The universe might be far more colorful than we realize — not because new pigments exist “out there,” but because our brains may only be showing us a tiny slice of what’s possible. Increasingly, scientists and psychedelic explorers alike are asking a facinating question: could altered states reveal aspects of reality that normally sit outside human perception?
From laboratory experiments to deeply personal journeys, reports of impossible hues, radiant white light, and hyperreal visual worlds are pushing the boundaries of how we think about color, consciousness, and the brain.
The White Light Experience
“It’s a brilliant, blinding white light that is so radiant it contains everything within it. You feel that white light with every bit of your body—like you’re experiencing the vibratory pattern of it, the intricacies and infinite nature of it.”
That’s how Joel Brierre, founder of the Tandava retreat in Mexico, describes the zenith of an 5-MeO-DMT experience. The intense psychedelic is known for inducing ego dissolution (often called Egotod) and mystical states where individuals feel deeply connected to something larger than themselves. That could be nature, God, the universe — whatever you like.
According to Brierre, the all-encompassing white light is a common theme among participants. Others report seeing different hues ranging from “clean blue” an “soft pink and gentle pastel”. These colours are sometimes linked to what he describes as prenatal regression.
“One woman, after taking 5-MeO, reported a very visionary kind of experience, where she was in front of a Jaguar, and the Jaguar opened its mouth, and she was taken into its mouth—and then went into this vast universe from there,” he says.
What Is Color, Really?
Experiences like these raise a deeper question: what exactly is color?
Scientifically speaking, color doesn’t exist as a property of objects themselves. Light reflects off surfaces and enters our eyes as electromagnetic waves. The retina converts those signals into neural impulses, and the brain constructs the experience we call color. In other words, there’s no inherent “red” or “blue” in the world — just energy interpreted by the brain.
From this perspective, what we see is essentially a shared hallucination. Psychedelics may simply amplify or remix that process.
How Psychedelics Change Visual Processing
A 2024 Studie from the Allen Institute found that psilocybin (der Wirkstoff in Magic Mushrooms) changes activity in the brain’s visual cortex, the region responsible for visual processing. This shift may help explain why people often report distorted colors, moving patterns, and entirely new textures during psychedelic experiences.
Another striking example comes from a 2025 experiment at the University of California, Berkeley. Researchers used lasers to stimulate specific photoreceptors in the eye, allowing participants to perceive a color never previously reported — one that doesn’t exist in nature or language. They called this mysterious hue “olo.”
If scientists can create a brand-new color in a lab, it’s not hard to imagine that compounds capable of dramatically altering brain activity might also unlock unusual perceptual experiences.
Different Psychedelics, Different Visual Worlds
Not all psychedelics affect perception in the same way.
“5-MeO-DMT is not that visual—it’s more so that it’s beyond the five human senses,” says Brierre, describing the experience as an ontological shock, “a pure, unadulterated experience of coming into contact with something far more boundless and infinite than the mind can comprehend—what could be considered God, essentially.”
With DMT, however, “the sense of subjective self stays online, so it’s a far more visual experience,” notes Brierre, who also co-founded F.I.V.E..
The imagery, he says, is intensely vivid: “Brilliant, brilliant colors—shining beyond what they ever have before.” Some people report seeing entirely new hues that feel emotionally meaningful or sacred, while others describe neon geometric landscapes and hyperreal detail.
When Colors Turn Dark
While many psychedelic visuals are described as beautiful or awe-inspiring, they can also become overwhelming. Especially at high doses or in chaotic environments.
Brierre recalls his own difficult experience with LSD in the 1990s.
“In the ’90s, I was doing a lot of very high doses of LSD—15 to 20 hits at a time,” he says. “I once had an extremely terrifying experience, filled with very intense visuals—spiraling, fractaling patterns, complex geometric patterning in the air all around me. It looked like trees were being blown away by wind, like the whole world was coming to an end . . . all of the shadows of my mental patterning were, all of a sudden, represented outside of me . . . There was a lot of red, a lot of oranges and yellows . . . some blue hues . . . swirling with every color imaginable.”
It felt, he recalls, like “an internal Apocalypse, where everyone was going crazy from the inside.”
Brain Plasticity and “Ensouled” Colors
Scientists are still trying to understand why psychedelic colors often feel symbolic or “realer than real.”
“From research, we know that psychedelics cause plasticity in the brain, and allow our typical neural connections to reorganize in new ways,” says Mona Sobhani, Ph.D., a cognitive neuroscientist and author. “From a materialist neuroscience perspective, these new neural connections or rewiring[s] might translate into the person’s subjective reality as new or emotionally embedded colors.”
Why the brain uses color to represent these changes remains unclear. “That would be unclear,” sagt sie. “Although there does seem to be a fundamental connection between certain colors and emotional states in humans, as research from psychology testifies.”
Are Psychedelics Revealing Something Real?
Sobhani believes science may not yet have the full picture.
“I believe we should stay open to all possibilities, including ones that are non-materialist and outside the usual scientific worldview,” sagt sie. “Saying things are just a hallucination is lazy—because if the brain is evolutionarily driven to conserve energy, why would it waste so much [energy] creating meaningless visions? That explanation feels too simple.”
She adds that “it is a well-supported fact that the brain is becoming untethered from its normal boundaries on psychedelics,” and whether that reveals something hidden about reality remains an open question.
“But yes, I believe it’s likely that there are aspects of reality that sit outside our perception, and it’s possible psychedelics reveal some of that.”
The Color of Infinity
Across countless reports — from encounters with archetypal figures to visions of cosmic landscapes — one image appears again and again: an impossibly bright white light containing every color at once.
“A flood of brilliant white light that has all the colors of the rainbow inside it . . . merging into the infinite—it rather feels the universe,” Brierre says. “If we try to imagine infinity being expressed in color, that would be it.”
A Window Into Perception
Whether psychedelic visions represent purely internal brain activity or glimpses of something deeper is still unknown. What’s becoming clear, however, is that perception is far more flexible than we once believed.
By reshaping neural connections and altering sensory processing, psychedelics offer a powerful reminder: the world we see every day may be just one version of reality — painted by the brain, filtered by evolution, and occasionally expanded into something far stranger and more colorful than we ever imagined.
