When I was a senior psychology major, I had the opportunity to take a class in parapsychology. I know, I know, most people looked at me oddly when I told them that. It involved a lot of archival research and looking for various studies on clairvoyance, specifically those that had some element of replicability. Unfortunately, psychic experiments that could be replicated were few and far between. I spent a lot of time in parts of the library that I didn’t know existed combing through crumbling volumes of the Journal of Parapsychology from the 1960s. With every volume I could have swore my own psychic abilities were getting better.
My professor was supremely knowledgeable about the history of parapsychology, just as he was about more accepted mainstream psychology. He always mentioned two things — his time in the military and his research on a sensory deprivation technique meant to enhance ESP called ganzfeld. I forget if there was a connection between both sets of stories, but I was reminded about this period of my life when a recent article about do-it-yourself ganzfeld experiments was published (and referenced by a number of blogs that I regularly read). Since I’m much more daring than I was back in college and a side effect of ganzfeld’s sensory deprivation is mild visual and auditory hallucinations I knew I had to give it a try. All I needed were ping pong balls, tape, good headphones, a radio and a quiet room.
The hardest part of the process was taping half ping pong balls to my eyes so that I couldn’t see the outside world. I probably overdid it on the tape, but at least I wasn’t self conscious about the ping pong balls falling off. Once that was done, I put on my headphones to loud static and relaxed. After what may have been ten minutes (I wasn’t sure since I couldn’t see the clock), I could pick up an image swirling around in front of me. Soon it came into clear focus — a well-defined, beautifully feminine eye. Occasionally I would hear a woman’s voice that sounded far away calling my name. I thought that was going to be it, but soon after a cloudy formation floated up from the bottom of my field of vision. It eventually took the shape of a pyramid that floated upward until it merged with the eye. I was really perplexed why this is what I was seeing, but continued until my eyes started to itch.
It want exactly the way I was hoping for it to be. A part of me wanted it to be like that episode of South Park where kids were getting high off of cat pee. I especially felt that way after I brought someone else in to try it. She said she was on an airplane looking down at a city. Her vision had animal faces in the clouds too. Anyway, I might shoot for something like that and try again. It’s probably not as good as drugs (which I wouldn’t know about anyway), but at least it’s a relatively harmless natural reaction to a lack of visual and auditory stimulus.
Hat Tips: Dvorak Uncensored and Wehr in the World
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