Can An App Give You a Psychedelic Experience Without Taking Drugs? Lumenate Says Yes

A newly launched smartphone app promises help guide you into a psychedelic or semi-psychedelic state using only light and sound. 

The Lumenate app, launched earlier this month, invites you to “effortlessly explore your subconscious” and enjoy an altered state of consciousness that the app claims teeters between deep meditation and psychedelic therapies. 

Getting started is relatively easy. Once the app is downloaded, all you need to do is get comfortable, turn your phone so that the flashlight is facing you, and close your eyes. The app uses your phone’s flashlight to create stroboscopic light sequences that allow you to drift “effortlessly into a calming and immersive journey through a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of colors created by your subconscious,” the app states. 

The company tested the app on 30 participants who reported the following psychedelic-like effects:

• Highly colored vivid closed-eye fractals 
• Occasional pronounced sense of movement
• Reduction in sense of self
• Reduction in body awareness
• Reduction in sense of time

Luminate is the brainchild of U.K. inventors Tom Galea and Jay Conlon. Both left the corporate world in August 2018 with a goal to understand how they could help people live freer and more fulfilling lives. Their quest sent Conlon off to walk the length of New Zealand and Galea to drive from Canada to Chile in a campervan. After months of interviewing people from all walks of life, they reconnected and hashed out a plan.

Armed with a vision to make impactful subconscious exploration more accessible, they launched Lumenate in October 2019. Then they conducted a series of brain scans to help optimize their method of inducing altered-states of awareness using simply light and sound. 

Their vision started as a series of public group light experiences but after the first event, a U.K.-wide lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID-19 forced the cancellation of future public light experiences. 

During the isolating months of the coronavirus pandemic, Galea and Conlon decided to create an app using the light experience. After extensive research and development, the Luminate app launched in March 2021. It is available as a free download on the Apple App Store and Google Play.