Ketamine Dreams

From the Author

Ketamine Dreams is what it's like to be locked inside of a ketamine trip without the need for any adulterents. With the help of a computer, some simple maths and the include song by Ellie Goulding, you can experience a dreamlike state that is terrifyingly beautiful.

Like many psychedelics, it's hard to describe the experience of other worlds experienced when one enters a "K-hole." This project is an attempt to capture the essence of that experience in a way that is accessible to anyone with a web browser. If you've got this link directly, you might know who I am. If you have a sense of what I can do to make this experience more pure to the substance, share your experiences with me. I want to tease out the essence of the experience and make it more accessible to those who are curious about the substance.

There are 4 scenes showcasing different degress of freedom and confinement. Ketamine being a dissosociative anestetic, the experience is often not driven by oneself but sorta floating on a rail. I've felt trapped in a small cubby space that appears to be a train luggage storage to being blasted off to outer space with experiencing the cosmos with full intention. The main nexus scene is sort of a 4th dimensional experience that has been common in every trip. I hope you find some interest in the art and display of what might be a new take on the drug ketamine.

System Overview

Ketamine Dreams is a real-time, browser-based immersive environment built on Three.js. It generates procedurally driven dreamscapes that shift between distinct visual regimes, each with its own geometry, material behavior, and post-processing stack. The experience runs entirely client-side with peer-to-peer multi-user support, daily-seeded parameters, and a post-processing pipeline that includes bloom, edge detection, chromatic aberration, scanlines, and melt transitions.

Included is a simple UI to make subtle changes to the experience. By default the process is deterministic, meaning that the same seed will produce the same experience for all users. It takes the current day and shows the same scene on the same timer so each device you connect should experience things in a similar vein. The movement is still unique to each user, but the environment is shared. This will allow for multiple users to join the same instance and spam emoji at at the screen. This could be useful for a shared interactive hallucination that could be the visuals for a venue or background for a DJ show.

Scene Registry

THE NEXUS

// nexus

Personal Narrative

This is how many interludes to the unfolding scenes of my ketamine experience feels like. It's an eerie dissolution of ego and with a sense of familiarity, maybe akin to the Christopher Nolan film Interstellar. The walls are infinite and the floor is infinite, yet the space feels confined. Images and patterns attract attention but the eeriness does not go unnoticed.

Technical Description

Procedural cityscape constructed from instanced wall primitives with dynamic material assignment using GLSL shaders to morph the static geometry. Features a heart-spawning system layered atop the geometry grid, with bloom-driven emissive channels and edge-contrast post-processing. Wall materials shift hue based on the daily seed, creating a unique palette each rotation cycle.

SPARSE SPACE

// space

Personal Narrative

At the height of ego death there is a sense of being in a void. The automatic behaviours of being a human is left behind and there is a sense of one with the universe. These types of trip scenes are often accompanied by a sense of awe and wonder, as if one is witnessing the birth of a new world. It feels very inhuman but also calming as being one with the universe at it's core is who all of us are.

Technical Description

Minimalist volumetric field with sparse geometric primitives distributed across a wide coordinate space. Relies heavily on the post-processing pipeline for visual density — chromatic aberration and scanline passes create texture where geometry is absent. Camera velocity is uncapped, encouraging high-speed traversal.

LUMBER

// lumber

Personal Narrative

Sometimes the experience is a bit more intense and the things we see do not make sense anymore. Our world around us can sometimes be chaotic and a k-hole can manifest this in different ways. The lumber scene shows we don't always have full control, and even moving a bit causes the chaos to increase.

Technical Description

Dense forest-like arrangement of columnar geometry with bark-textured materials. The scene uses a custom shader for organic surface variation, with fold-intensity parameters controlling the degree of geometric warping. Vein-speed uniforms drive a secondary displacement map that creates a breathing effect across vertical surfaces.

LIMINAL

// liminal

Personal Narrative

Welcome to the cube, it's a small space that feels familiar but also strange. The ketamine is at full effect and movement is greatly contained. The scene seems to offer some respite from the other choatic scenes, but the eerie sense of being confined and not knowing what's beyond the next wall is ever present. The cube is a place of reflection and introspection, where the mind wanders if this is what reality is like.

Technical Description

Transitional space defined by low-frequency geometry and muted color channels. The scene overrides the normal bloom radius and reduces edge contrast to produce a soft, indistinct visual field. Transition melt effects are most pronounced here, as the scene is designed to blur the boundary between dream states.

KETAMINEDREAMS

From the Author

System Overview

Scene Registry

THE NEXUS

SPARSE SPACE

LUMBER

LIMINAL

Commit Timeline

KETAMINE
DREAMS