Hack your brain: How to hallucinate with ping-pong balls and a radio

The most I've hallucinated while falling asleep is occasional swirly patterns. No sounds, ever. Maybe because I've had a tinnitus for as long as I can remember? (constant ~20kHz)

Likewise, nothing when waking up. Once every couple of months or so I "know" that I've been dreaming and at best can remember a person or object from the dream. After a few seconds even that is irretrievably gone.

My understanding is that it's pretty rare for someone to develop those sorts of mental issues from psychedelic drug use alone, though these drugs can provoke an episode. (There's a neverending debate over whether those events "would have happened anyway".) Frequent use of psychedelics, however, can be really dangerous. Acidheads aren't profound, shamanic people; they're often really boring and screwed up.

Drugs have an utterly opposite marginal utility behavior to that of meditation. Drugs take off rapidly (too rapidly for some people) but the marginal utility drops off (and becomes negative) very quickly. Meditation starts more slowly, but the marginal utility increases as one progresses.

Often it's not really sensory at all; it seems to work at a higher, conceptual level. For example, I once looked in a mirror and saw myself, but recognized different people, with different personalities, my mother, my siblings, my different personalities.

I looked out into a room, and I saw all the elements, but my experience of it was flat, as if someone took a picture and laid it out on paper. Then the shading in the picture implied lighting, which quickly implied depth. Objects rotated into consciousness. I saw a tree, and then suddenly the existence of leaves and branches screamed out to me, as if to say "we are entities too! we are not simply parts of the tree! we are objects of our own." A friend of mine was standing near, but still. At a conceptual level, my perceptual experience of her was of an extremely accurate statue of her. As in "my, what a life-like Sarah." And then she moved, and she was animate again, a real person.

A friend of mine studies perception. He tells me there's a lot of evidence for these kinds of 'perceptual layers,' and that a lot of the subconscious visual classifications that I was experiencing. Self, not self. Person, not person. Animate, not animate. Object, not object. Flat, not flat. One expects it's the sort of thing that we do naturally, for many other sorts of things. Male, female, old, young, intelligent, dim, aware, tired, happy, sad, etc. And it's the sort of thing that neural networks can do, too.

So I definitely think that there are things that you can bring back. I think if you try hard, you can hold on to the experience, and see how much of it makes sense in the real world. But I'm not sure this is the experience of most people. I hear lots about people seeing pretty colors.

* Note, all this happened on half a hash brownie, alone. This experience suggest that I stay away from anything harder.

Name changed to protect the innocent.