Lucy in Pollyville

Amanda's Creative Exploration with Synesthesia and LSD

To prepare her space, Amanda cleans her home, stocks up on brightly colored snacks like fruits and yogurts, lights up the room and grabs her crayons and markers before dosing with LSD. With psychedelic journeying, set and setting can enhance or detract from the experience, so Amanda is mindful and intentional about setting up her environment before the trip.

This time around, her intention is not about healing her womb space or working through premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Rather, she pulls out a Polly Pocket dollhouse and gets to work on her latest film project, The Pandemic in Pollyville.

While under the influence of LSD, Amanda views Pollyville from an entirely different perspective, co-creating with Polly Pocket to craft story lines and working to understand what life would be like for an adult version of Polly during the lockdown.

In a scene from The Actress, Polly has many suitors in an attempt to cure her loneliness and insatiable need for connection. Based on the increase in Tinder usage during the lockdown, many of us can relate to Polly’s existential crisis:

Utilizing altered states of consciousness for creativity is not uncommon in psychedelic crowds. In Amanda’s case, she works with psychedelics for a variety of reasons including healing from childhood trauma, enhancing creative projects and learning more about her unique experiences of the world.

Synesthesia

Synesthesia, or cross-sensory experiences, are sometimes reported under the influence of psychedelics. For example, a visual psychedelic experience such as a spiral may dance to a particular beat while the music is playing. In this example, sound and vision sensory information integrate to produce a cross-sensory experience.

While some people only experience this with psychedelics, Amanda has had synesthesia for as long as she can remember, and has used LSD to explore it in more detail. Under the influence of LSD, Amanda’s synesthetic experiences are amplified dramatically:

“I can see an entire world rich with textures, sounds, colors and pixels. I feel textures with a lot of sounds and sometimes I associate sounds with colors. Every number has an energy or personality to me, so if you can imagine this with LSD, your entire world is immersed in it. LSD has a way to help me really focus, so when I’m on psychedelics I like to use the focus for these types of self-analyses.”

Leaning into her synesthetic nature during LSD trips has undoubtedly been a part of her creative progression, but that hasn’t always been the case. In addition to auditory tactile synesthesia, Amanda also experiences mirror-touch synesthesia:

“I never brought up a lot of the cross-sensory experiences that I’d been having my whole life because they were normal for me, but I started realizing they weren’t normal for everyone.”

Mirror-touch synesthetes have heightened pain empathy as compared to the general population and can experience the physical pain of others. Because of this, you won’t catch Amanda watching Grey’s Anatomy as she is able to feel surgeries being performed on others by viewing it through a television screen:

“I’ve always been highly empathic and I think the mirror neurons are overactive because of that. In that regard, I probably absorbed a lot as a child because I didn’t know how to block it.”

Despite the challenges Amanda has faced with being able to feel a bit too deeply into others’ experiences, Amanda isn’t trying to heal her synesthesia. She’d like to learn more about it and how to work with it to enhance her creative pursuits.

Leaning into her empathic, mirroring nature allowed Amanda to connect with her Pollyville characters while simultaneously letting her inner child come out to play. The Pandemic in Pollyville is a beautifully crafted representation of healing and integrating Amanda’s inner - highly sensitive - child into her adult experience:

The Actress and The Holiday are submissions to the dysphoric project NeuroCreative fundraiser. Have a creative project you’d like to share? Click here for submission details.

BIG thank you to Amanda for sharing her story with us and submitting her creative projects for our first fundraiser. Amanda has inspired me to think differently about what I want for Christmas this year :)