I've been meaning to return to this topic of liminal spaces for a while, to explore its relationship to the closed-eye-visuals (CEV) of my mushroom trips.
(Incidentally I've ended up watching quite a few "creepy and comfy" videos from
The Librarian on Youtube, mentioned in an earlier post. His video on "That Creepy Feeling" of videogames using the Source engine reminds me of the strange mood created by one of the original tech demos for Half-Life 2. It was a brief scene looking around on a rooftop of the deserted City 17, where something about the quality of the light, the level of detail, and the strange liminality of the location lodged in my mind. My hazy memories of that game are less about the action, and more about the overall mood created by the art style and sense of place in some of the deserted, abandoned spaces you transition through. The first picture in this review of a later VR addition to the Half-Life 2 series of games gives an idea of the rooftop view - although doesn't quite recreate the same mood – and the second could almost be from a gallery of liminal space pictures:
https://bit-tech.net/reviews/half-life-alyx-review/1/).
Along with the liminal space theme, there are intriguing similarities between "the backrooms" and my psychedelic experiences. For a start, the sickly yellow walls of the backrooms remind me of a colour-shift effect of psilocybin (magic mushrooms), where white walls become yellowy-green. Even the patterning of the wallpaper in the original backrooms photo is reminiscent of the "glyphs" that overlay surfaces during my trips. And with eyes closed, the architecture of the closed-eye-visuals forms a giant liminal space, the backrooms of your mind. Like the backrooms, the visuals of psychedelics are beyond your control; they create a new space, an additional inner visual field with no boundaries. To quote from a trip journal written earlier this year -
"I remember the architecture of these trips. Like being stacked in vague yellow-green spaces as some other mode of existence unfurls itself, creating its own space and its own rules."
To step back a bit and consider the nature of psychedelic visuals in general, particularly the closed-eye-visuals of psilocybin mushrooms, this short extract of a Terence McKenna talk is a good starting point:
Terence McKenna - What is a Hallucination?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTi31-PhOdI
He distinguishes between trivial imagery which he terms hypnagogia -
"chorus-lines of dancing mice, little round candies, falling leaves, snowflakes, in other words the flotsam and jetsam of the mental ocean" and
"full-field, 360-degree, visionary scenarios of jungles, deserts, ice-fields, ruined cities, machinescapes... highly organised 3-dimensional self-sustaining transformed modalities that you cannot pour language over."
One way to "pour language over" these visual scenarios is to write down a short description during the experience. In the same way that visual imagery is seemingly plucked from nowhere, another effect of the drug is to alter the way you use language, so that while you cannot hope to accurately describe the detail of what you are seeing, you can attempt to communicate the strange essence of the visuals and visions. I would say that psilocybin allows you to hallucinate with words, and as you go further into a trip, the distinction becomes hazy between whether you are writing what you see, or seeing what you write. For this reason I usually prefix actual descriptions of specific closed-eye-visuals with "CEV:" to distinguish them from the blending of imagination, visions and upwelling words that combine in a trip.
For a sense of what the closed-eye-visuals of psilocybin actually look like, one picture in particular that captures the kind of abstract spacial geometry I see is Alex Grey's
Net of Being. While a 2D image like this is slightly flat and lacks visual intensity, the brightness and vividness of psychedelic imagery can be gauged from a google image search for "light installation art psychedelic." Another aspect of my visuals, their flowing movement and brightness against a black background, can be seen in the YouTube video below titled "Fabrique des Lumières | Klimt & Hundertwasser" where artwork is projected onto the walls and floor of a large building with a black interior.
[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lggSq0Te-s[/ame]
You could get close, in visual terms, to psychedelic closed-eye-visuals through some sort of sophisticated virtual reality art creation, but a key aspect of this imagery is where it is closely tied to a sense of meaning, not just an aesthetic response but some deep emotional resonance which accompanies it, for example a visceral sense of "other" or the numinous. An image from your visuals can take on the sort of haunting quality that you sometimes find in stories of supernaturally-influenced paintings. There’s also the fact that imagery created by your own brain will probably be more meaningful than someone else’s, even if there was a way to broadcast the experience to other people. Alex Grey is a talented artist, but he can’t paint
my visuals.
While I've experienced McKenna's visionary scenarios in various forms, it strikes me that my visuals rarely present themselves as landscapes or views seen from afar. Architectural spaces tend to be experienced from inside, exteriors of structures are rarely seen. For example, this brief jungle-themed episode from a recent trip was closed-in and claustrophobic:
To awake within the humid swamps of your imagination.
When the fences are down. We go out. They come in.
Old cranes intermesh with the flora in the same shade of dull green, as if trying to blend in. Abandoned and lost in these jungles of the mind.
And this next brief vision gave the impression that I was already halfway up the structure (castle or cathedral) and viewing it from a balcony, rather than seeing it from afar:
"Looking up at some massive gothic cathedral in the night, with a luminous glow around it."
Another question Terence McKenna raises is whether the visions are products of the mind, or somehow come from outside. While I would instinctively tend to dismiss the idea of a trip being an experience of some external "other," he makes a good point that if you accept these things come from your own mind, your mind is a very different place than you might have initially assumed. He expresses this point very well in the clip:
When I take a plant and it shows me something I could previously not have imagined, then I know I am in the presence of the other.
...If you insist that the Niagara of hallucination caused by psilocybin is generated out of the dynamics of your own psyche... then you are unable to explain what your own psyche is. In other words, you become unrecognizable to yourself... and if you are unrecognizable to yourself, you are not yourself, in some sense.
I think this realization, that your own mind is ultimately unrecognizable to itself, is one of the most fascinating and disturbing things about the psychedelic experience at higher doses. You are lost within your own consciousness, and the "other," the beyond, is in there with you. It is you.
***
To make the idea of liminal space visuals and other types of visuals within a trip more concrete, I've browsed through my trip journals and picked out short descriptions of particular closed-eye visuals (CEV) to illustrate this; a catalogue of hallucinations. I've divided these into four categories, which overlap and merge into each other. The first is the hypnagogia, McKenna's "flotsam and jetsam of the mental ocean," fairly simple and random scenes of low visual complexity, which at the very beginning of the trip's onset may consist of nothing more than a grid pattern of pinprick lights behind your eyes:
HYPNAGOGIA - CLOSED-EYE VISUALS:
"Vaguely seen piles of silver balls."
"Faint neon patternings against a black background. A bit like a circuit diagram."
"Rooms full of people in ridiculous pink checked outfits...people crammed to the ceiling like some period theme party gone awry."
"A peculiar structure of pop-up cartoon animals and shifting sand. Lost from some children’s book."
"Bright spaces. A girl in a short white skirt on roller-skates, bent over as if the ceiling is too low."
"A shape like a Tellytubby - the pink one - Po. On the ceiling. Clinging to the ceiling or hiding."
"Some kind of lost parade right up against my eyelids. An American pageant looking slightly bemused. Lost perhaps. A girl done up with glitter."
"A confused circus of oddly shaped beings and writhing randomness"
These hypnagogic scenes develop into something more complex and elaborate as the trip takes hold, and the spaces of the trip open up within my mind. For example, at the transition from hypnagogic to more complicated imagery, the view of a room might be constrained, like looking through a fish-eye lens, very buzzy and bright - a phrase from a trip journal "a tight dazzle" sums up this sort of imagery. A more complex scene would be something like this, more beautiful and more meaningful - "I fall asleep into a room of glowing bird-like women." At this point, near the beginning of the trip, I am still in a fairly sober headspace so the description is simple and straightforward. Although I would struggle to describe the details of my visuals, during later stages of a trip the descriptions become more figurative, which hopefully communicates the accompanying mood. I like the idea that these descriptions might conjure up something completely different in the mind of a person reading them.
***
The next category, in contrast to the hypnagogia, are highly abstract scenes which are much more complex and visually impressive, but which still don't necessarily convey any particular sense or meaning. Many of these scenes contain some abstract representation of language, as though there is a hidden meaning within the glowing, writhing shapes that make up the three-dimensional spaces of my CEV.
ABSTRACT GEOMETRY - CLOSED-EYE VISUALS:
"Seeing rooms of words like an airflow experiment. A wind-tunnel of words. Crosswords & aerodynamics. Mixed-up ideas. Letters flowing around the shape of a wing."
"like a fluid alphabet flowing through a transparent mold"
"Staring up at something pinky-red, like a building lit-up at night. Fractal surfaces extend this upward and then the surfaces fold in on themselves, an origami of light."
"Red and white fleshy walls, like looking into a kaleidoscopic fruit machine and seeing algebra..."
"Lift machinery that comes alive like crossword puzzles on a metallic snake."
"Giant pulsing shapes that wear fractal algebra like a skin."
"I fall asleep into roiling masses of light"
"Riding through a city of algebraic gristle coiling into itself. A fractal maze. Fearful and potent.
"Blue and white alphabet spaces that fractalize and kaleidoscope and disappear within themselves within the false perspective of an infinite hallucination"
"Dark algebra. Fearsome in the tombs."
***
The next category, liminal visuals, is based around this thread's topic of liminal states and spaces, using a definition of "a state or place characterized by being transitional or intermediate in some way" "Informal: any location that is unsettling, uncanny, or dreamlike." The trip itself is a liminal state, with the mind lost somewhere in a zone between imagination and perception, dreaming and wakefulness, real and unreal, conscious and unconscious, internal and external, self and other. Unlike liminal space photos, there are sometimes figures within these spaces in my visuals, but these people often seem perplexed, immobile, waiting, unsure of why they are there. It's as if they have wandered into my hallucinations and become lost.
In terms of the meaningfulness of these scenes, there is a sense that meaning has been subtracted from them. The spaces are familiar but don't quite make sense; like the backrooms, the geometry is wrong, the architecture baffling. Like liminal spaces in general, they can be thought of as becoming dissociated from their function and therefore from the viewer. In the empty man-made spaces of liminal space photos, the meaning of the places is lost without people there to use them, while psychedelic visuals of liminal spaces exist at a further remove, distorted ghosts abstracted from the places of real life, uncanny, leaving a sense of unease at the increasing distance between the viewer and the familiar world.
LIMINAL SPACE CLOSED-EYE VISUALS:
"Almost falling asleep as a lift operator takes us down."
"A security guard in a room with a curved green wall. As if to say
’if you notice any suspicious hallucinations, please do inform us’."
"Dreamlike imagery of workers cleaning up a flooded mall."
"Oddly shaped rooms that feel as though they are underneath the supports of a larger structure. Furniture scrambled into strange shapes. Bright, harsh lighting fills empty spaces too small to be of any use."
"Japanese Christmas shoppers at the backs of shops, extending into the surreal spaces of my mind. They wander, their expressions unreadable and inscrutable."
"An airport that has crashed into itself and turns inside out, slowly."
"The crowds that throng the empty streets"
"Being propelled backward by someone on a bike riding out of an underground parking garage. Like the view from a GoPro camera facing the rider."
"Identically-dressed Japanese men in blue suits emerge from a door in a metal wall, descend a staircase, and then fold up the interior that I was viewing this from."
"Gliding through red-litten offices, very symmetrical, dark, almost like a kind of surfing motion."
"Adventurous airports. Terminals that look like labia. Labyrinths. Lit in glowing subterranean pink. You cannot read the signs in the glare. You will miss your plane. There is no plane."
"A dark underground space like a club, resolving into a room where the walls are sloping, or perhaps one of the walls is missing, so the ceiling merges into the floor towards the back."
"The smiling face of an Asian girl I don't recall, in a structure I don't recognize, leading nowhere."
"Fractal spaces the size of aircraft factories folding into themselves, turning silently, mosaic surfaces in unusual tints of yellow."
"A huge vault full of octopoid creatures, with a plasticene texture, writhing amongst themselves"
"Figures running out of a tunnel, like the road tunnel in Monaco, with cat masks or something above their heads. Like they are part of some strange ritual or festival."
"A black spiral stairwell, with red shimmering graffiti in a sort of gothic horror font."
"A large column. Turquoise halls unravelling. Seen from inside as they roil and writhe."
"Flowing between the shadows of the spaces between non-existent windows. The silent movement of enormous shapes in the background, as though the surroundings of the CEV, normal buildings, deserted, are just there for show. As though the unreality were not real."
"Labyrinthine Escher-like depths"
"The same shifting, corrupted geometry of insane spaces...alien, unusable..."
"A tightness of collapse and contraction and spaces shrinking and unknown."
***
The final category contains scenes which I've labelled ominous - "of or serving as an omen... threatening; sinister" "...portentous; especially: foreboding or foreshadowing evil." These scenes present themselves as saturated with meaning, and serve as an indication of where the trip is heading. The sense of meaningfulness (salience) that accompanies psychedelic imagery is an integral part of what makes a trip so fascinating. Rather than simply presenting you with a pretty but meaningless display of abstract imagery, the scenes convey a mood, act as signposts to where the trip is going, slowly coalescing into a theme, a direction, a story. It's hard to say whether the images create a certain type of mood or meaning, or whether the arrival of a certain type of mood initiates imagery to match it. As mentioned earlier, the categories overlap - abstract imagery or liminal spaces can be ominous, as expressed in some of the examples.
OMINOUS CLOSED-EYE VISUALS:
"The figures of old people transformed into glowing red trees with human features. Gloating. Gesturing with their stunted, twisted branches."
"A gloomy underground space, vaults maybe, with insectile shapes dormant on the sloping walls that descend into the pool."
"Altars of fused bone. Fractal. Sinister. Radioactive. Radiating heat. Radiating Light"
"A maroon cathedral, the roof full of fractal mouths and demonic eyes, descending, descending..."
"Black glistening caverns where walls of organic tissue writhe with a subtle luminous glow in the darkness. Eerie."
"Being beckoned past some hideous reptilian godlike figure with glowing red eyes, like a demonic red glow behind the skin."
"Livid canyons where the horizon is filled by giant octopi, heaving as they move."
"Hazy, smoky oceans with bone pedestals rising out of the water."
"Black craft that swarm around you, hinged with unseen cantilevers, shapeless and bestial beneath their metal carapace. The rubber feels like metal, and the metal feels like rubber. And it comes closer, and closes around you, and moves quickly and silently into the unknown."
"I see structures, like moving and flowing bone in geometrical shapes. But everything spells death."
There are plenty of other types of visuals, and other ways these visuals could be categorised, but I think distinctions based on salience, the sense of meaning embedded in the images for the viewer, reveal some interesting patterns. While the "hypnagogia" and some of the abstract geometry initially have no especial sense of meaning, being neutral in a sense, the liminal space imagery conveys a lack of meaning reflected in the disorientation and dissociation of the psychedelic experience as it takes hold. The more ominous imagery conveys the sinister sense of "other" that a strong trip presents, and the abstract imagery in turn becomes more potent and meaningful, conveying an alien sense of otherness.
The typical abstract imagery I see usually develops into three-dimensional spaces of moving, coiling shapes which are in turn made-up of simpler shapes (often resembling alphabet cubes of alien languages) in some sort of fractal arrangement - looking into strangely alien architectural spaces. There is usually an inky-black background, as if looking into an abyss, and the scene is lit by these shapes which glow from within. The overall effect is like exploring some kind of sinister alien underworld.
Another frequent motif in the visuals is that of the fairground ride, a sense of movement through the abstract imagery, "dropping through dreamscapes like fairground rides." Creatures and other "entities" occasionally seen are another topic that could be explored.
As for the origin of some of the imagery, while the truly abstract scenes seem to be based somehow on the internal architecture of whatever the brain is doing, for the more specific images, it's as if random memories of textures and patterns and imagery are being selected magpie-like by some unconscious process and pushed through my visual cortex, and without context it can take a while to work out where a particular image has been dredged up from. I think the reason for the prevalence of imagery which resembles the interiors of liminal spaces is probably due to the fact that so much of human existence is spent indoors or transiting through these kind of places, that they have become deeply embedded in our mind's overall model of reality.
For a journey through the backrooms of my imagination, I've just posted the contents of the trip journal which inspired this post – “Cave-diving tragedy in hotel room” - which ended up being a sort of guided tour of insanity (it's the first of three parts with the overall title "And Yet, I Know the Wilderness.”) When you go caving inside your mind, the first step is to bring your own cave...
Link is here -
https://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?p=163079#post163079
