If you don't know what Synesthesia is (which is totally understandable) you can either check out wikipedia or read my very unscientific explanation as follows. It's a condition where your senses get crossed. Like you see sounds, taste colors, and make strange and vivid sensory associations in your mind. This may have happened to you while you were tripping, but some people (like me!) have it all the time. For me, I associate letters and days of the week with colors (making me a really good speller lol), I see the year as a Mobius strip, and recently I've been starting to taste music. For example, just now I was listening to "Life In A Glass House" by Radiohead and the flute created this really unpleasant twinge in my tongue. I had to stop listening, even though I loved the song, because the twinge was so irritating. Modest Mouse, however, is always positive-- their consonants taste crackly and I love it. This happens mainly with drone-y, minimalistic music. The thing is, I can date this new development to the first (and only, unfortunately ) time I've dropped acid. I have two theories: either "if you can do it once you can do it again" and the acid just blazed a path that I can now easily walk along, or I'm just a hypochondriac (which is entirely likely.) So my question is, does anyone else have synesthesia? Has anyone else developed synesthesia because of drugs? How have you dealt with it? Or, even if you've just had synesthetic experiences WHILE tripping, I'm really curious.
I have head of this, the drummer from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs has this, he can see sounds and hear colors...I have seen them live quite a few times and always watch him and wonder how he must feel while drumming.
I have took acid. First time I did I had a bad trip.. I also experienced Synesthesia for the first time. I could taste vinegar in my eyes. It was crazy.. like my eyes had taste buds or something. Very strange! Anyway since then I have random moments of synesthesia. When playing guitar I have different colours/words/pictures flashing in my head for certain chords or notes. Sometimes it takes me a while to notice I have repeatedly been saying and seeing the colour navy in my head when playing a certain note formation and seeing a tractor for another. It's weird but nothing that gets in the way.
I've certainly had it under the influence of LSD and 2ce. I get goosebumps and like tingly when I listened to music i did on ecstasy but that's almost more like the equivalent of a flashback of sorts i guess. I do sometimes visualize music when I listen to it but based on some videos i've seen of people who actually get interviewed as being synesthetic it's nowhere even in the same ballpark. I just kind of get indiscriminate images and and textures of the music. The video i saw, this lady with synesthesia was saying like the F note is blue and the C note was yellow, B note was green , so on and so forth and these notes are the same color EVERYTIME. it's nowhere near that for me when i play or listen to music.
Yes, I have had synesthesia since I was a child. It used to frighten me to a degree, until I met and spoke with a knowledgeable psychiatrist from Europe who also happened to be a profoundly gifted violinist. He believed that syn. is the gift of an exceedingly advanced and creative mind. One of the most memorable experiences of it I had was while viewing the (live) artwork of Van Gogh. His use of color and feeling was SO powerful, SO Godly, that I could hear music while looking at the paintings.
