Xenolinguistics on 'hallucinations as alien art'

The key to this discussion is a conceit of the extraordinary vision-producing ability unleashed in consciousness by psychedelics, as alien art: aesthetic productions of an unknown, hence alien, source. Whether the alien is an unknown (normally unconscious) aspect of the Self, an Other, or a blended configuration of Self and Other, can be held in abeyance as part of the high strangeness of the experience.... Alien art begins with conditions of extended perception, an ascending scale of effects from the sensory amplifications of cannabis and hashish through the full-scale wraparound realities of high-dose sessions of DMT, psilocybin mushrooms, and LSD. These visionary states and content are frequently experienced as going beyond the pleasures of “great visuals” or “psychedelic eye-candy” to their rhetorical and noetic function, with aesthetics and visual languages employed to deliver a teaching, an insight, a revelation or prophecy, or the sought answer to a problem.

And if you buy that, then you can start connecting the dots to move on in this direction:

Part of the phenomenological epoche or bracketing in this effort consists in setting aside the drive to determine the ontological status of the experiences, especially since abstractions such as “reality” can themselves be radically re-configured in the psychedelic sphere. Further, I examine the reports of others, however unsettling, with the same good faith, engaging in a comparison of texts, essentially a literary and rhetorical activity, with no claims made as to the “reality”, in baseline terms, of the findings. The correlations among texts provide sufficient intrasubjective validation to indicate the possibility that the authors of the reports have spent time in realities sufficiently similar to establish, not a consensus—there are far too few in-depth reports gathered over multiple sessions—but perhaps a set of recognizable landmarks that can form the first sketches of maps of a “reality” that includes these experiences.

This is not new territory - indeed, the author, who goes by mazerunner on her site, pulls in "the usual suspects" to help flesh out this extrapolation, but what's enjoyable about this essay in particular is simply the skill with which it's all laid out, examples presented, and in such a rational frame of mind. We used to call ourselves "ontological cartographers" all the time, without really unpacking what that meant in any useful fashion. But I resonate pretty strongly with the notion that you can have your far out alien DMT entity encounters without passing any judgments about their "actual" existence, and still draw some pretty alien conclusions that might survive the light of cold hard reason.

Then again, I've clearly suffered a lot of brain damage over the years, so your mileage may vary.