I wait until i come out of a trip and then go stare into the mirror.

I have watched my head spin circles on my shoulders whilst warping/morphing into EVERY OTHER POSSIBLE FACE that has ever existed. All ethnicities. Genders. Appearances. Even down to the hairstyle/facial hair and stuff. Everytime its the same. I visibly become everyone else.

Then as it wears off i start to get the sort of zombie like morphing of my own face. Like i was a burn victim or something. Then it goes away.

yea that sounds familiar

gazing into a mirror, especially while smoking dmt, can be an amazing and beneficial experience. Even just meditating while staring into a mirror and taking low doses of changa (or on the comedown) is extremely centering/grounding and can set up a beautiful mental platform for launching deeper into hyperspace. It lets you face your shadow and demons in a very direct way, if your up to it, which can help you let go quicker with a strong sense of balance

MomentOfTruth- i've also had stuff like that happen many times. it changes between humans and other beings such as animals or other entities that look extremely alien.

through staring into mirrors on psychedelics you can learn to put yourself into a significantly altered state through focus and will power, although it is a sort of relaxed focus...This can carry over into your reality after the trip; eventually you can learn to do it sober, without mirrors, ime. but they always help immensely

Very well put, olympus mon. Sums up my mirror experiences as well, although I was outdoors during the day whenever I looked in the mirror. Always after the peak of the breakthrough once I can stand up although low-doses work nicely as well.

This body holding me... I resonate deeply with your experience of seeing your soul in your eyes. The whole atmosphere and feeling of that is beyond my ability to word, but it was deep, beautiful, and utterly peaceful.

It also gave me a profound appreciation for the intricate array of abilities this body either allows me to use or carries out on its own device. It was better than the first time I looked at my hands on mushrooms. The human body is quite the tool.

WEM- you make a couple interesting points there. For starters, I've been blind in one eye my whole life and have never experienced binocular vision... So for me there may be far less of a difference between a photo and the real article than there would be for someone with normal vision.

As far as the face recognition comparison goes... Here's a story for you. I was tripping on a mid-range LSD dose with a friend, and we were flipping through my sketchbook. There were a number of portrait drawings in it, fairly realistic but done with a kind of loose drawing style. My friend pointed out how the overlapping of rough pencil strokes averaged out to something that represented the personality of the subject. At the height of my peak, I was looking at him and watched his face break down into a group of overlapping pencil strokes, as if I had drawn him. Then the lines started to drift around in my field of vision, drifting in all different directions while still retaining their basic orientation. Even at their most scrambled, his personality still came through loud and clear, spelled out in these jumbled lines.

I definitely agree that things we express with our faces can show the deeper aspects of our immaterial inner selves.

Spent several hours sitting crossed-legged on the floor once looking in a mirror whilst on mushrooms. Had picked the mushrooms on a mountainside, and I saw the whole of that landscape in my face - mountains, rivers, clouds, trees... So beautiful. I could look at the whole vista, or zoom in and see exquisite detail, birds in trees, flowers by the path-side. And at the same time it was always my face. And then my face became the face of an ancient sage, like some kind of Shaman or Seer, beautiful, older than time, but my face and the mountains were still there also.

I often wondered if I saw the mountains because my brain made the association with where the mushrooms were picked, or if there was some kind of spirit in the mushrooms themselves.

Perhaps your brain is using the fact that you only see in one eye to its advantage, which eye is the one that you can see in, left or right? I remember reading an article one or two years ago about the effect of being blind in one eye's effect on your brain's ability to process different concepts, mainly pertaining to which side of the brain controls which eye, and how since each side of the brain specializes in different kinds of thinking (analytic and logic vs creative and imagination), that people blind in one eye would process how they see differently with respect to logically vs creatively, I can't find the article now but it had used artists who were blind in different eyes and their techniques being different due to their processing abilities were different for vision.

olympus mon-

i have experienced EXACTLY what you are desrcibing, except i achieved it once only and I was sober.

Just staring into my eyes in the mirror until it gets uncomfortable, and just breathing and trying to clear my mind.

Then I felt this kind of shift and I was looking into the eyes of this body im in. It was like looking at an animal.

I would imagine it is what an animal would feel like seeing itself in the mirror for the first time and not understanding that the thing they are seeing is 'themself'.

Way cool, been wanting to vape in front of a mirror for a while, think i will try it next when the time is right, have a few demons i want to banish

It's the left eye that works, so it's going through right brain processing. I get a very weak signal from my droopy right eye, but it doesn't line up with the left eye signal, so my brain ignores all but the peripheral movement. When I close the good eye I can see from the right eye; it's just extremely blurry. So I am getting vision signals going through both sides of the brain, but the primary visual signal that I'm using from moment to moment is from the left eye.

So I've always wondered, since I'm not using valuable gray matter processing parallax, what am I using it for? Or is it just sitting there idling... Or did it maybe just never develop?

I think the main difference between my perception and yours is that I have to think about depth much more consciously. I'll move my head back and forth to see how the objects around me track relative to each other; that's a good way to judge depth, although the measurement is comparative rather than absolute. It works well enough to drive: at 44 I've yet to have an accident. But I do bump into things in parking lots from time to time... Apparently I'm moving too slowly to get a fix on distances.

As an artist I use my deliberate perception of depth to my advantage, and stack up a vast vocabulary of tricks using focus, contrast, the overlap of shapes and other tools to simulate a sense of depth on a 2D surface. So for that purpose, at any rate, it's been an asset. I just can't catch a baseball to save my life.

If the reason why your blind is in your eye and not your brain, then in theory it could've developed fully, I can't exactly imagine something as complex as a brain not putting it to good use for something else of value... just not really sure what sort of other capabilities that part of the brain has

the left eye is controlled by the right brain, but visual input from it goes to both hemispheres; the right hemisphere takes in the left field of vision for each eye, and the left hemisphere takes in the right field of vision for each eye

thats really interesting that your depth perception has aided your painting. you paint better with one eye than i probably could with 8!

I absolutely love looking at myself in the mirror whilst on LSD. I often go into a dim bathroom, with just a candle and put on headphones. I often have a different kind of music playing, because every kind of music brings its own feel. When I want things to get scary I put on psytrance or slow techno. And things get REALLY scary. Sometimes I am forced to leave the bathroom, sometimes I can conquer this fear and I will see myself standing with a heroic white glow in the dark bathroom, othertimes I turn into a monster which I can most closely describe as an orc from the LotR movies. With other types of music, such as psydub, everything just shapeshifts beautifully and slowly and I can get lost in trance and stand in front of the mirror for several hours. Looking into your own eyes creates as if a thousand layers between the mirror and yourself, and your own eyesockets become hollow as if you were looking at a hollow shell of a person, not you. It really is something.

With DMT on the other hand I have never felt this. I just see my face with thousands of geometric shapes of all the beautiful bright colours that exist, primarily purple, orange, blues and forest greens. It is fun, but it is not something I would do often, because I find just lying in bed is far more enlightening, interesting and fun.

respectfully,
Import

EDIT: after reading about eyes in above posts. I always notice that I am looking at my right eye when looking into the mirror. The left eye seems "dead" or inactive. Is there any reason as to why this is?

We all have a dominant eye, much like a dominant hand, and dominant leg. I'd wager to guess you're right handed (pretty safe bet, since most people are!). Often, right handed people are right eye dominant.

There's also a funny thing about how we look at faces. The usual convention is to look at the right side of a person's face (their right, your left). That side of the face is more expressive. Plus, you look into the same eye as they look at you from. Pretty weird! Once you start to look, you'll notice you're doing this. We even do this when looking in the mirror, at least at a glance.

I wonder if left eye dominant people look in the other eye. Maybe why I never trusted them, shifty bastards.

I'm right handed, but left eye dominant. But it's because of boring old stigmatism, not anything neurological.

I like to believe I'm trustworthy.

Anyway, back to the OP.

Trivia : Each eye is controlled by both hemispheres, right and left. Your left field of view of each eye, is being shown to you through processes of the right hemisphere, and vice versa.

Also, seeing monocularly, means that you have an abundance of depth cues unavailable to you, hence the difficulty in distinguishing between a photograph and real life, nothing to do with functions of particular brain hemispheres.



Research has demonstrated that one may be using auditory signals to induce plasticity in their visual cortex, thereby using some audio to interpret it visually. This was researched with a few patients that were born blind (eye organ damage), but where using echolocation to navigate themselves. Their extensive use of echolocation turned out to bring outlines and shapes of the environment into their awareness, and the researchers can only speculate (and see through neuroimaging) that the visual cortex was active into a higher degree than congenitally blind patients that did not use echolocation.

So, in plain terms, your visual cortex must be active (using echolocation or not, since one of your eyes is working perfectly).

I hope you know I was joking! One of my best friends is a lefty, whom I always like to joke with about his leftness.

As for the mirror, I make it a point to look in the mirror almost every trip. It can be pretty strange. I think one of the big things that makes it so strange is the dilated pupils, makes me kind of look like an alien, or some crazy ass lookin dude who's tripping. Often my face warps and I see different emotions placed on it, which I am not necessarily feeling at the time.

I do notice some type of energy when I look at myself or other people when tripping. Some times I see my friend as an old man. My woman usually looks kind of cold. I try not to stare, but it's true that people display so much more of themselves when I am tripping.

I think it's worth a try with the photo, if you can't do it in person. I have watched some movies with mushrooms, and I saw some of their energy, but not like in real life. As always, I never know if it is something real that I get to see, or something my brain makes up.

I`ve tried to look at the mirror while on dmt. First time it was during comedown. It was interesting but second time impressed me much more. I decided to smoke some leftovers from a previews deep ride. It wasn`t that much intense so i could stand up and walk to the mirror. So about after a minute looking into my reflection i realized that what i`m seeing not just a simple reflection of myself, but a real second version of me, like a clone or something like that. Then i realized that my awareness is not only in my real body but in this second body too, and somewhere in between. I could distinctly feel that body, hear how i breath and so on.

Very interesting topic. The most prominent time this happened to me was the first time i looked in a mirror while tripping on LSD. Not sure the amount, it was from a puddle (droplets) soaked up on some break that was left for 3 days before ingestion. AMAZING TRIP, but back on topic... I overheard someone saying to never look at yourself while tripping, so i immediately get up and run to the bathroom mirror.

I saw my pores as giant holes in my face. The was an impossibly thin and close layer of filth all over my skin. I looked sickly to myself as my jaw widened and retracted laterally. I remember saying out loud, "UG! I'm so dirty!" As i said this i stroked my cheek and the stubble grew to meet my fingers and would then ungrow back into their follicles once my fingers past. My eyes were the only clean looking thing and just had a pleasant void past the gigantically dilated pupils. The next thing i heard was someone say "did he just go in there after we said don't?" I laughed and ran back out to stare at the desktop backdrop of a beach again.

That's all i got. I'm super intrigued about being blind in one eye in everyday life, and if one would then have visions with depth on psychedelics.