Ganzfeld Exploring

Last night I finally experienced the Ganzfeld effect! I've been wanting to try it out for years, but just never got around to it. I think I saw something on reddit that reminded me of it, so I added ping pong balls to my grocery list and made up my mind to do some altered state exploration.

For anyone who isn't familiar, the Ganzfeld effect is when you're brain creates hallucinations when exposed to uniform fields of stimulation. Imagine tv static. You can clearly see it and your optic nerves are receiving light signals, but you're not really looking at anything. There's no shapes, no lines, no shadows. Your brain knows you're looking at something, it just can't make sense of it. Human brains do not generally accept that, so if there's no defined image to create, but it believes there should be a defined image, sometimes it will make one all by itself!

The basic DIY version of a Ganzfeld experiment goes like this: you cut ping pong balls in half and put them over your eyes. You then remove all light sources around you except for a single red light pointed at your face. Your entire field of vision will then be a solid red color. Then you put on noise cancelling headphones and listen to white noise or static. After a few minutes, your brain may begin looking for patterns in the nothingness since it knows it's seeing even though it's not seeing anything. Same with hearing. At that point many people will begin to experience mild aural and visual hallucinations.

Happy to report that it indeed works! At least for me anyway. I didn't take any pictures, but since I'm definitely doing this again I'll take some pics next time, maybe include a DIY guide on how to cut and shape the ping pong balls to better fit the eye sockets to give full vision coverage. 

After trimming the balls (heh heh) and reshaping them with my heat gun, I started turning off the lights and sat down in my computer chair to begin. I popped on my headphones and found a pink noise playlist. (Pink noise is very similar to white noise; white noise sounds like static, pink noise is a bit less abrasive and often sounds like wind or water flowing some distance off.) I didn't feel like bothering with an entire lamp/light/LED setup last night, so I decided to see if a tealight would be an acceptable light source.

All the lights were off in my room, it was around 4am, and the noise cancellation made everything completely and artificially silent. Only my gargoyle cat tealight holder (his eyes glow when you put the candle in!) was giving any light. I was nervous at this point, because I had heard the Ganzfeld experiments sometimes result in distorted or frightening hallucinations. As I sat there in the near complete darkness with my back to the room, I suddenly thought, "...this is fucking creepy!"

I decided to try the experiment laying down in my bed so I would feel safe. I didn't want my state of mind to cause negative effects. Which turned out to be a good idea, because I did feel a little unsettled at some of the things I saw.

I was laying on my back, pink noise flowing in my ears. The tealight gave off enough light that my field of vision was a dark brownish red. As I settled in, I began to see swirling phosphorescence. It was basically the same as when you step into a dark room from bright sunlight, or rub your eyes a bit too hard. I peered into the chaos and tried to make out shapes. 

I thought inside my head that I only wanted to see good things, that I was calling out with love, stating my intentions, etc. Unexpectedly, my entire field of vision darkened, then went black. I was confused for a moment, then realized the tea light had burned out. I continued on since I could still see the swirling lights just as easily. 

After about five minutes or so, the random light murmurations morphed into what looked like strands of light, reminding me a lot of diagrams of magnetic fields. They formed a ball, and pulsed/wiggled slightly, then morphed into abstract forms that still maintained their parallel lines. This lasted a minute or so. My eyes started to catch glimpses of what seemed like more defined shapes of light and shadow, with clearer lines of contrast. Distorted faces are one of the most reported hallucinations, and that was one of the first things I started seeing. They were very ill defined and lasted fractions of a second. Honestly unsettling; they would stretch or skew, sometimes the mouth or eyes would expand outward to transform the whole face into a random blob. They were barely recognizable as faces though, it was more like looking into moving smoke or the sparkling surface of moving water and thinking, "Oh, that sort of, kind of, maybe looked like something for an instant". 

Around that same time I also started seeing silhouetted shapes of trees, as if I was laying on the ground looking upward at a night sky and there was a tight circle of jagged pointy trees in a circle around me. Again, these were very fleeting and distorted. 

My sense of time was definitely off, but at around fifteen minutes or so, I suddenly saw a very clear image of a woman's eye. She was making direct eye contact, and I could clearly see enough details to see that it was a woman, she had somewhat monolid eyes, dark skin, medium to dark brown irises, and a slight sheen of sweat or oil on her skin. It very, very, very easy to see although it lasted only one to three seconds. It vanished all at once, then reappeared just as quickly, disappeared, then flashed one more time. I did not have any audio hallucinations at all.

A few minutes later I tried looking at the overall field of light fluctuations as a whole instead of focusing on any one formation within the swirls. At this point, I saw a very static-y outline of a woman wearing a hood or head shawl. 

Nothing for several minutes.

I then realized I was starting to enter into a half dream state. That happens to me often when I try to meditate, I'll start dreaming while still being barely awake. Once that happens though, I know I'm immediately about to fall asleep. I think it would be interesting to see if I could keep myself in that state for longer periods, but so far I haven't tried yet.

It was like I was dreaming, but only a fraction of a second at a time. I suddenly saw I was standing in the middle of a soccer arena and there were people standing around me. It was daytime. It was a still picture, no movement, although now I realized there was weak but full spectrum color in the image. That's what made me realize I was transitioning into dreaming. I got several more pictures continuing the scene, just me standing and talking with the other soccer fans around me.

At that point I realized I could either stop the experiment or just fall all the way asleep. I wasn't ready for bed yet, so I took the eye pieces off and stopped the music. All in all I think it was around thirty minutes. I was hoping to have more intense hallucinations, but it seemed like good results for my first time. I must admit, I did feel quite a rush of excitement! 

There was something very alive about the whole thing. I don't know how to describe it, but it was like the experiment itself was alive and aware that I was calling out to it. I'm definitely going to work on some upgraded Ganzfeld goggles and try out different color lights, sounds, and other variables on future sessions. 

It was thrilling to throw myself into the unknown, altered states of consciousness have always been fascinating to me. I'll post more updates if I get any interesting results on future sessions. If there's anybody out there with stories of your own, please get in touch!