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Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
psychedelia

1967, from psychedelic + -ia.

Wiktionary
psychedelia

n. The subculture associated with those who take psychedelic drugs

WordNet
psychedelia

n. the subculture of users of psychedelic drugs

Wikipedia
Psychedelia

Psychedelia is a name given to the subculture of people, originating in the 1960s, who often use psychedelic drugs such as LSD, mescaline and peyote. The term is also used to describe a style of psychedelic artwork and psychedelic music. Psychedelic art and music typically try to recreate or reflect the experience of altered consciousness. Psychedelic art uses highly distorted and surreal visuals, bright colors and full spectrums and animation (including cartoons) to evoke and convey to a viewer or listener the artist's experience while using such drugs, or to enhance the experience of a user of these drugs. Psychedelic music uses distorted electric guitar, Indian music elements such as the sitar, electronic effects, sound effects and reverberation, and elaborate studio effects, such as playing tapes backwards or panning the music from one side to another. The term "psychedelic" is derived from the Ancient Greek words psychē (ψυχή, "mind") and dēloun (δηλοῦν, "to make visible, to reveal"), translating to "mind-revealing".

A psychedelic experience is characterized by the striking perception of aspects of one's mind previously unknown, or by the creative exuberance of the mind liberated from its ostensibly ordinary fetters. Psychedelic states are an array of experiences including changes of perception such as hallucinations, synesthesia, altered states of awareness or focused consciousness, variation in thought patterns, trance or hypnotic states, mystical states, and other mind alterations. These processes can lead some people to experience changes in mental operation defining their self-identity (whether in momentary acuity or chronic development) different enough from their previous normal state that it can excite feelings of newly formed understanding such as revelation, enlightenment, confusion, and psychosis.

Psychedelic states may be elicited by various techniques, such as meditation, sensory stimulation or deprivation, and most commonly by the use of psychedelic substances. When these psychoactive substances are used for religious, shamanic, or spiritual purposes, they are termed entheogens.

Psychedelia (light synthesizer)

Psychedelia is an early light synthesizer developed by Jeff Minter and published by Llamasoft in 1984. It was converted to the MSX and ZX Spectrum by Simon Freeman.

Usage examples of "psychedelia".

This strange interweaving of psychedelia and classics and rock was a veritable explosion of musical evolution.

Bay Area psychedelia collided headlong with the emergent world of computerized virtual reality, was like a Kiwanis Club gig compared to this astonishing do.

After six frenetic years as the four mop tops and Lords of Psychedelia, the Beatles sat in their brightly coloured Indian cotton shirts, quietly meditating or strumming guitars, surrounded everywhere by hibiscus and frangipani, black crows flapping in the treetops and squealing monkeys tumbling through the branches of the surrounding jungle.

The psychedelia of San Francisco in particular would have struck him as a long fall from the heights of Mozart and Doc Watson.

Hypnagogic patterns danced in the darkness around him, his brain painting random psychedelia on the night.