Effects/Content

The Subjective Effect Index (SEI) is a collection of articles designed to serve as a comprehensive reference work for the diverse range of subjective effects that can occur during an altered or non-ordinary state of consciousness. It has primarily been written to describe the effects of psychoactive substances, particularly hallucinogens, but may also be extended to other psychonautic practices such as meditation, sensory deprivation, and lucid dreaming.

Each SEI entry consists of a title accompanied by a phenomenological description and analysis of the effect. They are deliberately written in a formalized writing style that seeks to avoid reliance on flowery metaphors or analogies, attempting instead to use ordinary language. This decision has been adopted with the hope that these descriptions will eventually come to serve as a universal terminology set that enables people to better comprehend and share experiences that are otherwise notoriously difficult to understand and convey.

The SEI currently contains over 200 entries that are organized into categories based on which sense they affect and their general behavior. Many of these effects are further broken down into leveling systems, sub-components, and style variations that have been reported to occur between different substances and situations. Detailed replications, in the form of image and video examples, have been included wherever possible to supplement the text descriptions.

The contents of this index are based on the collective experiences of our contributors and various anecdotal reports collected from the internet. An archive of some of these reports can be found in our experience index.