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Notes -
Eh? Can you explain the acronyms please.
Sigh. It's probably not worth talking about. Any insights gleaned are personal and the kind of stuff I could have told you a week in advance if I was drunk.
I mean, sample size of one and all, but I actually delurked and started posting for a conversation like this one, FWTW.
Well, if one of Odin's ravens thinks so:
The long and short of it was that it went way harder and deeper than I accounted for. I genuinely felt the edges of my mind fraying. I was fighting ego death and struggling to retain the integrity of my consciousness. I might have described myself as "tripping balls" when I enrolled for a psilocybin trial, but it had nothing on what I experienced. Back then, and in this instance, my greatest fear was succumbing to woo or catching religion. I felt the pressure, that sense of cosmic significance. I genuinely told it to fuck itself. At that point, I was envisioning it as some kind of extradimensional tendril cracking open my skull and wrapping itself around my consciousness, while "I" was quite literally shearing it away it with a set of scissors.
Another very literal visual metaphor was trying to keep the "knot" of patterns that constituted myself from being unraveled under the tension.
Words can hardly describe it. I feel like the protagonist of Scott's short story, Samsara, except I actually faced the pressure of imminent enlightenment and chose to walk away. I don't need enlightenment, I need to be less depressed. Jury's out on that one.
That is quite similar to what I experienced after full anesthetic. Like for 24 hours different parts of my mind (and body) were disjointed and talking to each other. Like the self that was holding them together was missing. And fucking clock ticking in your mind all the time. It started 12 hours after the surgery when I got sleepy.
Miserable experience.
Huh. That's an interesting outcome, some anesthetics are known to have dissociative properties, but I don't think that's quite what I experienced. Which one was it, if I may ask (or if you happen to know, it's not usually disclosed specifically because most patients don't care)?
I wasn't fighting parts of my self, or my body, per se. Most of the time, the voice in my head was gone, or the volume was dialed down significantly. This has happened to me before on or after psychedelics, and is something I carefully noted during the experience. I always have an inner monologue, at least when I check for it. It might be damped down or absent when I'm extremely focused, but how would I know?
At the very peak, I don't think I was thinking in words, just visual metaphors. I used words to write (because I was able to do so live, albeit not with great grammar), and that stream of text was my stream of thought at a certain point. Very hard to explain unless you've been there. I was literally typing at the speed I was thinking (the latter definitely slower than usual) and exactly as I thought. Not quite the same as what I do when sober, where I'm usually at least planning ahead and have a general thesis in mind.
My body usually felt heavy and leaden. Then it got lighter as the peak came down slowly. No sense that parts of it were alien or in conflict with me, which you'd see with dissociation/depersonalization.
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