Hacker News Reader

Comment by saberience | Hacker News Reader

I actually experience CEVs easily without any drugs at all, something that’s happened all my life. I can even influence it to some extent. IE if I close my eyes and focus I can create more and more intense closed eye visuals without falling asleep. When I was a child I used to do this for fun when I was bored.

So yeah, it’s definitely not a hard and fast rule about CEVs.

View on HN

I've had the audio equivalent of that at least once, and I think (can't prove it) a few other times. But it was scary so I never tried again.

I suspect I had the visual once, thanks to one time as a teenager I tried a magic spell and the explanation of "I'm capable of self-hypnosis" is much more plausible than the spell having had even the slightest effect.

I can easily create intense overrides for sensory experience whenever I like for my sense of which way down is, and mild overrides for the various kinds of touch.

This might seem like a weird question, but have you ever had distortions in your sense of the size of features of your face? I remember a very strange feeling as a child about my sense of scale when I was dreaming or asleep. Feeling like I was minuscule while in the presence of something very big. Later in adult life I found I distort my sensory perception of my facial features, ie make my lips or cheeks feel gigantic, by pressing a very particular part of my face into the pillow at the correct angle. This sensation seemed to feel similar to one I experienced as a child.

I also have or have had the ability to do other sensory overrides like distorting my sense of physical space, ie warp the bounds of my room while I stare at ceiling in bed. It’s not really a visual thing, but it makes me think of the spoon bending scene in the matrix.

Not my face specifically, but as a teenager my whole body sometimes suddenly had a different sense of size.

For my body as a whole, I also don't have an inner sense of a permanent body morphology that is "mine", so with one exception[0] I can't even imagine what it's like to be body-dysmorphic — even if we lived in a world of magic gender/species transformations that might happen with no ill effect, if I woke up and found that had happened, the only concern is if society can cope with it, not one of my own inner psyche.

The one exception is forked tongue. That is a sticky morphology to imagine, and one I don't like at all. It's also something a friend got done surgically. Good for them, they seem to be enjoying it, it makes me go "aaaa".

[0] I assume there are limits beyond my imagination, but my imagination does at least include tails, wings, gender flipping, and I've listened to the We Are Legion (We Are Bob) series.

I’m so curious about this. It’s only ever happened to me when I woke up in the middle of a vivid dream, and lasted 10 or 15 seconds. It also happened when I was on oxycodone after a surgery. Do you feel like you are in a dreamlike state or slightly high all the time? Have you ever experienced depression?

Wait... You mean images of concrete things or just shapes or something? I can do what you describe (always have and can influence it) but it's just moving shapes with colors. Kind of similar to those you get when you watch bright lights and then go to a dark room. Isn't that common?

For me it starts with moving shapes and colors, then fractals, and I can eventually get it to be concrete things. Takes some focus, though.

Yes! This is exactly what happens to me if I close my eyes and focus. I can literally turn it into full dream like sequences that are incredibly real but it's easy to lose focus and then you lose the visual. It's actually something I do for fun sometimes, it's like seeing the inner workings of my brain in action.

It starts off as colors moving around, shapes, like rainbows flying across my vision, or blobs of transmuting colors, basically simular to Itunes visualizations. If I keep focusing on those blobs and colors, I can start seeing more complex shapes emerge like fractions but also faces, silhouettes of people, or other more "real" visuals, then if I focus more the images become much more life-like, like people walking by the river in high fidelity and I am totally conscious the whole time. It does require focus though, if I lose focus I can quickly lose the life-like visual and i'm back to blobs of color.

Is that just hypnagogia? Many people experience that before falling asleep, I could also do this while awake but with eyes closed, it is usually colors and shapes but not anything concrete.

It sounds similar, but it happens very easily with me and isn't so tied to sleep. That is, I can have full dream like experiences while still being awake and conscious of everything that's happening to me. Almost as soon as I close my eyes, even while awake and sat at a desk I see visualizations which can easily turn into complex fractals, many colors, I've always thought it was so cool.

Interesting, that only happens to me on certain drugs, usually not without their effects.

I used to when I was younger, these day I seems to have lost that ability even my dreams are not vivid and I rarely have a dream (that I remember)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com