember the dream. Not that I'm forgetting stuff, I just never thought of it in the first place
- Misremember stuff from the past
Yes, can somewhat explain it like grinding over something over and over again. Trying senseless combinations of something to solve something yada yada. Sometimes related to what I'm working on at that particular time. I always think it is my brain's way of consolidating new information. Nonetheless it is very unpleasant.
What you're asking is quite specific. Do you desire only to comprehend, or to comprehend in order to solve? For me it tends to be a loop of complex problem which I feel I comprehend, which upon solving turns out to not be solved, because it was incomprehensible, followed by comprehending, goto 10
Yes absolutely, it feels like the brain is in problem-solving mode without a concrete problem to solve. It's maddening. I often experience those "dreams" when under stress.
That was seriously uncool and no fun. I almost immediately saw crosshatching bars and shapes maybe like fractals, and then the center of the screen seemed to form a white sphere and a f'ing nightmare came crawling out of it filling me with dread, and then I closed the page. Took about a minute.
Did it a second time maybe 30 minutes later and it quickly resolved into spinning wind turbines blades, dozens of them, circling the middle of the screen, in a random circle-ish flow that moved like waves. After a few minute of that, it seemed like I was falling through a warp tunnel with stars connected by glowing arms flashing by, then hands and arms started to reach up from the bottom of the screen and I turned it off.
I just let my eyes relax and didn't really focus on the screen, but when I did focus, that's usually when the unpleasant images appeared.
I had bouts with nightmares and such and a technique I found is that when the horrors begin to appear, I consciously try to be unaffected by them. To try to at least delay what you just described, that feeling of dread taking over you. While you can't really have control over the outside world and the horrors within it, you can at least have control over your reactions to it. And reactions to stimuli like this red flashing thing, and many other situations, are really about just the reaction of the mind, filling in the blanks, trying to make sense. The more you can relax that effort, the less horrific it will become. Similar to relaxing a muscle cramp. I'm not saying that I'm very good at this all, but going this way has helped me a lot already.
I saw spinning shapes too: spirals, figure eights, spheres of rainbow pointillist light. Or just swirling patterns like schools of fish. They all moved slowly. When I tried to focus they just disappeared. For me it was relaxing. I watched for about 5 minutes.
Sounds like what I see when I press my fingers (gently) onto my closed eyelids. I think it's the different layers of the visual cortex trying to find edges/patterns in something that doesn't have any.
I watched this for ten minutes and didn't see anything (apart from a flashing red screen). I'm supposed to be the artistic one in the family, so I can't help but feel slightly disdapointed. I've always suspected that people who claimed they could visualize things with great clarity were lying (the "images" in my mind's eye are very fleeting, lacking in detail, and can't be focused on -- like they're on the extremes of my periphery) but maybe I really was born with a disadvantage.
> I've always suspected that people who claimed they could visualize things with great clarity were lying
I know this will do nothing to dispel your suspicion, but I can see people and places with great clarity, detail, in color and moving, and if I focus on them they are not fleeting (I get involuntary images that are fleeting though).
You'll be right to dismiss my claim -- I'm some random stranger on the internet after all -- but I can only assure you that not only am I not lying, until very recently I thought this was the norm. In fact, I had to be convinced by a friend who suffers from it that aphantasia is not a hoax. I still cannot understand how someone can be unable to see the face of their loved ones unless they are actually in front of them.
As for the red lights in this experiment: they started to change as my eyes became unfocused, and I got some "hypnotic" dizzy feeling after a couple of minutes, but didn't see any shapes and got bored with it so I closed the window.
There's a test I'd like to give someone with your abilities one day, and I'd love if you took the time to try this. I forget where I originally saw it, but it goes something like this:
Imagine you're looking down on a grid of squares. It's a little bit like a chess board, but it's only four squares wide and four squares high. In each square is a single letter, and each horizontal row spells a four-letter word. The top row spells "SEER" , the second row spells "SLAP", the third row spells "HEAL", and the bottom row spells "TRIM". While visualizing this grid of letters in front of you, can you now tell me which words you see running either vertically or diagonally? You should be able to do this by looking at the grid and without having to do any sorting of letters in your mind.
My suspicion is that people who claim they can visualize images perfectly won't be able to do this, despite only having to memorize four words to complete the picture.
> My suspicion is that people who claim they can visualize images perfectly won't be able to do this
Note: I do not "claim" to visualize, I can do it, like many others. Remember that aphantasia is the uncommon condition.
I cannot see vertical or diagonal words and in fact have trouble focusing on the words. I can see one at a time clearly, but if I focus on the others the rest become blurry. I can see the checkered board though. I suspect this is because your example is too artificial and analytical.
My visual mind doesn't work analytically like this. I can see the face of my friends and family with lots of details (I can see them with different hair cuts for example), even hear their voices. I can remember scenes from my last vacation clearly, in full color.
But I cannot do a crossword puzzle visually, sorry.
I can see equations floating in my mind, but only if I focus on a narrow section; and I obviously cannot do serious math with them.
Thank you for your answer. The reason I wanted to give this test is that I think we may be experiencing the same thing, but interpreting what we see differently.
I too can recall scenes from my last holiday trip. I can "see" the night time scene at the bar, the placement of me and my friends around the table, the lady in a white shirt delivering our drinks -- but it's not the same as a real photograph. It's a different type of vision altogether. It's possible that there are people who are experiencing the same thing as I am, but are describing what they are seeing as a clear photograph. My argument is that it's not a clear photograph if you can't inspect any details.
Out of curiosity, can you also not hear "vivid" music in your mind? My friend can't, at best he can "hear" himself mumbling something resembling the original piece.
I however can hear passages of music I remember well: the opening from Star Wars, parts of Kind of Blue or songs from Pink Floyd, the intro song of many TV shows, etc. I probably cannot pass a test equivalent to the crossword puzzle either, but I definitely can hear the music and it's not just me mumbling in my head.
Interesting question! I can "hear" the Star Wars theme, and the brass and strings or whatever it is that makes that iconic sound, but it's not the same as the real thing. I think the best way to describe it is that the music and images in my head are both experienced with the same level of clarity as my inner-monologue. My inner-monologue doesn't sound like a real voice in the room with me. As in, there's no way to confuse it with real sound. But it has the same tone and feel as my own voice, just as the music in my head has the same tone and feel as the real music.
This is where I think the difference in description is happening between myself and others. I've experienced both visual and auditory hallucinations before. These are indistinguishable from real images and sounds. When I picture things, play music, or talk out-loud in my own head, it's not the same as reality. It's a different type of seeing and hearing. Some people seem to imply that their imagination capabilities are on the same level as hallucinations. They say they can picture things with picture-perfect clarity, right there in the same room with them. I even had one artist say he could overlay an image on a piece of paper with his mind and then trace over it.
I have another test I'd like to ask these people: is it possible to picture a black square that sits in front of your eyes and obscures your whole vision? If not, why not?
I get what you're saying. This visual imagery as well as the sounds are NOT hallucinations. You cannot mistake them for the real thing. I cannot replace Spotify with my mind (that would be awesome though!)
It's just a very vivid and detailed experience, but it absolutely cannot be confused with the real thing like an hallucination can.
I can see geometric shapes of all colors but they don't obscure my vision. They "bypass" my vision and go through a different "channel". I cannot confuse myself and suddenly think there's a floating black square in front of me.
Not the person you are replying to, but I’m like your friend, and also lack visual imagination. In fact the only thing I can create in my head is my internal monologue. Ask me to remember a tune and I’ll be internally beat boxing or humming it with my inner monologue voice. That’s the only musical “inner ear” I have. I am also tone deaf, which maybe related, and suck at visual arts.
I can hear instruments, but after reading about the humming guy I could suddenly only hear myself hum. I had to force myself to switch back to instruments, like some sort of optical illusion. This makes me think it could be a learned ability.
Oh, agreed. It's not as clear as a photograph and you have to make an effort to "pin down" the image.
In fact, I suspect many of my mental images are inaccurate and my brain is making some stuff up. I'm not claiming to have perfect recall, just that I see visual imagery with my mind :)
I can't do this. I simply can't imagine that grid in my head fully populated; I have to keep going back to the text. If I concentrate extremely hard, I can kind of keep one or two of the words pictured in my head for a millisecond.
Question: When asked to remember a person's face, can you see it in your head/"mind's eye"?
FWIW, I don't think the ability to visualize something specifically in your "mind's eye" has a lot to do with creativity.
I interpret this as more about direct recall of memory. The stronger the visuals the more likely you are to be able to recall a specific event/visual in more detail (whether it's accurate is up for debate).
Disclaimer, I have no idea what I'm talking about - I just like this subject.
Not the parent, but i can't recall faces (not even my parents) aside from isolated features, like a mustache.
I've seen absolutely nothing on this flashing screen despite looking at it for around 5 minutes. I don't think everyone else is lying, but i wonder if other people's brains just get "bored" and start imagining things, on a moving visual canvas.
It’s a very interesting question, because I can call someone’s face into memory, but as if I’m seeing it in my peripheral vision, which is to say the details aren’t there. I have some experience drawing, and I can knock off a pretty good likeness, but I couldn’t do that from memory. Yet I can definitely picture their face.
Barely. If I try to recall a friend's face, I sort of get small pieces. Maybe the way their eyes squint when they smile. I have more success if I try to remember a photograph I've seen of that person. I can kind of "see" them then, but again, it's very faint, and more like a memory -- the idea of a picture is there, but it's not possible to inspect any detail.
My mental images are usually very similar to how you described yours. I'm also "creative". I've casually self-diagnosed myself as "not being able to see images in my head". However there have been times where I've had picture perfect clarity of something in 3d, including color, but it only lasts for moments and I've never been able to conjure it on purpose.
I was friends (more aquaintances now since I haven't seen him for quite a few years) with an incredibly talented artist / illustrator. I worked with him for a period and would place him more than anyone else I have ever met in the genius spectrum based on a number of factors. One of them is that I know that he can vizualize fully formed images, to the extent that some of his work is just transcribed directly from what he sees in his mind.
I have never been able to do anything close to this, and similarly have self-diagnosed as much weaker in this "power". I mean I can visualize things in my mind but it is fuzzy and fleeting, like focusing on any detail collapses the field of view.
This episode of radiolab about a musician who can maintain a 3d mental image of four orchestras playing at once always stuck with me, and seems relevant to this topic:
he can vizualize fully formed images, to the extent that some of his work is just transcribed directly from what he sees in his mind.
FWIW this is sort of a thing that the process of becoming an artist trains you to do. I have been a professional artist for a couple decades and it is much easier for me to do this sort of thing than it was when I was a kid. There's a lot of steps involved in projecting a mental 3d model onto a 2d plane that I can just do in my head now because I've done them so damn many times.
There's definitely an innate level of doing this as well, some people start with a big boost, various psychoactive chemicals can help (I have done so much work while slightly stoned for the performance boost it gives my visual cortex), and then there is that story about one 1940s animator at Warner Bros. who got in a car accident that involved a degree of head injury, and could suddenly just "trace" stuff directly off of his mental images onto paper once he recovered.
I've heard that there are people who think in words, and those who think in pictures, and combinations of the above. If you don't think in pictures, cannot visualize what you will paint, what's your point of reference enabling you to put paint to canvas?
I always thought my visualization abilities are pretty good. I can recall people's faces pretty well, along with their posture and gestures. I can imagine 3D shapes and rotate them and fit them together. I can visualize different shades of colors.
But this blinky screen plus white noise gave me nothing after 5 minutes except some slightly brighter and darker areas, and I aborted. <Hercules> Disappointed! </Hercules>
Not sure why they talk about it being "wrong" since obviously you are functioning enough to be commenting on a site on the internet rather coherently....
This is extremely cool. Within about 10 seconds in a lit room without white noise playing I began getting fairly vivid visuals. I'll be sure to come back to this to get the full experience later, and complete the questionnaire.
For reference I tend to get interesting/vivid visuals whenever I close my eyes for a few seconds, often when I look at a finely patterned/textured surface, and sometimes when I look at basically anything when I've gone >36 hours without sleep. The visuals from this are more intense than those I get from simply closing my eyes though, and more interesting/changing than those from looking at tiled floors or popcorn ceiling.
What sort of visuals did you see? I had some amazing visuals, but I'm not really sure what I'm to expect if I'm one of those people with vivid mental imagery. I didn't see anything particularly concrete, except what kind of looked like a spiral galaxy at one point. The rest was basically lots of cool fractals and textures. What was most strange was a few shooting stars I saw pass through my vision; they weren't those sorts of "shooting stars" you might get if you get up too fast or if you get all the wind knocked out of you. These were quite vivid shooting stars moving steadily for several seconds until each would vanish.
It's hard to explain because it isn't like seeing the actual objects I'm about to list - these visuals all morph into each other, and sometimes it feels like I'm seeing an idea rather than an object, if that makes any sense. Using Ganzflicker for about a minute I recall I saw:
- some strange smooth shapes, like two glass hourglasses on either side with oil refracting light, with a blob sliding through the middle of them
- A cat's face
- A forest with non-existent animals running through the tall large-trunked trees
- A palace full of marble columns
- Some sort of grand tower that went out into space, and seemed to branch out like a rope being made
There were all many more abstract things, typically in between (or as a transition between) the more identifiable parts.
These visuals I regularly experience are similar to those experienced on shroom, but far less intense/intrusive/encompassing.
They're fairly distinct in sensation from visuals experienced through imagining, which are fairly distinct from daydreaming, which are fairly distinct from dreaming.
I wish we had a language expressive enough to share these qualitative experiences - my writing does little to express them.
I am not sure about this. If you stare at anything for long enough you get peculiar effects in your vision (try it).
That said, in the last year or so I have begun to enjoy music from the extractor fan in our kitchen. Each time it is on I hear a random genre of music - plain chant, brass band, jazz, etc. I don't experience it in any other context (or any other hallucinations before you ask). Anyone else get something like this?
I once had a friend who said that his brother could dance to any "music". This included the sound of oil being heated in a pan. I also have some flashbacks sometimes, when I hear familiar sounds and I sometimes see things in a fractal structure (this plant is especially trippy: https://naturgarden.hu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/A-tuja-gon... ).
Thanks they are great, I will be ... I am using those at my desk. Reminds me that the 24 hour working factory behind our house when I was very small stopped their night shift. I am told I didn't sleep through the night for a fortnight. Maybe there is a connection.
I discovered a fridge in a supermarket with a very pleasant humming tone. I went there often just to hear it and even tried to record the sound with a shitty mp3-player but it was unsuccessful.
But it was just one genre, music by an artist like Stelladrone or similar.
A fridge (compressor) in a studio I lived in often made me hear Barber's "Adagio for Strings" (sad song in the game "Homeworld" or the movie "Platoon"). I think it hummed at the frequency of the long note then slowly shifted in pitch similar to the three-note patterns that follow, or something.
I can experience something similar with the ventilation system in my apartment. Usually, the sound of it is immersed in the background noise together with other sounds coming from the outside, so most of the time I'm not aware of it at all. However, sometimes when I meditate I hear it and if I focus my attention on it, after a while it becomes clear and loud, rich and versatile, not unlike a music played on a wind instrument.
I do get auditory hallucinations in other contexts (usually while sleepy) but yeah, anytime there’s some sort of drone like a microwave this happens to me. I have always felt terrible that I never really learned an instrument because it’s nice having a free source of compositions to draw upon!
I've had same experience with one old Prague escalator in city center which played rhytm from amazing Sicario soundtrack, it was pleasant ride for that minute
When I am in the shower, I hear all kinds of music, usually classical, I hear people talk, birds whistle etc. In our car aircon I hear jazz. It is kind of nice.
I only did it for 2 minutes, and it wasn't strong or overpowering. But I saw a) a blurry checkerboard, and b) ripples coming out of the 4 corners of the screen.
It turns out, 4 ripples coming out of the screen creates a blurry checkerboard! See https://www.falstad.com/ripple/, set to "Example: Four Sources". That was exactly what I saw, but sped up, in red instead of green, and the ripples came out of the corners instead of east/north/west/south.
Does anybody else experience a similar phenomenon but with their auditory system? Whenever I'm falling asleep in a room with white noise (usually a fan) I swear I hear people talking, songs, animal noises... But it's just the fan.
I’ve experienced that. Sometimes I hear voices but I can’t make out the words. Sometimes it sounds more like birds chirping. I haven’t had that in a while though but when I do, it would happen just as I was dozing off to sleep.
Yep, when I'm really sleepy and is about to fall asleep I hear cacophony, familiar people's voices saying single words or short phrases. I even can hear my own voice saying something short.
It's very consistent and I use it as a sign that it's time to sleep.
Check out Exploding Head Syndrome! I have it. I have only experienced it as a kind of electrical "boom", but the bursts of sound some of you describe sound related, especially since they happen while you are drifting off to sleep.
Yes. Every time I run a vacuum, I can hear voices talking, shouting, screaming. It's very unpleasant. Fortunately it doesn't happen with lower-volume noises like fans.
Absolutely nothing for me, but after reading up on Aphantasia and the link it has to a lack of autobiographical memory, it makes sense. I have a condition called Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (http://sdamstudy.weebly.com/what-is-sdam.html) which means I can barely remember anything from my life and what little I do remember is vague and fuzzy.
Interesting self-experiment, but results are self-reported (and failure of the experiment to elicit imagery does not necessarily imply anything about vividness). I'm not sure it really reveals any objective metric regarding vividness of mental imagery.
Wow. I didn't see anything I would deem a full hallucination, but the visuals were pretty amazing. Lots of fractals, triangles, geometry, some shootings stars, what looked like a spiral galaxy for about 10 seconds, then a moment of staring into an abyss, X shapes in my peripheral vision, etc. I'm a bit disappointed I didn't see a tiger jump out from my screen or the Enterprise D passing by. My mental imagery is usually pretty vivid, but it's also impossible for me to really judge that.
I'm not really sure what to make of this, but I'll try this periodically and see if I get anything different.
EDIT: I am curious how this would be affected by music as opposed to white noise.
Watching the flicker thing for a few moments made me think: is it possible that some sort of sensory stimuli could paralyze you?
It would be fascinating if some crazy combination of stimuli could have sort of a “reset human” sort of effect. Given that we’re revolved organisms and not machines it’s hard to imagine any evolutionary purpose, but it’s fun to think about.
determining whether a face is friendly or annoyed is a high-level cognitive process.
I wouldn't be too sure about that. The human brain has an enormous amount of dedicated circuitry for recognizing and interpreting human faces. When something goes wrong in that circuitry we can't just "do it in software" and we call it face-blindness.
This. I haven't read the guide carefully and I had no idea I was supposed to experience auditory hallucinations, and I didn't hear any. I wonder if the visual hallucinations (which I did see) were caused by my prior expectations.
Interesting. I do not have aphantasia. Actually it is easy for me to visually imagine. However, trying out this Ganzfield flicker for more than 5 minutes did nothing for me. Maybe I will try again later in a darker room and for a longer duration.
I also cannot recollect visual things in mind eye. It is strange to explain but I am good with inventing things and imagining complex things but I cannot see anything in mind eye. It is not visual it is more as abstract "shape", shape is not good word as it is visual, in my case try to imagine shape more as intuition or feeling.
I do not know how to explain.
I was kind of annoyed by this finding that I started trying different ways to imagine objects. Few months ago interesting thing happen, I woke up really early and stayed up after 2am, when I got in bad, I was in state that I passed state of sleepy, so my mind was fully conscious, (state you can choose do you want to get up or not at any time), and then stream of images appeared from single point, that point grew and like accessing some optic cable hole, and it was vivid very vivid like reality. It lasted just a few 10 - 30 sec before I was knocked of and started sleeping.
It look like my left side of brain (logic) was so tired that handed over everything to right side (pictures colors) additionally leaving spectator (chartering voice) awake for little while. I am no medical person just interpreting subjective experience so do not take any of this as fact. I just remember that at at that point that I had feeling that Logical side of brain imposed some kind of dictatorship on imaginative side of brain, because of job or past experiences. That time logical brain was too tired after more than 20hrs of coding and thinking so it seems went away for a sleep fraction of time earlier than the imaginative side. :)
I recently learned a trick to fall asleep faster. The theory is that sometimes we have trouble falling asleep because we’re stuck in that “logical mind” mode, ie verbalizing thoughts in our head, thinking about concepts, etc.
The trick is to pick a word, something like “bed”, “sleepy”, etc. You then take each letter and try to think of as many things that start with that letter. The catch is that you should try visualizing the object as clearly as possible. You move on to the next letter once you run out of things for the current letter.
This is supposed to move your mind from the verbal, anxiety-ridden, future-minded mode to the pre-verbal, visual mode. That then slowly fades into hypnagogic imagery, which then leads to sleep and dreams.
I stumbled across a similar trick recently, which is to basically start thinking in dream-like imagery with dream-like logic, until your brain begins to adopt the pattern itself.
> and then stream of images appeared from single point, that point grew and like accessing some optic cable hole, and it was vivid very vivid like reality. It lasted just a few 10 - 30 sec before I was knocked of and started sleeping.
That would be hypnogogic hallucations[1]. Different from aphantasia[2]. People with aphantasia can typically experience hypnagogia just fine.
I'm nearly completely aphantasic. I can get very brief flashes of images but can't make them happen nor hold them in my mind.
I almost never dream. When I do dream it's fairly lifelike.
I can't visualize anything arousing. When I first learned (at 26!) that my friends can visualize any fantasy at will I was floored. I have zero internal imagery for anything sexual. Have no fantasies.
I can't picture anyone's face. Bodies are only experienced in person. If I can't see it with my eyes, it doesn't exist.
I'm completely aphantasiac across all senses. I can't mentally visualize, mentally have song stuck in my head, imagine taste/touch/etc. I still dream frequently. Dreaming and lack of awake mental visualization are separate. There are people who lack both but you can dream visually frequently while being completely unable to have any visual imagination awake.
I never remember my dreams, and I suspect I'm aphantasic. As far as I'm concerned, 99.something% of my sleep follows the pattern of fall asleep -> void outside of time -> wake up.
There are extremely rare fleeting moments where I might wake up and remember some details about a dream for a few seconds, but then I lose it. Those would be counted on one hand per year, easily.
I think these things are a spectrum and I wouldn’t really say I experience it either, but my dreams have only rarely really felt visual, much more like a story or a narrative, which is also how my memories normally feel
I'm not able to look at the Ganzflicker at the moment but I did skim the research study in question (given that the focus on the article is on the conjectured mechanisms and not the results themselves) and the results found there are somewhat intriguing.
I saw a few repetitive patterns: something resembling the overlapping petals of a pine cone, and a bunch of cells vaguely similar to a Voronoi diagram. They didn't last long, were faint and transient.
I get much more vivid visuals with my eyes closed.
I don’t follow the research here but I was pretty sure it was a joke at first because after the initial quote (preceded by the statement “ Consider the statements below. What do they describe? A trip on psychedelics? A dream?”):
> I felt I could reach through the screen to get to another place.
Lasers became entire fans of light sweeping around, and then it felt as if the screen began to expand.
I saw old stone buildings … like a castle … I was flying above it.
I was presented with 3 options, a Dodge Ram, a Jeep Grand Cherokee, and some other truck. I was trying really hard to figure out what the statement had to do with vehicles until I scrolled down (on mobile) more to realize it was a poorly placed advertisement. Not sure why the internet thinks I want to buy a truck, but I imagine there could have been even more hilarious things that could have fit the context better.
Hmm, no wikipedia page for "ganzflicker", and 90% of the google hits are dubious websites. However, I will be trying this tonight because I loves me a good hallucination and if it can be done by sitting in a dark room staring at a flickering screen for 10 minutes, it sure beats acid.
The technical description of this phenomena is a bit conflicted. It seems to say the differing experiences are probably a result of different people having different visual refresh rates, and then somehow makes a logical jump to the test telling us about how visual spacial people are as thinkers. It seems to me that this would tell us a lot more about how our visual cortex interprets input. This is an experience of actual vision, not visualization.
For some reason, staring at a blinking screen in a dark room really creeps me out. I got goose bumps all over my body. I had to give up after a minute or so.
The imagery this produces is very similar to the one I see when I close my eyes and focus on the initially brown/red patterns that later become complex shapes and sometimes creatures.
If you don't "see" anything with your eyes closed then this probably won't work for you.
Also I should add that what I described above feels distinct from focusing on the inner eye.
I see a tonne in this flashing thing, and the way I think is like a movie screen. I can't comprehend how thinking without vivid imagery is even possible. I really think there's variety in how brains are wired and very different experiences of thinking out there.
This reminded me of something I used to do when I was a kid, sit in the sun at the edge of a shadow moving in the wind, like a tree, with my eyes closed specifically to get this flashing red and black pattern and enjoy the random images. I can't believe I forgot about it.
As someone who has thought that I've had aphantasia for the past six or seven years (thank you hn for teaching me about aphantasia), I'm going to give this a shot.
Yer I think I have aphantasia too. I don't see images, but I feel like I can describe things which forms a picture that I can't see but I know.
Anyway, at the very start of my 10min of ganzflicker I think I could see some very faint "wireframe" lines of no shapes in particular (just like * patterns), but these went away after a minute or so, and then it was just flashing colours, but the colours kept changing, and they were mostly reds, pinks, blues, yellows. Rarely green.
I'm in the same camp, thinking I probably have aphantasia.
Before I read about it I didn't call it anything because I had no concept that there was anything lacking in my experience. I thought it was just how everyone's mind worked. I had no idea that people could actually see things that they visualized. I had always thought that the term "visualize" was just an exaggerated metaphor for imagining. For example I can imagine a little island in a field of blue ocean with a palm tree growing out of it just fine, I can conceptually place the objects around in this imaginary scene and have a sense for where the things are in relation to one another and what shapes and colors they are, but I can't for the life of me "see" a single thing no matter how much I focus on it. It might sound contradictory but I don't know how else to describe it.
I have only experienced something that sounds like how normal folks see in their minds eye once, on the cusp of falling asleep, hypnagogic hallucinations began but I was somewhat in control of what I was seeing, I could change the image at will to whatever I imagined. It lasted but a couple of minutes before I fell asleep. Someone that has a normal mind's eye - and has also experienced the pre-sleep hallucinations - would have to tell me if my experience was similar to a normal imagination though. It could be that my hypnagogic episode was far more vivid than a typical person's visual imagination during normal waking hours though, too, who knows?
I did feel very jealous though after that episode thinking that most people probably have such an ability to visualize like that while awake.
It's almost like a huge maze, grid, or some other pattern but painful to look at. The dream tends to be extremely unpleasant and usually returns after falling back asleep.
I was trying to explain it to a friend the other day and didn't do a very good job.