Wow, that's such a terrifying experience. Do you feel comfortable sharing any details on the what actually happened? A very common experience with psychedelics

Wow, that's such a terrifying experience. Do you feel comfortable sharing any details on the what actually happened? A very common experience with psychedelics is that you feel like you're dying, or that you have died. In that sense I can totally see how the real experience of dying could feel extremely similar. (Although yours seems to be an order of magnitude worse, partially because coming back into consciousness brought with it immense physical pain.) > and fully expect an eternity of that when I die This is exactly what has given me the most amount of anxiety post traumatic trip. The fear that consciousness exists in a constant and eternal state of suffering post death (since that's what I thought was happening in my trip). It's given me sort of the opposite fear of most people -- rather than a fear of non existence after death, I'm scared of the POSSIBILITY of life after death, because I'm afraid that's what it'll be. I would much rather have my consciousness just cease to exist after death. I've learned this is an actual phobia with a name: apeirophobia. While this fear is still kind of in the back of my mind, here are some of the things that have helped me: * The experience of suffering is something that exists physically within our bodies and brains. If consciousness does persist after death, it would be without a body or brain, and thus not capable of the same type of suffering we experience on psychedelics or in a near death experience. During those experiences we can feel like we're in infinity or that we don't have a body, but we have to remember those are still just things happening in the brain. * We have literally 0 evidence for consciousness existing after death. Why stress out about one unlikely possibility? From a probability standpoint, it's not really different from worrying that we're going die and be punished by Zeus or Odin or Ra. Can't prove it won't happen, but it seems unlikely. * Other people have experiences like this that are positive, affirming, and full of love and peace. Why give more credence to the idea of eternal suffering rather than eternal joy / bliss / happiness? I haven't totally moved on from that fear, but this train of thought helps. I want to believe (and I think it's more rational to believe) that those experiences really are just a combination of the brain's normal processing being severely altered combined with the body's survival mechanisms being kicked into an insane overdrive. That there's not really anything more to it than that. I have no idea if any of that helps (or if it's actually something that bothers you on a day to day basis), but it's the thing that has helped me the most with coping.