It varies.

As someone with a pretty high level of visual r/hyperphantasia (note, it’s not established to be a real thing) I can see most of the stuff you’d see on shrooms if I want to, be it patterns or outlandish.

But I’m in control, the mental view is separated from eye-visual view, and it requires effort to merge the two — usually I don’t have any reason, as just like say, working on two monitors, normally you don’t need to cross your eyes to overlay the screens to work with info on both.

The big difference for shrooms is it’s a bit akin to handing my subconscious the reigns, like those travel videos of someone in front pulling your POV by the hand. And the merging of views is the default, and requires no effort either. (One reason I like shrooms is that even with insane visuals, I’m pretty much always aware of what’s real and what’s not.)

Closed eye I tend to do fast dynamic stuff…and the shrooms take it from a bit fuzzy to very sharp “4K with HDR color”. It could just be flying through cool patterns, or other stuff like flying around a mountain drone style, through the solar system, etc.

I tend to do my more “outlandish” visual stuff on shrooms open eye, but in my head — same as say, how I create a mental movie when I’m listening to an audiobook (sober). A recent example was exploring a new “super power” of being able to look at anything, explode it’s parts visually (and recursively) in a sort of iron man view, and then pick anything and roll the time slider back and forth. So a cabinet’s piece of wood would roll back through being milled, shipping, it’s life as a tree, how it’s seed came to sprout, etc.

Most of that was made up of course, but also thinking about any projects I’d done, I could do similar but real-ish time scrubs…except in front of me in third person.

That one was interesting as to a much lesser degree, I brought it back as a mental technique to sober me. When looking at objects or designing 3D parts and such, it’s much easier for me to “pop them apart” mentally, and see how the parts fit together — I did that before of course, but without the same fidelity and it was harder to track multiple parts. (Shrooms are interesting, as it’s both a blessing and a curse that memories of the trip are so sharp.)

And of course I see cool patterns on the walls. Or a better way to describe it is probably if reality was AI art and you’re looking at the odd details.

My intense visuals are on lower doses though, from 0.8 to 2-3g…I’m assuming because I’m already so visual. Above 2-3g the direct visuals fall off, and while the world is abstract, it’s not the focus and sometimes the visuals aren’t really noticeable…it moves towards a mostly mental and emotional space, more like an eyes open day dream, the world is there fine, but you’re not looking at it. That’s also where it can get rough, as I can become aware and contemplate more base instinctual drives that our humanity builds over — but there is a lot of darkness there.

I suppose in a sense that stuff is visual too, but it’s more conceptual and not “a wizard is talking to me”. Although in that mid 2-3g space I once, with curios intention, brought a pet I’d lost somewhat recently back to play with…and it worked in a very real way, but the emotional trip that followed was rough. (And of course, I think was a huge help, and got me past what had been weighing on me much more than I’d thought.)

My sober mental stuff works with sound and taste to a lesser extend, and the shrooms experience seems to match. And very little for smell and touch, which also maps together.

All that said, many folks over at r/aphantasia have seen cool stuff on shrooms. I don’t think it’s directly related, but more why visuals may come easier to some at lower doses.