I see fractals when i hallucinate!!

[Jeff]

Hello!
I just wanna share with you that i see patterns everywhere, for example if I look at the floor,
i see some regularity that looks like fractals, I see that on people's clothes, on the walls,
on people's skin, etc. It is like if we can predict where a new star could be born, in a hole
of the fractal when you look at the sky, or where a drop of rain will fall!!!
I am REALLY interested to know if somebody else has the same hallucinations!!
P.S. I never took drugs or alcool in excessive quantity.
Thanks for reading my post!
Jef.

[bib]

It all depends on what you mean by "excessive quantity"  

[Melancholyman]

I see it aswell, altough I'm more fond of travelling in my imagination when I hallucinate. But there is a really really strong relationships between fractals and reality that we haven't yet vaguely started to understand 

[David Makin]

It's time to start worrying if you see hallucinations when you fractal

[miner49er]

heh, I was in Amsterdamn last summer and tried some 'truffels'. aprt from a very relaxing evening, when I went to bed that night (morning) I saw amazing fractals in my minds eye. They looked very simlar to Julia set morphs (where one JSet morphes into another). I was listening to some Comedy on my MP3 player to try and take my mind elsewhere ut this had the effect of altering the 'hue' of th fractal - positive natured comedy made the fractal light coloured and negative made it dark and scary!

I think the link between fractals and the universe is that the universe's complexiity arises from simple rules.

[Nahee_Enterprises]

Hello!   I just wanna share with you that i see patterns everywhere,
for example if I look at the floor, i see some regularity that looks like fractals,
I see that on people's clothes, on the walls, on people's skin, etc.   It is like
if we can predict where a new star could be born, in a hole of the fractal
when you look at the sky, or where a drop of rain will fall!!!   I am REALLY
interested to know if somebody else has the same hallucinations!!
P.S. I never took drugs or alcool in excessive quantity.

Greetings, and Welcome to this particular Forum !!!    

I used to see such things occasionally back in the late 60's and early 70's, but that was a whole different era for me.  
Now I only see such things in my dreams and nightmares while sleeping (or when I wear my paisley tinted sun-glasses).    
 

[sideshow bob]

Hello, I hope nobody minds me reviving this thread, because I have been thinking about it of late...

The interesting question is, why does this phenomenon happen?

One explanation for the fractals that hallucinogen users report seeing, might be that our optical system uses some kind of fractal image representation to encode the data on the retina into a more compact form for the brain to process.  This would assist in grouping objects together into the same category, and would presumably be size-invariant as some of those objects will often be smaller/further away from the viewer than others.

Another is the power of suggestion.  Does anyone who hasn't previously seen fractals, see fractals on their trip?

And finally why does that other oft-reported phenomenon of colour cycling occur?

[Nahee_Enterprises]

    The interesting question is, why does this phenomenon happen?

Some good reading about such things may be found here:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelics,_dissociatives_and_deliriants

And such things as closed-eye hallucinations or closed-eye visualizations (CEV):
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-eye_hallucination

Then there are the out-of-body-experiences (obe) that seem to be hallucinations:
   http://www.psychwww.com/asc/obe/faq/obe21.html
 

[sideshow bob]

Those are interesting links, although none of them address the questions of fractals and colour cycling.  The closest anything comes is this, from the third one

There have been many suggestions as to why the tunnel form should be so common. It has sometimes been compared to the phenomenon of 'tunnel vision' in which the visual field is greatly narrowed, but usually in OBEs and hallucinations the apparent visual field is very wide; it is just formed like a tunnel. A more plausible alternative depends on the way in which retinal space is mapped on cortical space. If a straight line in the visual cortex of the brain represents a circular pattern on the retina then stimulation in a straight line occurring in states of cortical excitation could produce a sensation of concentric rings, or a tunnel form. This type of argument is important in understanding the visual illusions of migraine, in which excitations spread across parts of the cortex.

Another reasonable speculation is that the tunnel has something to do with constancy mechanisms. As objects move about, or we move relative to them, their projection on the retina changes shape and size. We have constancy mechanisms which compensate for this effect. For very large objects, distortions are necessarily a result of perspective, and yet we see buildings as having straight wall and roofs. If this mechanism acted inappropriately on internally generated spontaneous signals, it might produce a tunnel-like perspective, and any hallucinatory forms would also be seen against this distorted background.

So can we hypothesize anything similar for fractal, or colour cycling, hallucination?

I wonder if colour cycling has anything to do with neural information being encoded in spike times...

[hobold]

I cannot provide a source, but I came across the hypothesis that the human eye inherently uses a multiscale approach to analyze what it sees. I made a mental note of this, because I saw two seemingly independent derivations. One was based on the physical structure of the eye, where somebody claimed to have found multiscale networks of connections between sensory cells. The other was based on psychovisual experiments.

If the hypothesis is true, then the human visual system would be in some sense self-similar across a wide range of scales. Fractal shapes might therefor be a "natural" thing for the eye to perceive.