I miss magic mushrooms. Not just the eight-hour, rib-aching laughter sessions with my rascal university pals, but also seeing boring stuff with a new perspective: curtains dancing, floorboards breathing, actors popping out of the TV. These days, my temple-like body can’t afford to pull an all-nighter. But when everything in my 51-year-old world feels so linear, I long for that alternate reality. Getting stuck in the bathroom because the swirly carpet had morphed into a stormy sea with terrifying waves—that I could have done without.
Cut to 30 years later and the current upswell in therapeutic psilocybin. I’ve been tempted to join a psilocybin retreat, guided, monitored, and nothing like the messy trips of my youth. But as if by fairy magic, the next best thing landed in my lap: an app called Lumenate that uses the iPhone camera flashlight to create a strobe-light effect—they call it “flicker light stimulation”—which, through closed eyes, the brain interprets as a kaleidoscope of fractals, rainbow colors, and sometimes, if you’re lucky, proper visuals. A study published in 2019 by the University of Sussex found that it guides the user to a state somewhere between deep meditation and psychedelics. “Stroboscopic stimulation offers a powerful non-pharmacological means of inducing altered states of consciousness,” the researchers concluded.
