Hello everyone long time lurker, first time poster. I get such a warm sense of community and knowledge from this place and I would love to interact/explore more ideas with everyone.

I enjoy visual arts; expressionism especially. Any kind of visual story really captivates me. I am about to graduate school for graphic design, so there will be plenty more art in life due to it being my line of work~

As for my psychonautical experience, I am very juvenile. I have spent all my life exploring my inner and outer world purely in sobriety, and I see no immediate need to change that other than by curiosity, and theoretically knowing what's in store for me. A lot of my dreams occupy topics pertaining to altered consciousness, and the drinking of healing medicines, despite me having never done it. This naturally drives my curiosity to learn more and explore the nature of psychedelics and the impact they have on the mind and one's identity of themselves as a being on this earth, in the universe.

A fun fact, I have an auditory to visual synesthesia, which started to really develop around early highschool. I began drawing collages of the visual representations of things I would experience on my downtime. I was quite depressed during my highschool years, as the synesthesia grew more intense and incoherent, so my real curiosity in my perceptual difference started then.

Here are a few images I drew around my highschool years that I feel represented the types of thought processes I was going through at the time:





I always will have a growing interest in understanding the subtleties of the mind, as it develops and shapes itself through one's experiences. I've gotten better at understanding the building blocks that complete a specific train of thought, which has helped me get over my depression and depersonalization disorder, little by little. With more practice, and more meditative states used productively, I've certainly gained wisdom that has improved my quality of life.

Again, my experience with psychoactive substances is very limited with regards to use, however I spend a lot of time researching and going through thought experiments associated with them. Other than cannabis, mescaline is the only other substance I've started to dabble with. So far it has been an interesting experience, and I aim to explore it further. I would love to read up on the variety of psychedelic experiences and knowledge base that everyone here has to offer, because it is an enlightening read

Thank you for reading,

~Spenceland

First off, welcome to the Nexus, not that I'm much of a welcome party as I have only been on this site for a few months, but for what it's worth, welcome.

Second off . . . those drawings are fucking amazing awesome fantastic, I love them!
Ahem, excuse me. Yeah they're really great, thanks for sharing.

As far as the community goes, I'd say dive right in. Ask questions. Start commenting.

I would also advise looking at a few of the sticky's and common threads and FAQs about how to ask questions and how to conduct oneself, ect. This is a very giving community, but knowing etiquitte is helpful and saves the moderators a lot of trouble. Just my thoughts, peace.

(Also you gotta flood this place with those drawings, they're fantastic)

Thanks very much for the warm words my friend I'm really flattered you dig my work! I have a lot more I haven't gotten around to uploading, but I have a few more uploaded here!

I will definitely be kayaking through the DMT Nexus waters for the next little while, this is such a big site with so much to take in.

I will take the advice to heart and read through as much as I can handle~ very excited to learn more about the preparation of ayahuasca, and the mind and body preparation that takes place. A friend and I are planning to prepare the drink at some point during the summer, I readily look forward to it.

Welcome to the Nexus, Spenceland

I really love your art. There's something about the style that is very compelling and feels real...like the images are calling out from some other plane of existence, or are captive on the paper (or something like that ).

I'm really fascinated by synesthesia and would love to hear about any particularly striking stories/experiences you would be willing to share about living with such a phenomenon. I assume it has played a role in your art...I'd be interested to hear about that if it's not too personal.

Again, welcome. It's great to have you

Ooo... Another one... Welcome!

Another warm welcome added to the pile!

Nice artwork; Im wondering if or how your mescaline experience(s) have altered your synesthesiae, either during the trip or even after.

I'm happy to hear you're enjoying my style, it is a very interesting process to create the pieces. I'll start off by immediately admitting I do NOT have a final product in mind when creating them. Sorry if this is a bit too broken down, I love to give detail

As I stare at a blank piece of paper, first thing that comes to mind is a seed. A seed from a plant I have never seen. In my mind I imagine the birth of this seed, and whichever shapes first immediately unfold, I let those be the beginning parts of the drawing. They can be as simple as one line, and generally are. Music plays a HUGE role, I typically play soft space ambient music, or anything with a psychedelic/out of body quality. This helps me take my mind off everything but the visual associations that are on my mind.

After watching the seed burst in my mind, and drawing what i see fit, I let the music pull the shapes into character. The experience is far more in depth than what you see on the paper, and it is my dying wish that I am somehow able to convey my synesthesia experience with people in full detail. Every shape that you see budding off the next, in each image, is such a short and condensed visual. When I am seeing what to add next to the drawing, I am getting fully detailed tangling shapes in my mind which are beckoning me to draw them. My hand-to-mind coordination isn't yet up to the speed which I'd like it to be though I draw these very quickly. Most drawings are completed in under two hours, as I frantically try to detail in as much as I can!

In short, the drawings are imagined as plants, growing and generating fruit which have flavours in my mind. Some flavours are favoured more than others, and leave a lingering taste, which gets projected into the page. Some recurring elements come back into my drawings because of the tendency to relate back to visual tastes I enjoy.

More than anything else, I love just sitting back and watching these intense movies of the mind take place while listening to particularly visually seductive songs. Artists like Boards of Canada and Autechre and ambient artists such as Steve Roach pull in such vivid images. Typically it's like an extremely immersive visualizer for every frequency of every sound, combining into an elaborate abstract space. It's literally a visual translation of every part of the sound, shaped and molded by my associated emotions, set and setting.


About mescaline... during the trip, the synesthesia felt a lot more "outward", in that it felt more connected and perhaps less intense! Something I did not figure would happen. However this might be the cause of me being able to read the visual language better than I could before, and be able to quickly unscramble the abstract ideas being presented. I'm sure with a higher dose of my peruvian torch I will find different results; so far I have had only mild experiences. This weekend if my gelcaps arrive, I will have a proper trip set up, and I am very excited I've had nothing but positive results with it thus far.

I'll also share a particularly interesting moment which was one of my first intensely vivid moments of synesthesia. I was about 14 at the time: I was sitting in my desk, having had a particularly empty day, emotionally. I felt negativity filling every inch of my body, from some experiences at school, and it would not leave my mind. I turned on this song and listened to it over and over again... suddenly, I realized all could be weaved in between, and I could pull myself around those negative emotions.

Suddenly they weren't represented fully with emotion, but instead with shapes that consisted a lot of triangles filled with water texture, pointing downwards, and I noticed they were nearly dancing in front of me. They were like vivid watermarks in my dazed out vision, and once I was able to focus on them, my mind went into an intense tunnel vision. There was a scene showing someone walking, with dots in the sky that were appearing and transforming into certain waveforms based on the soft melody in the music. I heard someone open a door upstairs, and there was this surge of sharp objects in my peripheral vision-- some sharp electric lines which fattened up into fuzzy squares that popped like bubbles. I scratched my desk, and it was as if I was peeling off a scab made of small bacon strips of light... haha. They were red strips with yellow electric edges.

Mind you, I realized these were in my mind's eye, but I had zoned out to the point where it was as vivid as my actual sight. I then realized I could shift back and forth into the depths of the realm of the shapes, and back into full focus of whats around me.

As time went on, it became harder to ignore the visual associations. Now, I think in shapes. It is as coherent as language for me. However I have a hell of a time understanding lyrics in songs and having conversations with people... I have to focus REALLY hard to not get bombarded with shape salad it's so easy to forget to listen to what they're saying and not to the visual associations of the frequencies they're giving me to hear.

That was quite a ramble... if you couldn't tell, I love explaining the process of synesthesia as I experience it! I am fascinated by it all the time.