I'm experiencing improved visual perception after my first few psilocybin trips which I did in the last 3 months. My last trip was about a level 2, four weeks ago. I can't find evidence of other people going through the same after-effects, so I'm really curious about this. I'm also worried about things getting bad if I increase doses to a level where I see proper hallucinations. I wouldn't want my condition to turn into debilitating HPPD.
Here are the after-effects I've been experiencing:
I notice detailed color nuances that I used to not notice before, in particular on my own skin. Dark areas in a room look less dark than they used to. I now perceive our indoor lighting as yellowish, which it is ("soft white" LED lightbulbs) whereas before I couldn't see a difference with daylight.
Many photos and paintings look better than they used to. Small photos of people as seen on the Web look more cartoonish and smoother than they used to.
I have a better depth perception than I used to. This is obvious when looking at some photos or paintings which used to look just flat. Now in many cases, they appear in 3D as if I was watching a 3D movie with stereo goggles. The location of objects in a scene is now obvious. I can feel like I'm in the middle of the scene if I want to - rather than being forced to see things from the perspective of my eyes or camera.
Some photos and artwork look animated. They're not breathing but I see they want to breathe. I perceive the direction of the potential movement of objects. In a photo of a crowd, I perceive the direction of movement of each individual. On a photo of a cabbage plant with big leaves, I see the direction in which the leaves would move if there was a bit of wind or some shaking. Many late Renoir paintings that used to look ugly to me are now super interesting because I now perceive depth and a lot of pseudo-movement. It's wild.
I feel like I've acquired a superpower. I wish to keep it that way and I hope it can somehow help others.
Questions:
Is this condition known and if so, how is it called?
Is there cause for concern?
Should I keep experimenting on my own?
For now, I'm trying to hold off until these after-effects are gone but I don't know for how long.
Hi MadDoc This is curiouser and curiouser... I'll keep digging. It would be nice to know whether my visual perception went from average to superior, or from below-average/inhibited to average/normal. Maybe I can take some tests that involve color vision or "spatial perception". I took a spatial reasoning test already but I didn't do particularly well on that - I think it involves a different skill unrelated than what I'm experiencing. Sounds wise. Meanwhile, I started painting. It's been encouraging so far!