The visuals you get from psychedelics and the visuals from imagination are different. Psychedelics seem to affect your real visual field. You're not imagining textures melting with colors and walls turning into liquid, it becomes what you see.

I normally have aphantasia, at about 2/5 on one those pop scales that show various versions of an apple. I can sort of rotate geometric shapes without the notion of color or texture.

But rarely, while lying in bed I get these full vivid pictures. It feels like a whole another visual field. I can't really control it, but these are fully detailed like a painting.

It's dizzying how fast I can imagine these when my mind decides to switch into this mode, and how it can switch from one painting to the next fully detailed picture in a fraction of a second. I normally have to strain hard to hold just a few outlines of simple shapes in my mind, evaporating the moment my focus wavers.

I'm quite strongly aphantasic, I can, for a split second, hold the essence of a thing in my brain, but it's not even vaguely visual. I have though, several times, experienced almost exactly what you decribe - also while laying in bed trying to get to sleep. Every now and then I can kind of see a room, sometimes the room I'm in, sometimes not, even though my eyes are closed. I love it. I can't switch what I'm seeing though, but possibly because as soon as it happens I'm just laying there marvelling at being able to see something with my eyes shut, and staring intently at the details.

I can also only experience true visualizations when falling asleep or dreaming. I concluded that being awake (correctly?) suppresses vivid visuals and some people when awake simply do not have this (mal?)adaptation.

I think you're probably right, though sometimes when this happens I feel very awake indeed.

I do suspect "visions" can come from different sources as well. I've worked at an ayahuasca retreat center and have drank about 500 times so had some opportunities to investigate this. My vision is typically very "closed" (often it is just a massive intuition increase, it takes me a huge dose to get really into the visionary aspects). I have had visions seemingly from the top of my head (these are the most intense, all encompassing for me), in my "mind's eye"/imagination, in my normal visual field, and from my heart space, and sometimes a mix of all of it. My big suspicion is that DMT induces a type of synesthesia, a mixing of all of the senses, plus intuition, thoughts, and memories, plus a big increase in sensitivity (meaning what we see/feel is not precisely a hallucination).

This matches my experience and I was quite surprised to find out other aphantasiacs have their “minds eye open” when tripping. For me psychedelics only ever produced a fractal overlay on top of what I was already seeing.

I wondered for a long time why everyone else experienced such strong visuals and eventually decided on my own it must be related to aphantasia. It’s nice to find out I might not have been a total crank with that hypothesis :).

It depends on the psychadelic. Acid will be fractal overlay and color shifts, breathing textures. Mushrooms, you will see a face in the treebark and the clouds, plus the color shifts and breathing textures.

> psychedelics definitely give me visuals. However it‘s more like shifting and warping stuff I and not very pronounced.

At least with LSD and psilocybin, that’s what visuals are. You don’t hallucinate things out of thin air on either one of those drugs, things morph and shift and wobble and waver and shimmer and so on.

At least in the dosage ranges I have explored, 7g dried mushrooms and 10 ‘hits’ of LSD which was probably at least 500mcg?

With mushrooms it is certainly possible to see faces/eyes and such in certain textures like bark or cloud formations.

I was going to edit my post and add that mushroom visuals can be more tangible than the swirling/shimmering/morphing of LSD.

During one particularly strong mushroom trip I was seeing geometric patterns on surfaces that were very similar to ‘Navajo Print’ fabrics woven by Native Americans. It was uncanny, and I’m convinced to this day that those patterns were revealed to the indigenous Americans during psilocybin experiences.

Ever tried 2CB or mushrooms/psilocybin and if so, how prominent were the visuals? Always found those to be more visual (for better or worse), particularly compared to LSD, but I don't have aphantasia.

I tried them and probably have apanthasia. Similar experience to the other comments: it's usually just overlaid on what I see. A few time when I closed my eyes and got taken away by music, it would give me a more "story-like" trip, but I don't specifically recall visuals.

I scored as hypophantastic, but I'm not sure if I'm skewing the results because I draw/paint too. So I'm not sure if I'm triggering some detail processing/recall function. I see nothing, but I know what I should be seeing. For a lot of the examples I could... I don't want to call it "visualise" details, but I could describe in detail what should be there, but its in fact blank. Not sure how relevant this is, but I'm also neuro divergent; some diagnosed: ADHD, severe dyslexia, occasionally migraine + auditory hallucinations, undiagnosed but obviously there is also tinnitus. Dunno if I'm also a bit on the spectrum becau I also need to take at least 2x the dose my friends do, and stuff like amphetamines have _zero_ effect on my headspace

Not GP but 2CB and psilocybin were never very visual for me compared with LSD in my tripping days. I have aphantasia and the only chemical to give me full eyes open visuals was DMT. Mescaline was a very distant second.

I have aphantasia but I have visuals when dreaming, and have OEV's on any psychedelic in high enough doses.

So I think it's useful to talk about dosages here.

For example, I won't have OEV's until around 200-250ug of LSD, or 20-22mg 2C-B, or 3.5g mushrooms.

Marijuana gives me the ability to have closed-eye visuals ("mind movies") even in low doses, though I don't use it because it gives me panic attacks.

> has something to do with the sigma receptor

Why? Because two of those drugs are agonists?