Images and the sense we give them: the search for the psychadelic

24/10/2014: 12 hours later...
IMAGE: Charlize Cape

This was a simple enough dream, but I have been thinking about it the the most part of the day. It has really hit me where it hurts: like the best dreams that I have, it has left me with something completely indescribable. This time it was not a steel-string guitar piece or an emotion or even a romantic encounter, it was simply a moving image.

And it was at once so personal and so powerfully alive, it remains alive in my memory even now. I have no idea what this dream means to me: all I can do is try to describe it.

The dream was very basic and short. It consisted of me and two friends, Dexter and Andrew. We were sitting in a steel room, possibly compatible with the set of a science fiction movie or even just a university laboratory. The room contained a screen or monitor, mounted on the wall, and we were watching it and talking.

The screen started to display an image: and this is where words will probably fail me. It was simple enough, a red and blue cycling gradient of background colour with an orange ring that grew and rotated in the centre, sprouted hubs, begun spinning on its axis while parts would break off and change then rejoin the centre once again. An vocal exchange between the three of us went approximately like this: 

Hereditary: "See the genesis of the human imagination, expressed in visual form. What we are watching is the psychedelic experience. Such compounds cause human ideas to become experienced as mental images."

Dexter: "But with such intense emotions, and understanding. It is not just images, but the raw feeling that the idea gives too"

Andrew: "......"

Hereditary: "Yes, but the feeling of comprehension and the perception of the image are two aspects of the same thing. You cannot separate them"

Dexter: "So they lack specific causality?"

Hereditary: "Precisely"

Dexter: "And yet the image is there. It is tangible. Why do ideas have so much function but so little form? Even music can be expressed symbolically"

Hereditary: "They can be expressed symbolically too. That is what we are now studying"

Dexter: "Interesting..."

  

Andrew: "I still don't get it"

I continued to watch the image, expand and grow and resemble the life form that it did. I then went through some other dreams and woke up shortly after. I drank my coffee and jumped into the shower. That is when it hit me: I was still thinking about that damned image! It was just there inside of me, evolving through itself over and over, bringing my focus back to itself from whatever else I had been doing, or indeed trying to. I begun to think not about the exchange about the image itself. It was haunting my thoughts as I prepared for my journey to work, and it would not stop.

At work, I decided there was simply not much too it. I had seen the image a thousand times before, from many examples in my life: A Simpsons episode, where homer eats a chilli. Beetles music videos. That "Sick, sad world" TV program that seems to be the only thing on when a television is featured during Daria episodes. These are proverbial tropes of the psychedelic experience are so common in our popular culture they could not have had to work hard to embed themselves in my subconscious for future recall. And yet, on arriving home after work my curiosity got the better of me, and I endeavoured to find this image, or one like it. I had to know from where it has actually come. Three and a half rather painful hours later, and I did not so much as come close. There was nothing on the whole internet that I could derive this image from. Nothing!!! And even worse: the images I could so easily recall that bore its resemblance turned out to look nothing even like it. It was as if those memories themselves had been overwritten and falsely associated by this recent creation from my dreaming imagination. This image was indeed my own and that begun to scare me.

So where had I seen it before? Probably nowhere. For all I know it actually was my own "endogenous idea generation process" (as referenced in the dream conversation) breaking through into my dream reality; and the guise of studying the psychedelic experience had simply thrown me of the trail, with the image eventuating to be a lot less psychedelic than I thought. I have, of course long suspected that the generation of internal imagery played a crucial role in how the cerebral hemispheres integrate information. The thalamus is simply too crowded to represent an entire cerebral hemispheres worth of computations while the limbic system is uniquely ill-suited to convey much at all except for basal evolutionary emotions super-serving the fight/flight responses from the hypothalamus. The corpus callosum, meanwhile has scarcely little to do with information exchange at all; and exists predominantly to enable one cerebral hemisphere to facilitate dominance over the other during the selection of cognitive strategies.

However the psychedelic experience reliably does cause these images to break through into the sensorium. That does not mean that these images are innately psychedelic; as evidenced by this dream and my whole experience in writing this entry. Perhaps the network changes brought about by the psilocybin ligand simply allow the contents of the thalamus to accept internally-generated information from the occipital cortex, that would otherwise be gated from waking experience (in addition to whatever other qualitative changes they produce in one's though process) and in our haste to classify we simply confuse the two. I have suspected this much in the past as well.

All I do know is that in focusing on this image, that has burned itself into my mind ever since, I am overcome with a kind of intense pull into my own visual thinking, and before long I find myself using my own visual thinking to think about visual thinking. From there (as I experienced in the shower) I am free to visually think about just anything I want, and I happened use the occasion at that time to decode a particularly complicated interpersonal relationship I had been rather uncertain what to do with. It worked quite well, then again my visual thinking always does: It is how can think in systems, and in large part how I have picked up so much on the theoretical neuroscience that I have.

Of course, shockingly little has been published (in contemporary times) about the neuroscience let alone the psychology of visual thinking: if you read my bio, you may well suspect that I intend to be one of the first. I had long suspected the power of visual thinking, but I was proverbially made a convert a little earlier this year at a friends wedding. Waiting for the formalities to commence, a particularly sprightly Google programmer was challenging an immunology professor to solve the Sleeping Beauty paradox. The programmer had read some number of books on the subject and was quite eager to leave us all in a state of 'benign bewilderment', as he himself had been for some time. And as he continued on, quoting mathematical arguments for and against I just shut my eyes and let the images take over. 

A web of coloured balls, connected by strings. Strings branch off from the balls, and new balls, with new colours emerge. The set of balls of a single colour combine and collapse. New strings. They have colour now too. Aha.  

...Opening my eyes again, I came to my conclusion:

Hereditary: "It all comes down to whether you believe we exist in a single universe, or as distinct entities in the multiverse doesn't it?"

The expression had virtually deserted the programmers face. All he said was "Yes, that's right". It was especially validating, as I had absolutely no idea what I had just said. Image and emotion: the language we use can only hope to interpret. In a way it was not even that difficult, it was just a neat hack to quickly put intuition into words. Of course I do not always slip into visual thinking so easily, it takes enormous concentration and it rarely comes to my rescue even when I call for it. It thinks with a mind of its own, and it's intrusive interruptions to my field of consciousness are necessarily limited, for countless aeons of evolution have effectively gated this presence in the great evolutionary battle against insanity. This cognitive maginot line is not breached for any old thing (unlike the real maginot line) for the protections are just too strong: It takes a truly powerful idea indeed, or perhaps a little psychoactive substance. Or even just a very interesting dream.

So was this dream of mine simply a vehicle to deliver me this self-referencing totem of my own visual thinking, that I may enter that wondrous trance of inter-hemispheric meditation that little bit smoother? Or was the dream itself essentially self-referential: in that the image was literally a visual analogue for the verbal discussion simultaneously taking place (about the nature of the image) suggesting the validity of image, exchange and dream in one great open system? I wish I could say. But the image I saw still speaks to me. It has a sound and a voice of its own, and it talks to my emotions and my mind's eye in equal measure. And if I had to put its strange message into words, as the exchange it generates refracts within my head, I would probably put it like this:

Image: "Think about what I am"

Hereditary: "...but you make me so curious"

Image: "And that is the secret"

 ★★★