Thread by @rewilde_

I'm going to try and describe some of the psychedelic experience I went on yesterday in the @Drea_m_achine. It was an amazing trip.

The machine just flashes white lights, and has I guess binaural music (by @Jon_Hopkins_ no less!). The rest is within you...

https://twitter.com/BBC6Music/status/1524076015282270209

I should add what I can provide here are static, AI generated images. The experience itself was photographically detailed and "real", and also in constant motion. So consider this at best a static, artistic rendering.

We were shown into the machine by the wonderful team...

I got settled and closed my eyes, the music started and the lights went up and down before starting to pulse. The first visuals I got were red, a symmetrical spiral/mandala with concentric rings. As this progressed small snowflake-like shapes appeared on the rings, dancing.

This progressed to a massively complex black and white spiral, with lines shooting from the centre and a checkerboard, grid-like appearance. (this image is sort of nothing like it but carries the right vibe)

Next I had a sensation of being in a bright sunny meadow with a too-big expanse of blue sky above some indistinct, painting-like rows of flowers

Flowers became the focus. Petals, close and morphing images of petals orange and red, and then some closeups of fruit (insides of kiwi fruit for one). All morphing, changing and almost representative/form-like, not real yet hyper real.

The petals continued until I was in a grey space with hundreds of petals on their edge, swaying this way and that with the slightest breeze, slowly as if underwater.

I can't generate an image which looks like this. They moved slowly and gracefully and like dominoes...

This was occasionally interspersed by bright sunlight, which came with rainbow coronas of light. I seemed to be being shown the relationship between sun and the flowers, as though they are one system, one happening and a unity. A connection. This theme of connectedness continued.

Next the swirls and mandalas became almost crystalline, and eventually increasingly mechanical. The chaotic nature of them grew and grew to a crescendo. It felt like an analogy for human technology, and the sense was this is also a part of nature. E

Eventually this almost exploded in a climax, and I dropped back to a steadily flowing starfield. The noise was gone. There were stars and eventually orange dunes of a vast desert appeared, rolling on and on.

Around this point I began to get images of Krishna and Shiva, and other deities. The sense that these too were synonymous with the process or evolution I was witnessing. That they too were an organic part of nature, a facet of this one unified flow.

Things sort of "zoomed out" at this point to a scale where everything I had seen was revealed to be just one of a multitude of realities, like cells in a body, emanating endlessly outward from their centre.

There was a powerful sense of a source, a shared and single "happening" which could variously be called the universe, God, nature, Tao, reality, being, existence. And I was both a part of it and an observer of it. But that it's perfect harmony was not at threat, not ever.

I did have some more thoughts and feelings and images which I won't share today, but this was the main thrust of my experience.

When I emerged, out into rainy Woolwich, I realised I did so with the feeling "now I have to go be a human again". I'd been something else, for a time.

It made me realise that I feel we are more than just this body. That I feel the universe has order and harmony and balance which we do not bring to it. That our perception is limiting and limited. It made me feel peaceful and small and also endless and a part of this evolution.

I loved it and I'd encourage anyone to do it. I feel truly lucky to have been given this "vision" for want of a better word, of the universe in perfect order.

If you put these machines in churches or temples, I'd go every week. It was truly profound. Truly enlightening.

Indeed, it felt like the sort of transformative or revelatory experience some speak of in relation to meditation. All I had to do was sit back and close my eyes.

A final thought. Did it "change" me? Very early to say, but my answer is yes and no. I brought all this stuff with me inside my mind. The machine just brought it out.

But can I imagine ever forgetting what I've seen, heard and felt about myself and the universe? Absolutely not.