There are likely aspects of reality that sit outside our perception—and it’s possible psychedelics reveal some of that, experts say.

“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 is how Joel Brierre, the founder of a psychedelics retreat in Mexico called Tandava, describes the peak of an 5-MeO-DMT experience. The powerful, fast-acting psychedelic is naturally occurring and known for inducing ego dissolution (also known as ego death) and mystical states in which individuals feel a heightened sense of unity with something bigger than themselves—be it nature, God, or the universe.

The all-consuming white light is a common theme among many participants at his retreat, Brierre says. But others report seeing different colors from “soft pink and gentle pastel” to “clean blue,” he continues. These hues are often linked to what Brierre 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.

But what are these colors, really? After all, color isn’t something that exists “out there.” Light hits objects, bounces off, and reaches our eyes in the form of electromagnetic waves. Our retinas turns those waves into signals, and the brain paints them into color. Simply put: there’s no red or blue in the world—just energy. What we see may well be a hallucination our brain happens to agree on. And psychedelics? They may be cranking that hallucination into overdrive.

A 2024 study from the Allen Institute—a Seattle, Washington-based nonprofit research institute aimed at unlocking the mysteries of biology—found that psilocybin, a compound found in magic mushrooms, changes activity in the brain’s visual cortex, the region responsible for visual processing. This shift may help explain why users often report distorted colors, shifting patterns, or entirely new textures during psychedelic experiences.

Approximation of the color olo. Since it can only be created in laboratory conditions, it’s considered a fictitious or imaginary color. James Fong et al.

One piece of proof may lie in the startling, hyper-saturated blue-green that doesn’t exist in nature. In a 2025 experiment, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, used lasers to activate specific photoreceptor cells in the eye, allowing participants to perceive a color never reported before—one that didn’t exist in nature or language. They called it “olo.”

If a lab can summon an unseen color with lasers, it’s no stretch to imagine that hallucinogens—chemicals that radically rewire your perception—might do something just as strange. Yet, not all psychotropics alter vision 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—a powerful, mind-bending substance known for producing vivid, fast-onset hallucinations—by contrast, “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., a firm using neuroscience research to develop training protocols and tools for 5-MeO-DMT practitioners.

The imagery is extremely high-def. “Brilliant, brilliant colors—shining beyond what they ever have before,” Brierre says. Some report “new colors” or hues that feel emotionally coded or sacred. Others speak of neon geometric worlds and hyperreal detail. That said, the same compounds that produce dazzling colors and kaleidoscopic forms can also drag you into personal hell—especially at high doses, in chaotic environments, or with an unprepared mind. Brierre knows this firsthand.

“In the ’90s, I was doing a lot of very high doses of LSD—15 to 20 hits at a time,” he recalls. “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, Brierre recalls, like “an internal Apocalypse, where everyone was going crazy from the inside.”

“5-MeO-DMT [creates] 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.”

Scientists are only beginning to scratch the surface of how psychedelics generate new or impossibly intense experiences and colors, with the latter feeling symbolic, “ensouled,” somehow “realer” than the real thing.

“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 who writes about the intersection of neuroscience and spirituality. “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.”

As for why the brain would use color to represent those changes? “That would be unclear,” Sobhani says, “although there does seem to be a fundamental connection between certain colors and emotional states in humans, as research from psychology testifies.”

But Sobhani doesn’t think science tells the full story.

“I believe we should stay open to all possibilities, including ones that are non-materialist and outside the usual scientific worldview,” she says. “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 is still 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.”

Brierre has heard countless accounts of this kind of crossing-over—from the “jester” archetype often reported on DMT trips, which is a mocking, cosmic figure that seems to toy with the limits of human comprehension, to people who witness their own death before returning, shaken but unharmed. But one vision—or perhaps something masquerading as color—returns again and again: an impossibly bright white that hums with every hue of the spectrum.

“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.”