Any insight helpful

[Huan]

Hi there, I am new to the forum, and I want to preface this by saying I’ve greatly enjoyed reading numerous interesting threads.
I would also like to say that I have never taken DMT but I have taken other psychedelic substances but this has nothing to do with that.

A quick summary; when I was quite young (7or 8) I suffered a serious head injury, double fractured my skull and a intercranial hemorrage, I am fine now and thank goodness nothing bad came of it and I recovered quickly enough and everything was relatively fine in the mid to long term.
Although something interesting happened, and as I have been more interested in this space, and greater things, I started to draw a parallel between my own experiences post accident and reports of what happens after ingesting the molecule, or reaching those “higher planes” I am unsure on the phrasing I apologise.
I started having these episodes at night lying down, where I would suddenly experience being thrown full velocity you could say as if from a huge catapult but unmoving, and vast sequence of numbers would start flashing before my eyes, I was neither asleep or awake as I would drift in and out of these things, I can recall also vast rooms with huge colonnades I suppose you could say? Brightly coloured in varying shades, but everything bleeding. That is all I can remember now unfortunately. The overwhelming feeling was of sheer terror, and strictly outside myself, as if thrown into something completely outside my own. As I had no idea what was happening to me, it’s hard to describe how long these would last for, but I would say no longer than 30 minutes, I would have to ask my family. The frequency of these I would say would be for at least up to 6 months to a year after the accident. This is where I drew similarities with “breaking through” and such terms.
Growing up they were brushed of as fever dreams by my mum at the time, but now as I am researching and looking at all this information I am not so sure.
Could it be possible after trauma, to inadvertently access the space, or have these sorts of experience, I have not had any such experiences since, except lucid dreaming and psychedelic experiences, but I am not concentrating so much to access more right now.

Any insight, similar anecdotes or any information on the subject helpful,
Many thanks for reading!
Sorry not sure if this is the right place to post this

 

[Transform]

Thanks for sharing. I've had similar-ish experiences as a child, albeit not after a severe head trauma (although they weren't entirely absent from my infancy and childhood in various ways, as well as having had a life-threatening illness when I was very young). The nature of your visions seem to imply that maybe there was an impact at some velocity - do you recall any specific details surround the circumstances of your injury? It can be surprising what gets imprinted into the mind from a traumatic situation.

The other thing that springs to mind is how one suspected role of DMT is in protecting the brain against oxygen starvation. Not that an intracranial haemorrhage would necessarily imply either of these things, but a connection doesn't seem entirely out of the question. In addition to that, DMT is a known inducer of neuroplasticity/neurogenesis (in common with all psychedelics, as far I'm aware) - but, again, your young brain's rewiring itself, particularly during the active regeneration phases that are known to occur during sleep, could well have involved biochemical processes that give the same or similar qualitative experiences to those induced by psychedelics, at least in some ways, without necessarily involving an endogenous psychedelic like DMT or bufotenine, or one of the more or less oneironautical β-carbolines like 6-methoxyharman, pinoline or whatever.

So, yes, that's a really interesting question and I hope the points I've raised make some kind of sense to you. There's a whole lot of neurochemistry behind sleep phase neuroregeneration that you could look into, and I haven't even mentioned neuropeptides like BDNF.

Welcome to the Nexus!

 

[aizoaceous]

I also have memories from childhood that I believe were some kind of hallucination. They sometimes included a number motif and were sometimes disturbing, though less so overall than yours. I don't think I ever discussed them with an adult, perhaps having learned that it was better not to when I was still young enough that whatever I said wouldn't be taken literally. I experience this less now. In a darkened room I'll always at least see visual noise, and physiological stress may cause me to see more. I believe that everyone is capable of this--for example, extreme endurance athletes often report hallucinations. The threshold is just lower for me. I have family history of migraine and have experienced some episodes myself, though luckily not too severely. Migraine is reported to correlate at least with the visual noise, so my cause may be genetic.

I don't think these experiences are well understood. A perception outside consensus reality might be classified as a dream, hallucination, religious vision, or psychosis, depending on both the nature of the perception and the cultural context. Some of these departures are easier for society to manage than others, so there's a rational basis to treat some positively and others negatively; but it's still somewhat arbitrary. Tanya Luhrmann at Stanford has reported that voices heard by people diagnosed with schizophrenia in the USA express more negative sentiment than those in India or Africa. The Americans also described the voices in more medical terms. This may imply that a less medical viewpoint leads to a better outcome, though it's possible the causality somehow goes in the other direction.

This is absolutely not medical advice, but I found reassurance when I first used a hallucinogenic drug, in recreating and understanding that experience in a controlled manner. The literature reports many others who found long-term, debilitating psychosis, so I guess I got lucky. I don't think we know the ratio, since the bad outcomes are much more likely to come to conventional medical attention.

 

[Transform]

I also have memories from childhood that I believe were some kind of hallucination. They sometimes included a number motif and were sometimes disturbing, though less so overall than yours. I don't think I ever discussed them with an adult, perhaps having learned that it was better not to when I was still young enough that whatever I said wouldn't be taken literally. I experience this less now. In a darkened room I'll always at least see visual noise, and physiological stress may cause me to see more. I believe that everyone is capable of this--for example, extreme endurance athletes often report hallucinations. The threshold is just lower for me. I have family history of migraine and have experienced some episodes myself, though luckily not too severely. Migraine is reported to correlate at least with the visual noise, so my cause may be genetic.

I don't think these experiences are well understood. A perception outside consensus reality might be classified as a dream, hallucination, religious vision, or psychosis, depending on both the nature of the perception and the cultural context. Some of these departures are easier for society to manage than others, so there's a rational basis to treat some positively and others negatively; but it's still somewhat arbitrary. Tanya Luhrmann at Stanford has reported that voices heard by people diagnosed with schizophrenia in the USA express more negative sentiment than those in India or Africa. The Americans also described the voices in more medical terms. This may imply that a less medical viewpoint leads to a better outcome, though it's possible the causality somehow goes in the other direction.

This is absolutely not medical advice, but I found reassurance when I first used a hallucinogenic drug, in recreating and understanding that experience in a controlled manner. The literature reports many others who found long-term, debilitating psychosis, so I guess I got lucky. I don't think we know the ratio, since the bad outcomes are much more likely to come to conventional medical attention.

Oh, that's interesting. I get a high degree of visual noise but only since I was around 16 - which also coincided with getting occasional visual migraines for the first time. It was only after taking LSD at 19 for the first time - and coming down again, I hasten to add - that I really noticed the night sky wasn't pure, smooth, inky black like it used to be. There were so many other potential contributory factors that it's hard to point the finger at a single one, but the overall picture does suggest it was as much environmental, behavioral and trauma-related reasons that came together at least as much as any genetic predisposition.

My recollections of my ability in early childhood to 'project' visions onto my bedroom walls, coupled with my other spontaneous visionary-mystical experiences suggest a possible genetic element too. Even so, none of this was independent of my health emergency very early on and a certain degree of (iatrogenic ) birth-complication trauma, and yet, it was also not entirely surprising to find out that one of my siblings has, according to comprehensive genetic testing, unusal coding variants for one or more of the central monoamine receptors. So, where's the parsimony in this? Probably it's safest to say that the OP was recovering from a TBI and that it's unsurprising there were hallucinatory/visionary-type effects as a result.

@Huan - there's a lot you can take into consideration, starting with the whole of the rest of your medical history prior to that point. Bear in mind that even viruses can have profound mind-altering effects sometimes. Genetic testing - especially the sort that comes with an ext(/exp)ensive(!) interpretation of the results would potentially add some level of insight, but don't get too bogged down in the data.

Also, I didn't bother getting a degree in neuroscience just to prepare for taking psychedelics (I didn't bother getting one at all, in fact, much as I may have liked to) but there's plenty of information available with the potential to help build a deeper understanding of your experiences, how (endogenous?) psychedelics may relate to that, and whether they may have something to offer for you in their own right.