Under the influence of various drugs, I start seeing patterns. Not seeing, visually, but recognizing; not physical patterns, but patterns of events, feelings, and behaviors.
The best way I can describe it is this. In engineering school, you learn that any signal (e.g. the sound waves you produce while talking) can be represented by adding together a series of simpler repeating signals. The component signals, simple by themselves, interact to produce something much more complicated. In my clearest moments of realization, the patterns I see are like these simple component signals. Small patterns of behavior or emotion that manifest every few weeks, or months, or years. Simple by themselves (the desire for novelty, the desire to feel wanted) but they interact with whatever other signals are present at the time to produce something much more complicated (a desire to break up, a desire to move).