Here's a small report I recently wrote describing part of an experience I had around 2-3 years ago. I wrote this to compare with another's experience on Reddit, but I figured I would post it here as well, because I'm eager to hear any interpretations of what exactly was happening in my brain. I had eaten something like 120-160 mg 4-ACO-DMT, and I was holing on a hefty dose of some dissociative or other (the time period's right for it to have been diphenidine, but I'm not sure).
For me, the state comprised
- No conception of having/being a body; just point consciousness
- Visual field a uniform nondescript cream color, with alternating red/green pulses (at seizure speed)
- A low, distorted-sounding drone not entirely unlike hypnotoad
- An unyielding and unvarying sensation of severe mind-shattering pain.
- An absolute, unquestionable certainty that this scenario would remain exactly the same forever. To phrase it crudely in math terms: if U(t) is the state of the universe at time t, then I felt it deep inside my bones that U(t + 1) = U(t) for all t. The experiential system was internally static and there was no link to the universe-at-large (or even a notion of it) to provide a stimulus for perturbing the system.
It's unreal trying to remember experiencing this. My entire conscious mind was consumed by thoughts of
I can't handle this for a single second longer over and over and over, like all my instincts were urging & begging me to make it stop, take a breath, come back to life, kill myself, do
something to stop the pain
, but there was absolutely no way for me to interact with any component of my experience. I don't know how long it went on subjectively, but it essentially felt unending, at least a few subjective hours to whatever degree time had meaning relative to that scenario. Realtime, I think I was holing for around 1-1.5 hours, and of course the first portion of that was occupied with the reality-disintegrating, down-the-drain death spiral narrative hallucination that actually led me to the state I was describing.
I didn't realize this until well after the experience, but from what I've described I think it could easily be framed as a manifestation of "hell", or some other Bad End afterlife. A vivid death hallucination, followed by uniform sensory torture and crippling pain that I knew to be everlasting, though that didn't allow me to resign myself to the experience and I couldn't relieve the pressure to fight to stop it.
On the bright side, in meatspace, I was just sitting down on the couch with my eyes closed and not doing anything stupid. Thanks, dissociatives!
Anyone seen anything with similarities to what I've described?