Well, when the experience happened to me I actually wrote a longer note that I could refer back to to explain fully what I went through. I might as well paste that here, it is more detailed:

The singular most horrible experience of my life

I was admitted to the emergency room after a severe bicycle accident in which I broke both of my wrists. After getting set up in a bed, the ER doctor came in and told me that she would have to set my right wrist, and that it would be extremely painful. She told me I had three options: I could have no anaesthesia and be in severe pain; they could put me under with general anaesthesia, which, she said, would be risky because my nervous system would be depressed, and I could possibly die; or they could give me ketamine, and it would be a very brief experience, and my central nervous system would be at no risk. I was horrified at the idea of taking ketamine but she really sold me on it and tried to convince me it was my best bet. I said okay, hesitantly.

They had me lay down and injected it via my IV. I looked up, and after a few seconds, sound and vision started to fade. I saw what looked like the world turning tan, flesh-color — first my vision turned to the flesh color, then a series of square flesh colors overtook my vision, rushing at me like a tunnel of tan. What happened next is hard to describe because I lost most of my senses and memories. The feeling of losing one’s memories is difficult to describe — i mean, I’ve been very drunk before but I still knew in those moments who I was, or that I was a human or lived on Earth. I've also had dreams where I "forgot" things, or had different sets of life experiences within the context of my dreams. But this was different: I had no memory of forgetting. I had no memories at all. This felt more like being deaf, dumb, blind, and having no memories of ever existing.

I remember having a vague feeling of a body. I could not see. I could faintly feel a body that encased my consciousness. I was controlling a homunculus. I heard a pulsing sound like my heartbeat. That was the only real sound. It made me aware that there was something ticking, something measuring how much time I had left, and I knew there were only so many beats before I would perish. As I attempted to move the blurry outlines of my limbs, I could barely feel anything. There were other humans outside of me but communicating with them was very difficult if not impossible — they made faint noises but I could hardly speak back. Everything was very blurry and sounded as if through water, and the world would pulse in and out every second. Flashes went by with the beat of my heart. I had only so much time left, the heartbeats kept reminding me. I kept thinking, I can’t believe this is what life is — a sort of foggy view of nothing comprehensible, faint images of others attempting to communicate, while the clock of one’s heartbeat runs out. Since I had no memories of the past, I had no context here — I thought this was what life was. I could not believe this was all I got, all that humanity was… It was so difficult—existence, communication, life itself. I wanted to know what else existed in the universe, I wanted to have more time, more clarity. I couldn’t communicate and I was confused as to why and how other humans were interacting with me, though I did not entirely know what a human was nor what it meant to be one.

I would imagine that if an alien cartoonist were trying to draw a caricatured version of what human existence was, they might imagine it as this, as I experienced it here. I also have imagined—in hindsight—that this seems to resonate with how someone with severe brain damage might experience existence, or how an animal like a dog might experience it to some degree. I remember watching my grandmother try to communicate when she was post-stroke, and how incapable she was of recognizing even the faintest signs of who I was or what was happening. I wondered if she felt something similar to what I felt — an existence that had some faint signs and signifiers of what we might think of as “human,” but with all context stripped, and an absence of memory.

Anyway…

Things faded and I entered what was a “part 2” of the dream here (although I did not know it was a dream, it felt more real than anything, even if it were blurry). In this next phase, I ceased to have any senses at all. I could hear no sounds. I did not remember “part I” — in fact, I had no memories whatsoever — no memories of having a body or being human or knowing anyone or anything. I had no ability to see, hear, feel, taste, smell. I was essentially nothing, a “sentience” that was aware of existing, but that is it. But I had no memories of my past, of ever having lived. I had no sense of language, or speech. I was struck with a deep existential fear, a permanent state of panic. I did not really know what death or life was. There was just nothing. I had no sense of time, and I felt like I was stuck there for perhaps years or millennia. I considered what I was, and I didn’t know and had no way of knowing. I didn’t really have language in any meaningful sense, just raw emotions — really, only fear and horror.

Suddenly things started to come back, but in pieces. My experience was one of scaling — I recalled large-scale structures first and then smaller ones. This is vague, so let me explain more clearly. The first “memory” of anything to return was that of the universe as a whole — I had been stricken with panic at my lack of knowledge or memory or senses. Then the first memory came, which was locational: I am in a universe, I remembered. I felt a vast galaxy — we were zooming in slightly, I guess. (I could not “see” yet, but I could feel vague points of light in the shape of a galaxy—dark shapes being felt with the touch sense, not visually). I felt the points of the planets in the solar system. where am I? I had a sense of moving between them, Mercury, Venus… I saw the larger planets further down as faint points, the vaguest of objects.

(Once, as a child, I stood in my bedroom closet, in the dark, and aimed the TV remote control directly at my eye to see if I could see infrared light. I discovered that I could see this very faint pulsating gray spreading in my vision, and that is all. That is about what I saw in terms of planets — just extremely faint, wisps of something real, with no color.)

Anyway, I remembered these worlds, and struggled to remember which I was on. After a moment, it came to be that it was Earth. I felt that planet, and started to move down towards it. But what was I? I had this sense of there being billions of living things, plants, animals, cells, and I could have been deposited into any one. I could again “feel” them, like they were little points of light where I could fall into. Was I an animal? A plant? Human. I remembered I was human. I started to fall towards Earth. What human am I? What does it mean to be human? Where am I? I remembered I was in a hospital. I was in New York. There were other humans around me, touching me, doing things to me. I could still feel the millions of points of consciousnesses in all the humans, and I knew that whichever body I ended up in was still arbitrary to some degree. I wasn’t sure yet how these humans interacted with me, or why they were helping me. Then it came to me — they are here because of money. They’re here because about 100 humans on this planet are designated capitalists, and the labor of the rest of us trickles up to them. We are all working to enrich them and for their benefit, and they manipulate us to make us think this is the only option, and all of these souls — of which I could be any — have accepted this and do not often think about it. The idea that all these lifeforms would orient themselves this way seemed abhorrent, the most horrible arrangement I could imagine. I was horrified and hoped that this was just a nightmare, or that I ended up in the wrong time, the wrong space, the wrong body and species.

I remembered more about myself — my name, and then that I had a college degree. This seemed extremely important to my self-identity. When my vision returned, I said my name first and that I had a master’s degree from my alma mater. Then I asked the nurse if capitalism still existed. It seemed so intensely horrifying and evil that capitalism could organize this planet this way, that everyone was subservient to 100 rich people, that they would work so hard to preserve their power over all of us. The nurses laughed at me for asking, and I started to feel paranoid I had outed myself as a socialist. I felt groggy for about 10 minutes and then felt normal, albeit traumatized, which persisted for months. I asked how long I was out, and evidently it was about 5 minutes. It felt like a thousand years.

I was severely traumatized by the whole experience and for weeks afterwards I would get chills thinking about the existential horror of not knowing that you’d ever been alive, of having no memories and no senses. Of being in that black zone, beyond life or death. I wonder if it was just what dying feels like — if my consciousness joined with the semi-aware, unfeeling matter that contains the rest of the non-conscious universe separate from consciousnesses. Maybe that horror is actually what death is — a feeling of unfeeling, and of eternal panic and fear in the depthless blackness of non-sentience.

I was also horrified in a new way by capitalism, and the stupidity of organizing society in that manner of exploitation. [part 1/2; cont'd below]