Struggling to make sense of the differences in DMT visual phenomena with my glasses on vs. off
Tl;dr a new eyeglasses prescription radically changed my experience of DMT and took my breath away. What to make of it?
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I have been using DMT for about 18 months, and it has completely changed my life. I have about 50 experiences under my belt, most in the sub-breakthrough range. In terms of technique and strength, I tend to vape it at 2.7 volts in 1g cartridges that I make with a 2:1 ratio of DMT to propylene glycol. Nothing prepared me for the absolutely terrifying and beautiful strangeness of tonight's experience, and it was due to new eyeglasses prescription, of all things. I'm hoping there is someone on this sub who knows enough about the intersection of DMT (or serotonergic psychedelics in general) and the neuroscience of vision disorders to help me explain what I experienced tonight.
Background: I don't quite have aphantasia, but I have strong hypophantasia, meaning I can visually conceptualize images but cannot generate them beyond faint outlines. In DMT space, the most I can typically achieve with eyes closed are faint brown-orange swirling patterns, with occasional additional colors if another psychedelic or entactogen is synergizing with DMT (red and blue with LSD+DMT, and olive green, gray, and brown with MDMA+DMT). Accordingly, 99% of my DMT trips have been open eye, and I have had a few incredible open eye breakthroughs.
I also have severe convergence insufficiency, despite having 20/10 vision in each individual eye. My eyes struggle to stay together for more than a few seconds at a time. Over time, my brain learned to neglect and disable the signal from my left eye, and it did it so well that I didn't even notice for months or possibly years.
After finally getting a comprehensive evaluation, I was prescribed glasses with strong prism lenses. Immediately upon putting on my new glasses, my left eye signal clicked back on, I felt dizzy and nauseous, and everything was a blur. Depth perception was atrocious, images were haphazardly 3D, and surfaces appeared convex. In the coming days, however, my corrected vision cleared and I began to see with exceptional clarity, better than I ever have in my life.
Against this backdrop, tonight I went to a private corner of a local park at midnight on a cloudy night overlooking the city skyline for something I do roughly once a month: a 30-minute "continuous short pull" experience. It's my favorite way to consume DMT. I just keep doing short 4-5 second pulls, with a few seconds in between, until I'm exactly where I want to be, and then I will maintain that level for 20-30 minutes. It's a wonderful way to titrate upward and get comfortable in the headspace without fully blasting off in public. To me it's akin to a DIY medium dose version of "DMTx".
New glasses on, the usual visual sharpening began after the first pull, as did the expansion of peripheral vision that accompanies entering open eye DMT space. As I got deeper, suddenly the high clouds became incredibly convex and felt mere centimeters from my face. Anything I looked at became spherical and grew toward my eyes until it hovered atop them in a similarly convex pattern. And unlike my usual DMT experiences, this convex world tracked with my vision and I could control the sphere's dimensions depending on where I looked. With my glasses off, the experience would immediately dissipate, and the clouds would appear their proper distance away, replaced by the typical expansive geometry of mid-dose DMT. But anytime I put them back on, the clouds were again so close I felt I could touch them. I looked over at a tree about 100 meters away, and it crept toward me until it too was just centimeters away, hovering and convex. Depth perception was entirely annihilated, and the closest analogy I have for how it felt is the curvature of space-time at the end of Interstellar.
I am accustomed to layers of geometry coming slowly closer to me as my dose increases, until suddenly the veil breaks and visual reality is replaced rather than altered. But I cannot stress enough that this was a difference of kind, not degree. It was wholly new, it was terrifying, and it was profoundly beautiful. The more woo sense of the feeling was of an entity saying "it's all right here, behind this sphere, if you have the courage to continue." The more scientific questions I kept asking were, "How can simple prism lenses mediate and potentiate DMT visuals to such an extent as to make the impossible possible, with distance between objects being eliminated at will? Was this a unique experience due to my vision disorders, or with my correction was I finally just seeing what most people with normal vision already do?
Anyway, this post is far too long already, but I am blown away and struggling to understand what I experienced. I would be so grateful for any feedback, links to any relevant neuroscience papers, or other knowledge/experience sharing. Thank you in advance.