I think it's easier to explain (as a materialist, which I am) if you posit that what has been disrupted is not the real-time sensory and self-awareness function

I think it's easier to explain (as a materialist, which I am) if you posit that what has been disrupted is not the real-time sensory and self-awareness functions of the mind, but those of encoding memory of those experiences, memory being the necessary stack layer through which this all transpires. Metaphorically, remember how skipping CDs sound? Generating and recording the same stream of sound is possible but as you say, "hard," but if the same outcome can through a relatively trivial disruption of a different part of the system... (I have intentionally made glitch music of various kinds... the fast path is always to force failure modes in the tools, not to try to replicate them through intentional construction :)) To add my own observation of the alternate experience of time on psychedelics: one reason I have loved the 2C family is the recurring perception that the entropic arrow hides from us that all states (T - N, T, and probably T + N) exist eternally all the time; the "we" of any given moment T merely experience it as illusory flow. As more and more friends die, and other things are lost, it is deeply reassuring to imagine that this might be so–that those people and things are still "there" in a literal real sense, even, nearby in some sense... ...just not one we are privy to given the limits of our embodiment. Not something I suspect is falsifiable, but if I'm going to have faith in something, as an aetheist, this is as deep a well of peace as I have found.