Synaesthesias are understood and interpreted differently across scientific, art-historical, literary, phenomenological, ethnographic, and psychedelic literatures, reflecting varying comfort with first-person experiential reports. This paper examines connections between synaesthesias, psychedelic experience, and language, focusing on Terence McKenna's synaesthetic language experiences on DMT and magic mushrooms. It also describes the challenges of creating and performing with the Synestheater, a system that enables live, multi-mapped weaving of visual, aural, and linguistic systems in performance.
Psychedelics produce a wide range of linguistic phenomena, from the ineffability of mystical experiences to the articulate songs of shamans. Common experiences include interior dialogues with entities framed as the Logos, aliens, or spirits, and encounters with sentient visual languages unrelated to natural language writing systems. This thesis develops a neurophenomenological model for altered states of consciousness research, drawing on Francisco Varela, Michael Winkelman, and biogenetic structuralism. It argues that consciousness is a dynamic, multistate process of recursive biology-culture interaction, avoiding reductionism. The author examines first-person texts of long-term psychedelic self-exploration, focusing on linguistic experiences, and uses a technoetic practice—combining psychedelic self-experimentation with interactive software and the visual language Glide—to analyze and communicate these states.