Tonight’s experience….
When I was 17, I had a near-death experience. I was in a coma for a few days, and when I woke up, I couldn’t remember if I had experienced anything in an afterlife or not. I think it was my mother who told me how close I had come to dying. I also remember the doctor looking really glad to see me, even though I had never met him before. He reiterated what my mother had told me, and I carried that moment around with me for a long time.
There was always this uneasy feeling that something had happened but that my brain was blocking it out. I just thought I had gone to sleep. I always thought I’d had some vivid dream, but I could never quite get the details right. Basically, it felt like sleep, but it also felt like something more than sleep.
That was 24 years ago….
Tonight, I just did 5-MeO-DMT, and it reminded me of that near-death experience I had when I was younger.
It only just occurred to me, driving home over the last hour, that this is how I felt all that time ago. Not the trip itself, but the comedown—the afterglow.
Tonight’s trip was me being violently hurled into an unfathomably bright and immensely loud light.
I wanted to experience a breakthrough, so I set the vape cartridge to the highest voltage and hauled on it until I couldn’t breathe in any more. Then I held it for too long—way too long. I undoubtedly did far more than I should have, and I knew it within the first few seconds.
Stretching my arms out beyond their limits, to the point that every muscle in my body tightened up like a snare drum. Being wide and completely open, physically and mentally. Thrown into something and becoming it, experiencing it, then repeating this cycle ceaselessly and eternally. Transcending over and over again, a million times a second. Repeatedly exploding with an energy seemingly brighter and faster than light.
A sense of being somewhere so far away that there was no chance of ever returning—and no desire to.
Beyond every negative or positive emotion. Beyond every trivial earthly dilemma.
“You okay, man?”
My friend, my trusted trip sitter, says it from somewhere on my home planet.
And I begin the landing phase.
Exactly how you’d imagine a rocket reentering the atmosphere, with the thunderous pulses of plasma echoing from the bellows of its titanium buxom.
It took 15 minutes to gather the strength to walk again. My voice was strained, like I had been screaming for a week.
And in that afterglow, I hadn’t realized—not for another hour, maybe two—that I had felt this before.
Driving home, I remembered this feeling.
This is how I felt when I woke up from dying.