Anesthesia Trip Report (Ego Death)

[r0ckyreed]

I have been holding back on posting this trip for a while now, but I thought I would share it because I do not see a lot of information about anesthesia on here.  I would like to make better sense of my experience.

This trip happened back in 2016.  I was needing to get my wisdom teeth removed.  Back then (Senior year in high school), I was a cross-country runner.  When I walked into the room, they measured my heart rate at 42 beats per minute.  The person there was kind of shocked, but I told her I was a cross-country runner.  

Anyways, as soon as I got the shot of anesthesia, that was the last thing I remembered before waking up to the sound of my dad's voice.  Where was I in the space between the shot and the wake up?  It felt like I woke up in just a blink of an eye.  I had no ego at all in that space.  As I was beginning to wake back up, I remember still existing in the egoless void for a bit.  I could hear sounds of my dad's voice getting me to wake up, but I still had no registered what it was.  The sounds were all part of Me but the "I" character did not exist.  It was as if going back into the world (reintegrating back into the world) was like recreating myself again.  "The procedure" did not exist.  All there was in my experience was the shot in my arm, the egoless void, and the waking up.  Which all happened as if it did not even happen at all.  

This all makes me really wonder whether I experienced death.  What is the difference between the short death I experienced and the long-term death that we assume will happen at the end of our lives?  Is there really a difference?  The "death" I experienced was so short that it was as if it did not even happen.  This makes me really wonder whether physical death is even real.  I mean what was I before I was born?  There is a blank. Yet, from this blank, the idea and story of me was created, and I imagined it being recreated when I woke up from anesthesia.  Billions of years can pass as if it is nothing, a blink of an eye.  Maybe it is nothing?  But what is nothing? That is probably one of the deepest questions I could ask.  It hits into all things that we think of when we call something "reality."  Reality is consciousness and consciousness is nothing at all.

This trip also revealed to me at that time that I am consciousness.  I never lose consciousness, I just lose an ego for a "brief time." There are many forms of ego-deaths that happens in our lives when sleeping, life/personality change, or anesthesia/drugs/meditiation, and death.  But this seems contradictory to me because my direct experience suggests that those events of sleeping and anesthesia never happened but were merely constructed to create reality from a blank.  

The ego never really dies because it never existed.

This trip was the closest experience I have had to have having my entire reality wiped away.  

What are your all's thoughts?  Have you had similar experiences on anesthesia?  How different is the ego death of psychedelics different to that of anesthesia?  This ego death was so intense that I did not have any experience at all.  I had no colors, no hallucinations, no ideas, not even an idea of myself being under anesthesia, no memory, etc.  It was as if I was really dead.

 

Edited July 14, 2022 by r0ckyreed