I've started listening to a DHE course. One of the early exercises in the course is about vividly hallucinating crosshairs. Like, hallucinating that there's actually a pair of crosshairs on the wall in such a way that you can't tell that there's not really a pair of crosshairs on the wall.

Just considering doing this raises in me a massive ecological objection: if you start doing that, what is there left to differentiate between fantasy and reality? What is there to keep you from becoming a full-blown schizophrenic?

More to the point, it seems that the near-universal inability of humans to do that kind of thing by default is probably in place for that very reason. It's for a similar reason, I assume, that we tend to experience massive amnesia about our dreams: keeping that split between fantasy and reality is extremely important to one's sanity (to say nothing of things like driving safety).

I considered going half-way and partially hallucinating things--you know, that half-translucent things. That seems more useful, anyway. Why are you going to want to hallucinate things that occlude your vision?

So anyway, I'm curious: Has anyone here taken the plunge? Hell, has anyone here even managed to do it at all?

Chris Johnson wrote:

Just considering doing this raises in me a massive ecological objection: if you start doing that, what is there left to differentiate between fantasy and reality? What is there to keep you from becoming a full-blown schizophrenic?

The ability to hallucinate what you want, when you want it, where you want it, and how you want it is the opposite of psychosis.

The difference between fantasy and reality is your knowledge that you put those crosshairs there deliberately. How you know that will be idiosyncratic to you, though.

Trends never continue unabated. The slope is not slippery.

Having experienced both psychosis and DHE training, I can confirm what Michael is saying.

The thing with the crosshairs, as with some of the other elements of DHE, is doing so without the need to ask why. It really isn't helpful, at least while you're dealing with the training. Afterwards, by all means speculate what some of the components of DHE are designed to do: that's a hallucination all of its own. (Wish I'd been able to go to Gabe's Intro to DHE last year, when he'd have doubtless revealed some of what's under the lid for what good it's worth.)

I guess my primary fear is that I'll start having such hallucinations without consciously willing (or even wanting) them to happen. In other words, that what starts as conscious hallucination will turn into psychosis. On one hand, it stands to reason that if you can "turn on" the ability, you should be able to "turn off" the ability in much the same way. On the other hand, if such a thing is a real risk, I don't want it to happen while driving or something. Suddenly hallucinating a dog or a pedestrian walking in front of my vehicle would make for a bad day.

Have you both managed to do the exercise? Can you share your experiences with it? For instance, how did you learn to do it? Can you hold the hallucination indefinitely? Can you change it at will? Have you found any crossover into hallucinating changes to pre-existing objects you can see? Things like that.

Yes, have done the exercise. It becomes second nature after a while. And builds onto another stage, of imagining a globe around you and others with a grid on it. By doing so, it became easier for me to track eye and other movements since it gives them reference points, even if they're imagined.

I think the exercise is partly designed to nudge you towards asking these kind of questions, so it's cool that you are and thanks for letting us share in that. It's an endlessly fascinating topic for me. In essense: how do we create our own realities without going bonkers?

With DHE, one of the main things is to explore and find out what works for you. NLP is about modelling how other people do things but DHE is about designing how you want it to be. My strategy for knowing what's real and what's imagined (hallucinated) works for me but your way will be better for you once you discover it. So let me ask you a question: how many different ways can you think of where the imagined cross hairs could look exactly the same as the real cross hairs and yet you'd still know the difference?

Chris Johnson wrote:

I guess my primary fear is that I'll start having such hallucinations without consciously willing (or even wanting) them to happen.

Give us a quick list of all the things you've intentionally learned to do and then began doing unwillingly.

Have you both managed to do the exercise? Can you share your experiences with it? For instance, how did you learn to do it? Can you hold the hallucination indefinitely? Can you change it at will? Have you found any crossover into hallucinating changes to pre-existing objects you can see?

It's something I haven't bothered practicing; I can hold a clean visualization with my eyes open for a fraction of a second.

I have, however, known a great many psychotics. One was a psychiatric nurse who was experiencing hallucinations as a side-effect of medication. She e-mailed me one evening to tell me how amused she was by the giant, floating, disembodied head outside her window. I asked her how that amused her rather than scared her, and she said it was because she knew she was hallucinating.

The way vision works is this: light bounces into the eye and hits the retina, where some of it is changed into nerve impulses which are transmitted to the brain, and then the brain makes some sort of sense out of those impulses. The brain then shows us images of its interpretation of those impulses.

At the back of our eyeballs, reality ceases to be an influence on what we see. Our nervous systems handle it all. We see with our brains, not our eyes.

So consider this: unless you learn to see on purpose, you will continue to see accidentally some distorted version of whatever happens to flop itself in front of your eyeballs in sufficient light.

chris_morris wrote:

I think the exercise is partly designed to nudge you towards asking these kind of questions, so it's cool that you are and thanks for letting us share in that.

Agreed. I think another point to it is similar to the martial arts principle of punching or kicking through the target. If you develop potential beyond what you're likely to need, you'll develop more power and have to exert less effort while implementing it.

Michael_DeBusk wrote:

Agreed. I think another point to it is similar to the martial arts principle of punching or kicking through the target. If you develop potential beyond what you're likely to need, you'll develop more power and have to exert less effort while implementing it.

I agree with that too.

chris_morris wrote:

So let me ask you a question: how many different ways can you think of where the imagined cross hairs could look exactly the same as the real cross hairs and yet you'd still know the difference?

Not all of these follow your directions to the letter, but here are some means of differentiation off the top of my head:

1. Make it semi-transparent (this seems to already be one of my "that's not real" submodalities)
2. Hallucinate an arrow pointing towards it and the words "this is fake" (or similar indicators).
3. Make it jiggle/flicker a bit (like holograms tend to be portrayed in movies, e.g. in Star Wars).
4. Have it emit a certain noise (seems a bit dodgy, but whatever).
5. Limit myself to creating only as many such hallucinations as I can consciously keep track of.
6. Make it automatically fade unless I consciously will it not to (this is what happens already with my visualizations).
7. Build in some system whereby questioning the reality of a hallucination would make it fade (although this could potentially lead to the opposite problem--negatively hallucinating things that are actually there).
8. Hallucinate a separate checklist of things I've hallucinated which haven't yet faded (meta-hallucination?).
9. Arrange it so that the hallucination appears only when viewed from a certain angle (somewhat like a privacy screen).
10. Attach the ability to some kind of physical anchor. E.g., I can only do it while holding "the visualization token."

Michael_DeBusk wrote:

Give us a quick list of all the things you've intentionally learned to do and then began doing unwillingly.

The main example I've been thinking of is muscle spasms. Typically, I have full conscious control over my skeletal muscles. Sometimes, however, a muscle will spasm--it'll contract involuntarily.

Admittedly, I can't think of many other examples. I guess it's more an issue of "if this happens at the wrong moment, it could be really bad," as opposed to having any involved history with such things. Put another way, I'm very interested in doing it, and can see how it'd be really useful, but it's not going to do me any good if it also kills me.

I have, however, known a great many psychotics. One was a psychiatric nurse who was experiencing hallucinations as a side-effect of medication. She e-mailed me one evening to tell me how amused she was by the giant, floating, disembodied head outside her window. I asked her how that amused her rather than scared her, and she said it was because she knew she was hallucinating.

How did she know?