Maria Fedorova is a PhD researcher in the project Philosophy as Conceptual Engagement at the University of Vienna. She works on experiential imagination and altered states of consciousness. You can find out more here.
A post by Maria Fedorova
In a series of interviews conducted by T. C. Swift and his colleagues on psilocybin (the psychoactive compound in “magic” mushrooms) experiences of cancer patients suffering from depression and anxiety, two patients, Brenda and Victor, reported the following experiences:
Brenda: At one point during her session, she experienced herself floating toward a brick crematorium and concluded that she must have died. After “bouncing off ” the crematorium she found herself under the ground in rich soil:
I felt like this was really dealing with death…I’m in the forest and there’s this beautiful, loamy, woodsy, green, lush kind of woods, and I’m down below the ground…And it felt really, really good, and I thought, “That’s what happens when you die. I am going to be reconnected with this beautiful world. This earthy world that we live in.”...It was just simple. It was gorgeous. (Swift et al. 2017: 500)
Victor: Until this point in the experience, I did not have a body. I was just this kind of soul, this entity…I was shopping for a body, and the only body I could choose was my body. And this is meaningful because I had a lot of body issues associated with being sick with what chemo did to my body and how it changed. And so I was circling my body, and I saw everything that has happened to my body, all the food I have eaten, the drugs I have taken, the alcohol, the people I have had sex with, the chemo, the exercise, everything that has ever happened to my body. I took it in at once. (Swift et al. 2017: 501)
Both of the reports contain references to psychedelic visions. In most general terms, psychedelic visions can be defined as closed-eye visual experiences induced by psychedelics. Such visions usually involve vivid mental imagery, are somewhat narratively structured and emotionally charged.
Subjective accounts of psychedelic visions have been fairly well-documented (see especially Houston and Masters 1966, Grinspoon and Bakalar 1979). These experiences appear to be almost as common in psychedelic states on moderate-to-high doses of a psychedelic substance as experiences of altered self-awareness, for which psychedelics are renowned. Growing empirical evidence also suggests that psychedelic visions can be therapeutically significant (see, e.g., Swift et al. 2017, Belser et al. 2017, Noorani et al. 2018). Yet the nature of these visions remains relatively unexplored. What are psychedelic visions, anyway? Drawing on Jennifer Windt’s (2015a, 2020) work on dreaming, I argue that psychedelic visions are immersive mental simulations: quasi-perceptual in terms of their phenomenology and imaginative with respect to their cognitive origin.
To start, my appeal to dreaming here isn’t accidental. I take a cue from psychedelic researchers who explicitly compare psychedelic experiences to dreams:
There are good reasons for applying the term ‘oneirogenic,’ producing dreams, to psychedelic drugs. In its imagery, emotional tone, and vagaries of thought and self-awareness, the drug trip, especially with eyes closed, resembles no other state so much as a dream. (Grinspoon and Bakalar 1979: 132, cited in Kraehenmann 2017: 1037, my italics)
This observation is about the phenomenology of psychedelic experience. Psychedelic experience supposedly feels like a dream. In the case of psychedelic visions, the question is: in what sense does the phenomenology of psychedelic visions resemble the phenomenology of dreams?
Naturally, to answer this question, we first need to determine what it’s like to dream. Some philosophers believe that dreaming mimics the phenomenology of waking perception (see, e.g., Revonsuo 2006, Metzinger 2009, see Windt 2015a for an overview; see, e.g., Ichikawa 2008, 2009 for a contrasting view). On this view, dreaming is quasi-perceptual. This claim, however, as Windt points out, can be interpreted in two different ways. A strong version of the claim says that dreaming replicates the phenomenology of waking perception in its entirety. A weak version says that dreaming resembles perceptual experience in some respects but not others (Windt 2020: 663).
Since the strong version of the claim appears to be empirically implausible (Windt 2015a: 248), I won’t dwell on it here. The weak version of the claim, by contrast, is instructive. It helps illuminate what Windt takes to be the “phenomenal core of dreaming” (Windt 2015a: 522). Dreaming is immersive (Windt 2015a: 523, 2020: 663). It involves a sense of presence in a dream world (see also Lawson and Thompson 2024). In this way, dreaming feels like perceiving in the sense that we experience our dreams from a particular phenomenal “spatio-temporal self-location” (Windt 2015a: 522) or, to put it very simply, from a particular experiential point of view.
Might psychedelic visions share the phenomenal core of dreaming so construed? Subjective accounts of psychedelic visions lend partial support to the view that psychedelic visions are indeed relevantly immersive (See also Camlin et al. 2018, Schenberg et al. 2017 for descriptions of ibogaine-induced psychedelic visions as immersive experiences.). Like a dream, a psychedelic vision seems to involve a sense of presence in the vision’s world. As Swift and his colleagues put it:
The present study revealed that the psilocybin sessions were generally described as immersive and experiential in nature, with insights and visions not merely imagined or thought but felt as lived experiences for the participants. (2017: 509, my italics)
It is nevertheless worth noting that psychedelic visions might not be quite as immersive as dreams. Rainer Kraehenmann (2017) rightly observes that psychedelic experience is typically marked by a certain degree of lucidity. In most cases, we’re aware that we’re having a psychedelic experience. This contrasts with experiences of non-lucid dreaming, in which we don’t realise that we are dreaming. Kraehenmann then goes on to suggest that psychedelic experiences most closely resemble lucid dreams (Kraehenmann 2017: 1037).
But psychedelic experience, in general, and psychedelic visions, in particular, don’t merely differ from dreams with respect to their lucidity. Another obvious difference, which applies to both lucid and non-lucid dreams, lies in the degree of perceptual decoupling (Girn et al. 2021: 4). However captivating, your psychedelic vision won’t be fully immersive simply because you’re awake and can therefore be distracted by things happening in the outside world. This is the feature that psychedelic visions arguably share with ordinary daydreams (see Lawson and Thompson, 2024: 23). Interestingly, this phenomenological similarity between psychedelic visions and daydreams might not exhaust all of their similarities. Another similarity might lie in the cognitive sources of these experiences, which both seem to share with dreams as well.
Some researchers have recently proposed to situate mind-wandering, daydreaming, and dreaming all together on the spectrum of spontaneous thought (Christoff et al. 2016), which functions by way of association and draws heavily on our memories and ongoing concerns (Fox et al. 2013, cited in Windt 2020: 669, see also Irving 2016). Let me briefly illustrate. Think about the last time your mind has wandered to that lecture of yours or to that email you keep forgetting to respond to. Or recall forgetting yourself on a commute to work whilst joyfully daydreaming about that upcoming holiday. Or consider a recent particularly vivid dream of mine in which I failed to submit this blog post on time. That dreams appear to have the same cognitive origin as mind-wandering (and, by extension, daydreaming) has led some researches to conclude that dreaming is an intensified form of mind-wandering (Fox et al. 2013, cited in Windt 2020: 669).
To that end, some psychedelic theorists have also examined thoughts experienced while on psychedelics in terms of “disorganised” or “intensified” mind-wandering (Wießner et al. 2022). Likewise, Manesh Girn and his colleagues (2021) use the aforementioned framework of spontaneous thought (Christoff et al. 2016) to characterise psychedelic-induced thinking. Applying these considerations to psychedelic visions, we can put forward the following hypothesis: though psychedelic visions are experienced as quasi-perceptual, their cognitive origin might be largely imaginative. Our memories and ongoing concerns might serve as one of the main cognitive sources of psychedelic visions1, which psychedelic visions then transform, like dreams do (Windt 2020: 669), into their own thing.
Presumably, this hypothesis can be tested empirically in the future. But already now we can observe that in clinical contexts, the visions that patients experience under the influence of psychedelics largely revolve around patients’ mental health concerns and tend to incorporate patients’ memories (see Swift et al. 2017, Belser et al. 2017, Noorani et al. 2018). This tentatively allows us to locate psychedelic visions alongside other manifestations of our simulational capacity, such as dreams, daydreams, and mind-wandering. All of these manifestations (with psychedelic visions being, of course, chemically induced) plausibly lie on the same spectrum with barely immersive simulations on one side of the spectrum and fully immersive ones on the other (cf Lawson and Thomspon 2024).
The current renaissance of psychedelic research warrants cautious enthusiasm not just about the therapeutic potential of psychedelics but also about their potential to teach us something about the nature of the mind. Some theorists believe that psychedelics can help us understand the nature of consciousness and selfhood by disrupting our experience of the self (see, e.g., Deane 2020, Letheby 2020). Similarly, if my proposal that psychedelic visions are immersive mental simulations is on the right track, psychedelic visions, too, may offer us a window into a deeper understanding of our capacity for simulating alternate realities.
Thanks to Paulina Sliwa and Emily Williamson for their helpful comments and suggestions.
Endnotes
1. The question of whether psychedelic visions draw on our memories and ongoing concerns should be distinguished from the question of the conditions under which such visions occur. Presumably, the neurocognitive effects of psychedelics as well as some other distinctive features of psychedelic experience, such as altered self-awareness, play an important role in how psychedelic visions come about and unfold.
References
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