On the hottest day of the year in Europe, I attend my first psychedelic virtual reality party.

However this isn’t my first time venturing into the weird side of VR, or digital psychedelics more broadly.

My attempts to alter consciousness with sound, light, and code rather than chemistry dates back before our current wave of VR adoption. As a teenager in the late 2000s, I discovered I-Doser, an application that sold binaural audio tracks that claimed to mimic drug highs, with its most notorious track, “Gates of Hades,” a droning soundscape that promised nightmarish, feelings of near-death experiences, and a strong onset of fear. It became the stuff of aughts internet lore. The idea behind binaural tripping is that, from playing slightly different tones in either ear, the brain will experience the illusion of a third beat in the mismatch of frequencies. The theory was that different frequency illusions related to different frequency bands for brain activity, which the brain would then sync to. So, a slow pulse could tip you towards the dreamlike theta waves of drowsiness, or the right combination could recreate possibly even a deliriant state. There was little to no science to support this, but it hardly mattered. The internet did its work, and we were all giving it a go.

Later on in life, I’d go world hopping in VRChat, a free social platform where users build and share their own virtual spaces, with a couple of other digital psychonauts. We were hunting for the trippiest particle worlds, or user-built spaces made entirely of swirling, pulsing points of light. Other nights, I’d wait in a virtual line on a Discord server to get into a VR club night. I've experienced partying with virtual reality technologies pretty broadly. During the horror years of the pandemic, I used social VR as a way to bypass social distancing and to experience getting outside of my tiny flat. This time though, I’ve found an in-person event that blends together VR and brain wave manipulation.

With genuine worries around becoming overheated and dehydrated due to the heat, the digital route to altering my state of consciousness feels like the more sensible option. One that won’t make demands on the body in the ways substances do. 

When I arrive, everyone in the room is just as sticky as I am. All the windows are open, and a single fan blows oven-hot air in everyone’s faces; in the corner, someone is filling a paddling pool with water and blocks of ice for people to cool down. Despite the heat, people are moving and dancing – and the apartment is loud. The crowd is composed of all types of people: musicians, DJs, neuroscientists, and future politicians — all of whom are drawn together by a shared curiosity of virtual reality and the psychedelic experience.

In the middle of the room, people wearing VR headsets lounge on a cluster of rainbow bean bags. Their bodies sink deeper into the plushy cushions, eyes covered, and their faces unreadable. What strikes me about them as I stand there watching isn’t just that they are distinctly still; it’s how convincingly elsewhere they seem. These people have surrendered completely to whatever is happening inside those headsets, in the middle of a party. And amidst a brutal heat wave. 

The party is at the Maastricht apartment of Zeus Tipado, a PhD researcher in psychopharmacology at Maastricht University who studies DMT combined with virtual reality. Tonight, there’s no substances involved though. Instead, he’s hosting a demonstration of Brain Candy alongside the app’s developer David Lobser.

Brain Candy is a VR application already available for the Meta Quest standalone headsets, and soon coming to Steam for PCVR, that combines strobing light, binaural audio, and haptic feedback to lull the brain into altered states, from deep relaxation to deeper, more intense trips. The flicker is the active component here. When produced at the right frequencies, the light alone can encourage the brain to generate geometric patterns: tunnels, spirals, lattices and other similar shapes familiar to those reported during DMT and psilocybin trips. Brain Candy comes prepackaged with those same patterns, with the future option for users to build their own trips as well.

Brain Candy arrives at a turning point for altered states of consciousness. Psychedelic therapy is closer than ever to mainstream medicine: esketamine, a ketamine derived nasal spray, was approved in the US in 2019 for treatment-resistant acute depression. Psilocybin and methylone, a close cousin of MDMA, were granted accelerated review as of April this year by the FDA. 

But a prescription is the only way of acquiring either. And a growing number of people, particularly those with contraindicated medical conditions preventing them from taking psychedelics, want to know what an altered state feels like without consuming a substance and risking their safety. Brain Candy presents a headset as a solution to that issue.

On the opposite side of the room from where the bean bags are, visuals are being projected onto the entirety of a wall. A man sits cross-legged on the floor beside a laptop, his attention moving between the screen and the projection. He’s manipulating the colors, the speed, and the patterns that scroll back and forth in a deep tunnel. His name is David Lobser, the artist and developer behind Brain Candy.

The projection he’s operating has been developed alongside the VR app that everyone in the room is experiencing. 

He explains it’s a creation tool designed to allow users to build and customize their own visual experiences. The controls offer fine tuned manipulation of visual frequencies and wave patterns. Lobser describes this intended specification as “research grade.” However, his vision for the tool, and for Brain Candy in general, is for more domestic use — for clearing distracting thoughts, inducing trance states, meditation, and Jungian shadow work. He references something called the “Dreamachine,” a stroboscopic device developed by artist Brion Gysin and mathematician Ian Sommerville in the 1960s, designed to induce hypnagogic states through flickering light, as a predecessor of sorts. It was a slotted cylinder that spun around a lightbulb on a turntable, and it was meant to be watched with the eyes closed. The light flickering through the eyelids at roughly the rhythm of the brain’s alpha waves was enough to produce vivid close-eyed visuals — shifting colors, spirals, tunnels, and kaleidoscopic designs. Brain Candy works on the same principles. The dream machine was always intended for groups though, he points out, relating to a multi-user version of Brain Candy that is already in development. 

Eventually, my turn comes. I lie back on one of the bean bags with a haptic vest wrapped around my torso, which translates the app’s bass frequencies into vibrations against my chest and back. I receive some guidance from Till Holzapfel, a scientific advisor for Brain Candy, who goes through the usual VR setup: finding the slider for pupil distance, helping my hands find the controllers, and making sure I’m comfortable. The haptic element adds a subtle physical dimension to the experience before the headset is even on. A low, ambient vibration throughout my back, travelling to the front of my chest begins to shift my attention inward before anything visual has begun.

Once I pull the headset over my eyes, the room disappears and I’m inside Brain Candy. Across a range of platforms and contexts, previous experiences in VR worlds have never given me a true sense of physical depth like this. There is something in the rendering, in the way the tunnelling environments are constructed, that registers not just visually but spatially. I don’t simply see depth, I feel immersed within it. My sense of where I am in space adjusts to match what the environment tells me. The experiences within the app range from breath work and focus to intensely strobing environments. I gravitate instinctively toward the calmer end of that spectrum. Even so, the intensity surprises me. These are not simply passive visuals. They are asking something of my nervous system whether I choose the gentle option or not.

Being able to move within the environment rather than simply watch it means that I can explore my own sense of place within the visuals, shifting perspective, finding the negative space between patterns, and letting my attention rest there. If anything, it deepens the experience. I lose track of time somewhere around the 10-minute mark, the tunnelling patterns becoming all encompassing.

What I notice, compared to similar visual experiences I’ve had outside of a headset, is a particular quality of release. When I’m tripping for real, my mind tends to race, working constantly to claw back some semblance of groundedness even when I am actively trying to relax into the experience. That resistance is absent here.

Somewhere in the negative space between the patterns, I begin to experience closed eye visuals. Wild cats and snakes, rendered in a style reminiscent of Bhavacakra (or the Tibetan wheel of life) iconography, a wheel depicting pigs, roosters and snakes chasing each other's tails, walk clockwise around the pulsating spirals.

I decide I’ve spent enough time inside and pull off the headset. David comes over to me. "You were in there for a long time," he says with some satisfaction. I have no idea how long I’ve been under, and I didn’t hear everyone leave.

I rejoin the smaller group still at the event, and the conversation feels different than the one I might have expected at the start of the evening. It’s deep, open, and moving across topics with the kind of looseness that usually takes hours of ordinary social interaction to arrive at. I leave feeling distinctly calm in a pro-social, outward facing way rather than the inward, slightly flattened feeling that sometimes follows an intense psychedelic experience. The intimacy of the smaller group suits the calm and open mood that Brain Candy leaves me in.

That's how psychedelic VR tends to work online, too. The trippiest environments on social VR platforms spread by word of mouth, passed between people in the right Discord servers as links with an implicit challenge: ‘try this and tell me what you think’. The experience can be communal, but even if it might be solitary, the social life of it happens afterward in the recounting, the trip report, the comparison of what each person encountered in the same environment. Brain Candy works for me the same way, even in a live party context.

Despite the headset having cut me off from the room, it sends me back into what remains of the party with something specific to say about my time “tripping.” It connects further back than social VR. It connects to the culture of binaural audio tripping, to the mythologized legend of I-Doser's “Gates of Hades,” digital experiences passed between people online as rumor, as copypasta, as a link someone sends you with the instruction to listen with headphones in a dark room and report back. The digital psychedelic has always been social in this way, and here it plays out in person almost perfectly.

Lobster is realistic about where Brain Candy will mostly live. “Mostly people are not comfortable doing VR in social situations,” he says. Its natural home is likely in bedrooms and living rooms, scheduled in as twenty minutes alone with the headset, for meditation, for trance or clearing the mind. But he hasn’t given up the room entirely. “Traditionally, dream machines were made for groups,” he says, “and there is a multi-user version in the works.”

💌 If you loved this email, forward it to a psychonaut in your life.

Editorial Process

DoubleBlind is a trusted resource for news, evidence-based education, and reporting on psychedelics. We work with leading medical professionals, scientific researchers, journalists, mycologists, indigenous stewards, and cultural pioneers. Read about our editorial policy and fact-checking process here.