I've known I've seen visual snow as long as I can remember - I've thought of it as "eye pixels".
I took a moderate dosage of shrooms (approx. 1g) - enough to feel high like taking edible weed, and a little bit of a things-are-connected, but not enough to feel out of it or see hallucinations.
When I closed my eyes, I was surprised to notice the visual snow didn't look the same anymore. Now it formed into kaleidoscope patterns. It was the same color and density as the visual snow, but now it no longer looked like random noise- it mostly looked like hexagons, but also some other regular patterns.
The exact pattern that was formed would change from second to second - but it was a regular pattern repeated all across my visual field and made from the visual snow. The "my vision / normal vision" in Scott's post is accurate, except imagine those patterns just when I close my eyes or looked at something plain like a featureless wall, and made from the visual snow.
Note it wasn't visual snow with this pattern overlaid - the visual snow had become this pattern.
It's weird, because I remember thinking to myself at the time:
"My eyes are not firing in a way to produce these patterns, some low level part of my visual processing is telling me that these patterns exist, and yet they look as real as anything I see. It's not the same as when my visual imagination is strong and I visualize (like just before drifting off) or when I'm dreaming. It's literally there (though faint). I'm not controlling it or imagining it. This is input to my conscious perception of reality."
I felt like I had a first-hand insight into how processed by our body and mind our view of the world is - how what we see is not literally what's coming into our eyes. Because suddenly random noise literally did not look like random noise any more. Along with the heightened sense of profundity that one experiences too, this felt like a significant realization.
I also wonder how much my perception of what I view as simply real, what I experience as being just-so on a conscious level is actually strongly filtered in this sense from a lower level, in such a way that as much as you might be able to reason about it and say "aha, there aren't actually any hexagons" it doesn't change the fact that you will still literally in your conscious mind get that input of "there are hexagons" (where here "hexagons" are a metaphor for ideas in general).
(Throwaway account)
I've known I've seen visual snow as long as I can remember - I've thought of it as "eye pixels".
I took a moderate dosage of shrooms (approx. 1g) - enough to feel high like taking edible weed, and a little bit of a things-are-connected, but not enough to feel out of it or see hallucinations.
When I closed my eyes, I was surprised to notice the visual snow didn't look the same anymore. Now it formed into kaleidoscope patterns. It was the same color and density as the visual snow, but now it no longer looked like random noise- it mostly looked like hexagons, but also some other regular patterns.
The exact pattern that was formed would change from second to second - but it was a regular pattern repeated all across my visual field and made from the visual snow. The "my vision / normal vision" in Scott's post is accurate, except imagine those patterns just when I close my eyes or looked at something plain like a featureless wall, and made from the visual snow.
Note it wasn't visual snow with this pattern overlaid - the visual snow had become this pattern.
It's weird, because I remember thinking to myself at the time:
"My eyes are not firing in a way to produce these patterns, some low level part of my visual processing is telling me that these patterns exist, and yet they look as real as anything I see. It's not the same as when my visual imagination is strong and I visualize (like just before drifting off) or when I'm dreaming. It's literally there (though faint). I'm not controlling it or imagining it. This is input to my conscious perception of reality."
I felt like I had a first-hand insight into how processed by our body and mind our view of the world is - how what we see is not literally what's coming into our eyes. Because suddenly random noise literally did not look like random noise any more. Along with the heightened sense of profundity that one experiences too, this felt like a significant realization.
I also wonder how much my perception of what I view as simply real, what I experience as being just-so on a conscious level is actually strongly filtered in this sense from a lower level, in such a way that as much as you might be able to reason about it and say "aha, there aren't actually any hexagons" it doesn't change the fact that you will still literally in your conscious mind get that input of "there are hexagons" (where here "hexagons" are a metaphor for ideas in general).