I've really begun noticing that some days I just seem a lot more visually integrated than normal; it's almost like I have some kind of feeling of being hyper-visual, where all of the sight stimuli that normally might just mildly intrigue me are instead impressed upon me in a more superlative way. Colorful objects now look dazzling. Sometimes I'll see a shiny object and it looks like it's shimmering like jewelry, or people's faces look more beautiful than they normally do. I saw a beautiful woman today, and it wasn’t that any particular part of her stood out to me as more attractive than any other, but there was a kind of symmetry and poetry to the way her facial features all combined, the way she smiled at her friend in conversation, all of these things combined into a wonderful package. I only wish it weren’t ill-mannered to just sit and stare, and take in her visage the way I may watch a tree dancing in high wind. I find a *lot* of people attractive anymore… a harsh, war-wrought face of an older man speaks to a certain resolve of character and ‘get-about-it’-ness that I find alluring. I want to talk to him, look at his face, watch his efforts to retrieve or constrain his emotions. Little children have such remarkable eyes, wide as stars and probing, prodding, analyzing, taking the whole world in. Do I look at the big people the same way they do?
It's kind of an odd thing, and it can be kind of distracting, but at the same time I feel like it's an extension of sensations that I've been trying to develop in myself for many years. Something I've written about when I was younger, the idea of having a child's eye. I was looking at blade spinning on my miter saw today, and I noticed that when the LED light hits it in just the right manner, sometimes it seems to shimmer and refract almost like a miniature rainbow. That's very unusual. I can't imagine that this is a new stimulus, but at the same time maybe I’m just aware of it in a way that I wasn't before. Actually, tight lattices seem to make rainbow shapes too, especially metal ones. If I see the grid of a grate covering for a fan, as the grate shifts as its orientation to me changes, I notice strong pulsating patterns that radiate out from the spokes and the central ring, concentric rings that tighten upon themselves until they collapse into rainbow spirals. If I stare at this document on my screen for long enough, I steadily become aware of areas where the density of text pools, and these pools coalesce into very faint grey blobs in my peripheral, until the blobs themselves stretch into moiré patterns that shift direction with my tilting head.
My motion tracking is also a lot stronger. I remember after the first time I took a large dose of LSD, I had a much stronger ability to track objects that were moving quickly. Things like train cars or vehicles on the road: I would be stationary and as the object passed, I felt less of a sensation that the moving vehicle was blurry and difficult to focus on, but instead the background itself would become blurry and harder to focus on but the object in focus would become razor sharp and I'd be able to look at my new details in the vehicle that normally I might miss. Maybe I would see a scratch on a door or a place where a bit of paint was missing somewhere or the color of the person driving's hair, little details like this. If I'm looking at a person, I seem to focus with almost no exception on their face and their head, but sometimes I'm also aware of the way that their body moves—the way that their hips seem to rotate as their legs drive them forward, or the orientation of their hands as they sway back and forth. Do the hands rotate in and out or do they stay straight? Do they pull in front of the hips or do they stay side to side? Sometimes the chest moves up and down slightly. Sometimes it stays rigid. People seem to move more with their calves and knees, and some other people might move their legs in such a way that they limit motion of their calves and keep their knees relatively straight, stiffly pulling themselves along mainly by thigh motion.
I feel like I'm getting better at sitting still somewhere and taking in the whole experience of my environment rather than trying to focus on individual details too much. My son was playing in the back yard while we waited for his grandma to come pick him up earlier. I find myself feeling perfectly still. Motionless, and nearly thoughtless. It's almost like a specter comes over me and gives me this arresting feeling like I couldn't move if I wanted to, but at the same time I know that I could and the arresting feeling doesn't feel forced or like I'm under any kind of duress. It's just like a shadow passes over my body and in that moment I feel less physical. I don't really feel my skin very much, but more so I feel the heat of the sunlight. Or the subtle tugging of the wind, or I can feel the hair dancing on my neck; little details like that. Visually, I feel like my eyes are almost glazed over, but they're still focused, it's just not on anything. It's on everything, but nothing at the same time. I feel like my eyes stop being like a telescope trying to train in on objects in those moments, but instead they're just windows allowing light in and my brain acting as an input-output network and not an ego and a body squishily and failingly judging and reducing my experience.