I am actually obsessed over an nde, not a trip since I actually don't plan on taking a psychedelic. I just disguised my post so that I could get answers from a psychedelic community. These would also be answers to my questions regarding ndes since both trips and ndes are hallucinations. I feared that if I just asked about ndes that no one or hardly anyone would answer.
Well it's very hard to imagine what exact feelings you might have in a nightmare, even if you wrote pages and pages I could never be sure if I really got the correct picture. But what you seem to be describing here is the loss of the capability to somehow step back from your own feelings and tell yourself "Hey, I only feel like this because X and that means I won't feel like this forever.", yes? That can definitely happen on psychedelics, it can be very unpleasant but at the same time it can also give you the opportunity to face important personal issues that you can keep yourself from facing when awake and sober. But as I said, there are no guarantess.
What I mean here by not having any power is that experiences in my depressive nightmares are far beyond horrible experiences. But if I were to have these same experiences in a normal waking state of reality, that reduces these experiences to normal horrible experiences that are not as bad. So me being in a normal wakeful state of reality somehow reduces horrible experiences to normal ones that are not as bad as what I experience in a nightmare. Or, at least, that has applied to a certain feeling in a nightmare I have had carried onto my waking life. But I am not sure if this would apply to the radically altered mental states that I experience in my nightmares.
So based on that, I was wondering if any horrible feeling or altered mental state (no matter how intense and horrible) that I might experience during a hellish nde or an nde with horrible features would also be experiences reduced to normal ones since I would also be in a fully wakeful state during the nde. Or would it be just as bad or an even worse of an experience than my nightmares? Some neuroscientists would agree that ndes are fully waking states while others think they are REM intrusion or lucid dreams. My question applies to ndes being fully conscious states.
If this question cannot be answered, then I will ask this one:
I posit that there is no way for me or you or anyone else to be certain of the difference.
What you would do here is compare the radically altered indescribable mental states that you have experienced during your dreams to the ones you have experienced during your trip and/or nde. Were they the same or at least similar? Or was it instead a unique experience entirely that was strange and bizarre, but wasn't like what you experienced in your dreams and was just a matter of you simply attributing the strangeness and bizarreness of the experience to that of a dream experience when the experience wasn't like what you experience in your dreams?
You're asking questions no one can answer but yourself. You're chasing your tail in circles.
Even I cannot answer these questions. So I was hoping that a neuroscientist could or at least people who have taken a psychedelic here could answer them.
Matt, from your replies I have now learned that you are actually obsessed with an affliction in your mind and when that affliction is triggered you are powerless.
Unless you have a psychedelic therapist, I would not advise you take even the smallest dose of any psychoactive substances.
obsession is your salient mindset - this is not a criticism, it is your warning to us here, you are repeating your cry for help which must be a neuroscientist promising that you can eat psychedelic drugs - not going to happen.
Mind set and setting govern the content of your trip. Dose governs the intensity of resonance or psychedelic extension of that content.
If you find a psychedelic therapist (there are a few) you can follow that direction.
When I first struggled with depression in my life, I have had horrible feelings and altered mental states in my nightmares. However, they were not that bad. They were horrible, but not that bad. This was because that was just my first moment of depression and I was still in a normal healthy state of mind back then. Therefore, any nightmares I would of had back then were that of a normal healthy depressed person.
But as I continued to struggle with more and more depression over the years of accumulated events, I have now experienced nightmares that are far beyond horrible. The feelings and altered mental states I have experienced now in my depressive nightmares are far beyond horrible and nothing normal.
The possibility that I could experience them fully conscious and aware of them during an nde has traumatized me and has taken my life away from me. To be fully conscious and aware of such horrible experiences would be the absolute worst thing as opposed to being less aware of them during a nightmare. I do not wish to experience them during a fully conscious nde if I ever do have an nde myself someday. So I was hoping that it was not possible to experience them. I was hoping ndes are different experiences entirely.
learning to breathe and let experiences pass through you is extremely important.
We are not talking anything normal here such as a panic attack or some other very unpleasant experience that just simply needs to be relaxed with. This is a radically altered mental state that is far beyond anything imaginable. I would not describe it as painful or even agonizing. There is no way to describe it. All I can say is that it is nothing normal, it is an experience far beyond horrible, and is an experience that the most severely ill depressed person would have in his/her nightmares.
So it is an experience of a severely ill depressed brain deserving of a serious tone and not any light-hearted tone such as the one you have displayed. Such tones would be for normal experiences such as fear and panic. But since we are talking an experience that is nothing normal and far beyond horrible, then if you were to know this experience for yourself, then your tone would completely change to something very serious.
Since this experience is so indescribably horrible, that is why I asked if such a horrible experience would be reduced to a normal experience since I would be fully conscious and, as I stated above, me being fully conscious has reduced a horrible feeling experienced in my nightmares to a normal horrible experience in my waking life and I was wondering if this would also apply to those horrible altered mental states during a fully conscious nde no matter how horrible and intense they are.
