My friends and I are sitting in a half-moon circle on my bed, each sunken into matching pillows. Our friend is setting up his performance, cables and speakers sprawling across the floor, his excitement visible in quick, precise movements. He hands us each a pair of the futuristic-looking glasses, reminiscent of that scene from Blade Runner, where Pris, played by Daryl Hannah, dresses up like a doll with black makeup around her eyes.
The SerenSpecs rest on my nose like any other pair of glasses, but the soft glow pulsing through the lenses marks them as something else entirely. I check the frequency setting: 7 Hz, theta waves. Another invisible force I’m inviting into my body, like the bass that used to rattle my ribcage, like the electromagnetic pulses in the PEMF hat. But this time, it’s targeting my consciousness directly.
“Just let go and observe,” my friend, the inventor of the SerenSpecs, instructs us. As if letting go was ever that simple. My finger hovers over the control panel, hesitating. There’s something almost transgressive about using technology to hack my brain’s natural rhythms, about bypassing years of meditation practice with precisely calibrated light frequencies. I press start anyway.
The light begins to flicker, a gentle strobe that seems to sync with an array of images unfolding behind my closed eyelids. It reminds me of driving at sunset, when the sun strobes through trees at just the right frequency to alter your consciousness ever so slightly. The patterns pulse and flow, crushing down on me like waves of light, each one pressing me deeper into the mattress until I feel like I’m sinking through its surface.
I cycle through the presets: theta for meditation, alpha for creativity, beta for focus. Each frequency feels different – some scatter my thoughts like startled birds, others gather them into neat formations. The gamma setting, 40 Hz, feels as if someone turned up the resolution on my consciousness, like switching from analog to digital.
When the lights begin to fade and my eyes readjust to darkness, the patterns still dance upon my retina like afterimages of a sun I stared at too long. It felt like a minute, yet almost ten had passed by. My mind is focused, sharp – as if the light waves have washed away the static.