After carefully considering all of my options, I recently, at age 47, after having given up smoking almost 15 years ago, decided to start smoking again, Marlboro Reds, and am up to a half a pack a day, after 3 days. The first night I started back to smoking, as I was going to sleep, I had mild but significant visual halucinations of the swirling liquid light-behind closed eyelid variety, compareable to but not as strong as the effects I had achieved the few times in my past that I have done halucinogenic drugs including marijuana, psylocibin and dextromethoriphin. With all of the designer drugs out thrre these days and talk of a database where you can choose chemicals by their effects, I wonder if that effect can be isolated. It certainly does not necessarily go along with impairment, euphoria or sedation -- it is a pretty separate phenomena. And I remember reading thattobacco had been used by the original Americans as a psychedelic, at much higher cconcentrations than Marlboro Reds. So I wonder if Tobacco could be modified, using the technologies developed in Humbolt County over the last 40 years, or the technologies developed at Starbucks, or even the technologies developed be Alexander Shulgin, so that it delivers consistently the kinds of closed eye visual "halucinations" that are characteristic of psychedelics but none of the other less desireable effects. Those swirlies are really all you need, because they are controlable, you can read into them what you want, and they are only present when you close your eyes and really concentrate on them.-- JesusHChrist, May 29 2013 Please, somebody else say it first...-- normzone, May 29 2013 I don't think that that was it.
Large doses of nicotine can cause the visuals that you are talking about.There is a very real possibility that these 'closed eye visuals' are nothing more than a noticing of the actual functioning of your own visual system and that it could become a permanent fixture of your visual perception.
It's not easy to live with...-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, May 29 2013 Hmm well then maybe I better cut down a little. What? I said, Mr. Smoketoomuch, so I'd better cut down a little, then. What?-- JesusHChrist, May 29 2013 Another way I have experienced something like these visualizations without the health disturbance was to set a math graphing ipad app (Spacetime which seems to have morphed into Mathstudio) on a line graph animation and then move the variables up to really high levels and magnify the middle of the graph and then hold the ipad at an angle and squint my eyes, so that the blur of activity on the screen became almost like the snow on an old tv screen, and the visualizations just pop out of the mix -- and you can control them, or go back and forth in them like they were a movie that you have really precise fast forward, stop, and rewind control over, which means to me that whatever is going on there is going on inside my head but kind of supported by the external stimulus. And I could move around in the visual landscape as if I was exploring a 3d environment on a computer screen, but just by changing something in my head.
Actually before doing this I had never really payed attention to the few visual hallucinations I had experienced before, but had just recently read a bunch of Terrence McKenna talks where he talks about visual hallucinations as not rehashed sensory data or part of the visual system but rather as a matrixy kind of way to access extra dimensions -- and the Spirit Molecule which is a book about DMT.
So I definitely need to quit smoking and don't necessarily want to permanently screw up my visual system, although I work with blind folks so it might give me a home court advantage, but am still wondering about the isolatability through drug design of hallucination.-- JesusHChrist, May 29 2013 Persistence of vision is a cool thing to try using a bright burning candle in a dark room with a strip of paper with discernible sieres of cut out images that you burn into your eye one by one as you slowly turn your head looking at something cool and grey like a stone behind the candle, on weed, then shutting your eyes to watch the images.-- rcarty, May 29 2013 Wow, Marlboro 72s. Reminds of Ducados.-- JesusHChrist, Jun 01 2013 Welcome back, [JH].-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jun 01 2013 Back in black //Ducados//-- JesusHChrist, Jun 01 2013 random, halfbakery