The sounds we hear in our daily life are always accompanied by a reverberation. If we are in a room, the sound from the source will not only reach our ears directly, but will bounce off the walls to reach us in an increasingly nuanced way. This process is so fast that we do not notice it, but in fact we hear the same sound several times in succession, and the result is a softer sound than what the sound source is actually emitting. A natural and incredibly fast delay.

That said, a common effect of taking psychedelics is hearing delayed, repeating sounds. In this case, however, the distinct nature of each individual sound is heard.

What I simply thought is: considering the different relationship with time (which as we know is relative) that one has during this type of experience, it could be that what one hear during a trip is not a distortion but a more real immersion in the sound world?

That only applies considering you're in a regular-sized space where the speed of sound is too fast for us to detect the delay. But go into a much larger space, such as the Inchindown oil tanks in Invergordon, Scotland, and you'll find noticing that delay significantly easier.


I'm not really sure what you mean by "a more real immersion in the sound world", but I feel like the reason why this sometimes happens is because the sense of time gets distorted during psychedelic experiences (especially with LSD for me personally), and that time dilation, one might call it, is the reason why we have more time to subconsciously (or not) inspect each sound as it comes to us.

Now, whether this occurence is rooted in what we call "reality" or is a figment of our imagination is a wholly different topic. It is fascinating, though. I remember that one time I had taken just over 1200 micrograms of acid and was waving a Kali baton in front of me, and it left behind itself a trail of hundreds copies of itself, every one of them moving slightly behind the one ahead of it. And I vividly remember I could hear the sound of those copies disrupting the air before my face and next to my ear individually, each one of them making a small ripple that hit my eardrum and was detected by my temporal lobe. It was like magic.

I like how Nydex brought tracers into this discussion. They are almost the visual equivalent to the OP.

There are specific augmentation to our perceptual apparatus relative to the nature of the drug and context in which we use it. In the instance of discussion presently, due to the impact of psychedelics and how they make varying neural links during the experience, it's as though we're able to pick up more data than in a sober mind. As such, we are able to distinctly notice said reverberations, as well as tracers of movement.

As for time itself being an illusion, I think that the assertion is context based as well as based on what one means by "time."

One love

If I had to compare the amount of data I personally feel able to absorb during a psychedelic experience in comparison with my sober state of mind, I'd say that while sober, the stream of information that is able to trickle down to the conscious mind is akin to a small forest stream. On the other hand, during a trip there is a roaring skyscraper-high torrential waterfall that is pouring down.

And yet, how much are we allowed to walk out of the experience with? Seems like there's some kind of checkpoint at the exit, where some primordial keeper of arcane knowledge pats you down and goes "Nuh-uh, you're carrying too much info out, you gotta drop like 98% of it"

Absolutely! As an audio engineer I can attest to this being the case. This effect or phenomenon was most pronounced when I did my first Iboga flood. I remember lying on my bed, and hearing sounds I made ricochet off the walls into the vestibule, into the hallway, into the next room, and back. I could trace the pathway of the sound. It was fascinating. It was no hallucination. It was direct perception.

While sound acuity is greatest on Iboga, it is also present to lesser extents on the psychedelic cacti coming in second. Then MDMA, Ayahuasca, Mushrooms, and so on.

Sound, as it bounces off various surfaces is indeed incredibly sophisticated. I think your conjecture is right on point.

We are actually able, when sober, to hear all these little echoes and to trace them back to their source.
That's how we can determine the direction a sound is coming from.

Only when there are too much echoes, and they're all very loud, we become distracted.

But i mean, the fact that we can hear the difference between sound coming from the left or the right of us means that we are able to notice a delay of less than 0.0006 seconds.

But iboga is indeed very remarkable when it comes to heightening the senses. I was able to hear the sounds of lightbulbs in the distance once, when i was on iboga. And when i was in a dark forest at night, i once, very clearly, saw an owl chase a smaller bird. It was so dark that i normally would have only been able to see shadows everywhere, but when i had taken iboga i could see it almost as clearly as when it would have happened in broad daylight.
It was a realy spectacular sight, leaving colourfull tracers in the dark.

What is "real" reality? It is a philosophical question that has been with us since the dawn of time. Within the epistemology and philosophy of science, it has been treated from Plato to the most current epistemologists as Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend and many others.

But I'll stick with Richard Feinman's phrase, which went something like this:

-"Whatever the "real" nature of reality, we must adapt it so that we can understand it, so any model we develop will be incomplete".

However, I believe, like you, that psychedelic tools open a door for us to explore that "real" reality with an altered state of our senses. On many of my travels I have had colorful visuals that I could not express in any way, "Those colors don't exist" in my daily life and were never described. We have the senses we have needed for our evolution and survival as a species. But to continue with the analogy of colors, our vision is only able to perceive a small portion of the total spectrum of the stream of light.

Sometimes I say this to people who are going to be initiated into psychedelics so that they understand that no matter how many words we put in, we will never be close to explaining our experiences within a psychedelic trip and that they should look very carefully at the emotions they have experienced, before, during and after the trip, because from there, If we "pull the string" we can draw conclusions and data useful for our well-being. And that weaving with words the story we have lived is a fun puzzle, but that we will always end up "inventing" those gaps of history that we will not understand.




There are no words in the "ant world" to explain that this was an elephant looking for water. I think something similar happens to us in this case.

I like this other reflection that I read some time ago:




Therefore, surely the same thing happens to us with many of the things that we observe and are not able to understand. I don't know, maybe black holes are a garbage recycler of a Type III civilization.

On the other hand, I also find it an interesting question: Why do the senses we "keep on" when we have a psychedelic experience are hearing and smell? The rest merge into one point, so to speak. And I think that's why all the rituals used ancestrally with entheogens have two things in common: "Vibratory" or "ancestral trance" music. And smell, the burning of incense and aromatic plants.