So I was in a car accident earlier today. I was pulling out of parallel spot and didn't see a car coming from behind. I pulled out and was struck on the driver's side. Now of course this is framed in a tale of stupidity, but the point is that at the moment I was struck, it felt like my perception of reality was shattered into a million pieces. I can't really describe the sights or sounds further, except the sounds were very distorted and alien as I came to. I remember thinking to myself "this is a hell of a lot like a psychedelic experience". It must have only lasted 30 seconds, and afterwards it took me a few minutes to find myself again as I sat staring at my lap. Turns out my head cracked the windshield in front of me, but I wasn't aware of my surroundings as it happened. I'm basically fine and luckily I got it worse than the other driver.

Anyways, I'm just curious if anyone has a similar story. And of course I want to remind everyone to drive carefully. I pulled out of the parallel spot quickly because I didn't want to keep oncoming traffic waiting, but now hopefully I will never forget that keeping people waiting by maneuvering slowly is a small price to pay to avoid a costly accident with unseen drivers.

I hope you are alright in recovering from this experience. Anything can happen during those impacts. Traumatic experiences are fascinating in detail, so thank you for sharing. Hitting or being hit by another car can definitely and possibly dangerously alter consciousness, as there are vulnerabilities in most motor vehicles.

Once before band practice, my friend was quickly pulling out of the parking space as I was putting the seat-belt on passenger side, and suddenly this shift in my auditory and spatial awareness came through me. This very loud popping sound whooshed and rattled through the car. I look over and my friend was in adrenaline shock. I was unnerved at what had happened. Turns out the vehicle we were in had a piece of metal sticking out the back-end and blew this guy's tire as he was driving by behind us. The tail-end hit the side of the other car slightly but still noticeable when it happened. It tore my friend up at the time, though. Band practice was rightfully engaged, anyways.

Also, once I was casually right here on the Nexus and a huge impact car accident happened just outside our house. Two older folks rammed this car behind because another car before it had come to a brake halt. An impact sound loud enough to get the blood pumping faster coursed through the neighborhood. So naturally, I ran outside to see how everyone was and they were all in shock. Particularly one woman had to be escorted out of the car because she was utterly frozen. No one was injured, thankfully. The only severe injuries I've seen are stretchers being used to take unconscious patients to ER. Those are definitely personal and sometimes life-changing experiences.

Other than that, nothing major as your story presents. Visions of pure exposure can reveal themselves in life threatening situations. This is known. And be careful.

My friends and I were eighteen or nineteen years old and one of my buddies just got a new sports car. So we take it out for a spin. Up the rural roads where you can speed and there are no cops

So my friend wants to test the governor on his new car (the point at which the engine decelerates sharply....we found it at around 200km/per hour) while driving down this desolate road. We come barrelling down this hill at over 200kph and realize there's a connecting highway at the bottom of the hill and if we don't stop....

So he slams on the brakes and we start spinning....did more than 360 degrees rotation. I had my hands pressed against the back windows with my two friends in the front seats. We came to a stop about six feet from the bottom of the hill and none of us wet our pants, thankfully

Everything slowed down and became dream-like...it was very psychedelic The sounds of the wind and the tires screeching were very distant and even my sense of touch dimmed/faded. Wild

This is somewhat related, but I had a VERY psychedelic (bordering on boundary dissolving) experience 7 or so years ago. Im fairly sure it was a panic attack that spawned it. I remember me and by buddy had drove to the city nearby, unsure exactly of where the ER was. We were downtown, 12am, in the middle of the city. I started to panic more and more for some reason because of not being able to find the hospital. Eventually we came up on this road that had been blocked off because of construction and there had been a cop sitting back there. In a last ditch effort I told my buddy to stop the car so I could get out and go ask where the ER was. The cop probably thought I was a goof, walking down a tore up sidewalk that was blocked off, in the middle of the night up to his car.

I'll never forget though. I went up to his window, he rolled it down about half way, I asked him "can you tell me where the ER is?" He started talking, and as he was giving me directions, his voice started to worbble out, more and more, like his voice was breaking up into unrecognizable sounds/vibrations. My whole body had went numb almost instantly then started vibrating. As soon as this happened - the cops face, his car, the buildings, the sky, everything started vibrating in unison, breaking up into little spindles of light; it's really hard to describe.

And for some reason, during that moment, I didn't care that I looked like a doofus in front of the cop, I didn't care about anything really. It also felt identical to that occasional dread you get on a really intense psychedelic experience - like "oh god. well, I guess this is it, my last breath, my life is no more". This is exactly how it felt to me during this. It felt like reality was dissolving away in those seconds. Not a care in the world during that moment; there was only that experience that was happening, nothing else mattered, at all.

EDIT: Btw, this story was over what felt to me like an irregular heart beat (was beating really fast it seemed like). It persisted for hours before I decided to get drove to the ER. This in turn made me panic, then everything else transpired after that.

We are all destined to think that sooner or later. It is funny because most people including myself ignore it and put it out of their minds, perhaps because death is absurd and therefor hard to intergrate with everyday life. This then therefor forces people to live latently thinking that it will never happen and miss the benefits of knowing impermanence consciously with certainty at every moment.

It reminds me of a clip from this movie about how being buried alive brought on spiritual awakening:

https://www.youtube.com/...h?t=33&v=c8vVrj9ubLU

I hope you don't have brain damage, otherwise miller form repoman may be right about how the more you drive the less intelligent you are:

https://www.youtube.com/...h?v=X4QKiYar9pI#t=02m02s

Although it wasn't a car crash per se, I did have an extremely psychedelic reaction from a concussion I had when I fell off of my long board and smacked my head on the asphalt on a hot and humid 100+ degree farenheit day.

I was dropped off by a friend approximately a mere 3 miles or so of completely abandoned backwoods roadway away from my home and I, not wanting to make her drive any further due to the extraordinarily long distance my place was from the rest of human 'civilization', agreed to get out at this drop point and long boarded home toward my house. It was a typical ride home. The cool kiss of the breeze was massaging my curly hair and fanning the beads of sweat off my face as I rode onward down the road, all alone, eyes closed, enjoying the moment.

Out of nowhere a rock got caught in the space between the top of the left wheel and the bottom of the board, causing my board to come to a sudden stop and catapulted me head first down into the sea of asphalt beneath me.

The upper right corner of my forehead took the brunt of the blow as I hit the ground forehead first and rolled over as I usually do when I get shot out into such injurious spaces. Right as my forehead ate asphalt, my consciousness snapped in half. Rolling over by subconscious training, everything behind my eyes exploded into a multiverse of psychedelic kaleidoscopic tunnel visions. Then these bright bursts of multicolored light fireworks rippled around the periphery and orangish-blue lightning bolts shot through and cracked the camera of inner sight and everything flashed to black.

My eyes opened and I woke up to see the cloudless sapphire blue sky staring me down from the heavens, watching over my concussed corpse. I blinked a couple times and something seemed odd.. very very odd...

OUCH A burning convex crater was standing at full attention about half an inch high and and inch wide right above the upper right corner of my right eye and just to the left of my right temple. Wincing in shock and pain, I noticed vivid visual color distortions around the upper-right arena of my visual field. When I closed my left eye, I noticed that the upper half of my right eye's visual field was extraordinarily blurry. It was sparkling in a sea of rainbow-fractal-line hexagonal star crystals of multicolored blurriness. Around the very edge of the swollen lump the visual distortion reached its peak psychedelic effects; the visual distortions were much more organic/real looking that they are from tryptamines by several orders of magnitude. The force of impact had given me a concussion and excessive swelling above the eye which may have put pressure on the optic nerve, leading to psychaedelic visual distortions in vision.

I got up and, barely balancing on my two fumbling feet, I got back on the skateboard and got back on my merry way back home. I looked at my phone and realized that I had been out for a good five minutes, during which not a single car passed by (I would assume this to be so because I was in the same position I left reality in when I woke up). I felt groggy and off baseline, a considerable +2.5 by this point. The visual distortion field still sparkled around the upper portion of the right eye and with each and every wince and changing facial expression, the bump echoed another cry of pained discomfort. It felt as if I had taken a bit too much acid and wasn't in conscious control of my bodily movements-some strange innately instinctual autopilot program called fate function was guiding my frame home. I, or at least the unidirectional source of attention I am, was sitting still, not aware of anything but the ringing in its ears and the ache of the bump which dislocated my mind from my body. I sat there, not thinking, letting the subconscious survivalist lizard brain move me back to my safe place as I drifted about the multicolored cataclysm of concussed consciousness, observing but not acting.

By some grace of God i got home, took a couple tylenol and drank some coffee to keep me up, and then proceeded to meditate in my bed. My GOD. The images flowed like silk and sating across newborn flesh across the tapestry of closed eyes. Multicolored rainbow-dotted multidimensional fractalmations of memories played out before me, eclipsing any and all visual reason. I kept on repeating the name of God, my mantra, over and over again as I brought my attention to the third eye.

The vision-spewing splendid source blew up like a balloon, expanding from the upper right segment of the visual field and settled over my entire inner visual periphery. I found myself lost within a sea of Bright multicolored lights painted with puzzlingly poetic patterns. I lost myself in the splendidly spectacular sight of a picture perfect blackish-white school of koi arranged into a magically mysterious mandala. The mandala school began to spin around and around and around until my third eye blew through the center of the hyper-spatial gateway through which everything went green.

Behind a background flashing red-blue-green over and over and over again, I heard a robotic metallic orange-plutonian voice approach me through the strobing background colors.

"Child, you have gone far, too damn far into this place." A voice with the soulless female features of GLADoS boomed and echoed with an ancient divine mystical presence-a voice of intuitive reason speaking to me through my third eye.

"This is death. This is doom. GET OUT! You are in the land of lotus eaters. They seek your life force and lure you into a peaceful meditative slumber with their visions of grandeur. Once you are out, that is it. You are done. LIVE, MY CHILD! LIVE!!" A roaring ringing pitch of an imperceptibly high frequency cawed and clawed at my ears from deep within the darkness. My attention anchored itself in the painful pulsating presence echoing from the big ol' bump on my forehead. The visual field faded back into the upper right corner of my visual field and, with a deep sigh of relief, whipped open my eyes in exasperated shock at what I had just experienced. I felt a surge of infinite energy (far more than the typical caffeine rush) vibrate throughout my entire spinal cord from the root to the crown, pulsating with an electric jolt of awareness of and strong attachment to and with the eternal present moment around and within me, the here and now where it's all happening right here right now with no time to lose myself in my own thought traps. Turning on some Pink Floyd, I put a bag of ice on my big bump and relaxed, slowing my breath and centering myself with eyes open. Slowly yet surely, the ice cooled down the swelling and, as the bump stopped growing and started to reverse its course, my vision made its way back to baseline sight as the pressure was lifted from my right eye's nervous center. I was back in the world of the living, lost for any and all words to describe what in the world had just happened to me.

When I told my mother of what happened, she immediately drove me to the hospital for a CAT Scan, fearing that I may have induced an epidural hematoma. By the grace of all that is God, my brain was unscathed and I haven't experienced any permanenty detrimental cognitive effects.

Shortly after that concussed chronicle in my life, I began channeling my thoughts down in a journal on a regular basis. Almost each and every day from then on I've written more and more extensively, driven by an awakening magical muse in my heart. My writing style has significantly changed over the years of constant never ending inspiration into a beautiful blessing which I am proud to use and practice. That bump to the noggin unlocked the floodgates of my unquenchable thirst to better know myself by allowing my subconscious a means of projecting its unfiltered self onto an external medium. Extensive and constant writing has helped me better understand my own psyche and come to peace with the skeletons in my subconscious closet. It has changed the way I perceive myself and others for the better; through extensive and constant stream of subconsciousness onto my 8.5X11 inch canvases, I have learned to better deal with others and my self along with them-social anxiety has been greatly diminished and I feel more comfy and at home inside my own head.

All great gifts have been given to me after a time of trial and tribulation; in order to taste the sweet nectar and ambrosia of life's finer peak moments, I must pass the test of trying times. I am eternally grateful to the fates for this peak experience-it cracked open a bottomless honeypot of cosmic creativity which is only getting richer and richer as I explore its divine depths.

Selah.

Godsmacker. Just wow. (Now your name makes a bit more sense!)

Hopefully your words will inspire me to express myself more - as it seems to me now, there's too much gone in and not enough coming out at the moment. This answers some of my ponderings on my social anxiety...

Thank you.


Now my road accident story...

Not a psychedelic experience in and of itself, but wait and see. The OP reminded me of this, for reasons soon to become apparent. Now, the trouble with glass is, you hit it with your eyes open... Fortunately I only cracked the glass and didn't actually go through it, but it was very surprising to feel a very hard blow to my face seemingly from nowhere when less than the blink of an eye previously I had been stood up about to get out of the door of my friend's slowly moving truck. So, I'm thinking:

"Ow! What hit me? We've crashed! Oh my god! But we were only going about 3 miles per hour?? What the ****???"

It was like my senses were running out of sequence, I then heard, or recalled with some time delay, a loud crash behind me.

Then: "Ouch! My [bottom]!"

And then I bounced off the windscreen and landed in a heap on the floor of the vehicle.

This must have taken slightly less than one second, but I suppose I recall it from the way I pieced together the confusing and disparate sensations, which took rather longer. A sort of retrograde time-dilation effect.

It was then that I started laughing. We hadn't crashed at all. Hardly. My friend's truck had a cast iron woodburner which had somehow jumped up and struck me with some considerable force such that I was flung through the air much like a ball coming off a bat.

The truck was still moving, so the stove hadn't merely come loose from some impact. Well, not any impact to the truck at least. Finally I worked it out. We had driven beneath an overhanging branch. The stove had a cast iron chimney flue projecting several inches above the roof of the vehicle. When this caught on the branch above, the motion of the truck was magnified by 20 - 30 times by the length of the flue pipe, meaning the stove had struck me on the posterior at something in excess of 40 mph and with a relative force of about 400lbs, thus causing me to fly through the air with sufficient velocity to break the aforementioned windscreen with my face.

I was laughing hysterically for half an hour or so before treating the welts on my buttocks. But that's not all - some four days later (here's the psychedelic link) I'd smoked some DMT with a friend and had produced some quite bizarre and unworldly vocalisations which I don't think I've yet managed to reproduce, although that's somewhat beside the point. The main thing being a little while afterwards when I was given a toffee and bit into it. Suddenly half of my face went "Clunk!" and moved what felt like several millimetres back into position. So technically I'd got a fractured skull there, although it was just the bone sutures that were a bit stretched out. All quite painless, apart from the stove impact site.

That part of my jaw was moving in and out of position for months afterwards. Probably more damage was done to my spine, but that's another story entirely...

Blessings.

Godsmacker, wow!!

These are some amazing stories! Love how much you gained from your fall, Godsmacker!

Now my story is slightly similar to Godsmacker. However, I was on a snowboard and my head hit a very hard slab of ice. I was with a bunch of friends snowboarding in the Swiss Alps when I saw a jump going off the side of piste. I hit it and tried my usual 360 and my weight went completely off, causing me to land basically upside down on my head. I didn't wear a helmet back then.

I stood up feeling very dazed and i saw my friends coming towards me. They didn't look like my friends at all. It was like they had warped into these really strange looking gargoyles. It felt a bit like a waking dream. I puked all over the snow, which is a sign of concussion. I said I was fine (even though I obviously wasn't) and we had to go back up the mountain to snowboard back to where we would get the train back home. For the next couple hours my vision was cut off by a slab of shiny grey metallic matter that had rainbow colours, like when oil is on top of water. My memory is quite blurry until we were on the train.

I wear a helmet when I snowboard these days.

I hope you're alright.. Blows to the head are nothing to mess with!

That being said, in a stupid moment of my own, I've also experienced some really weird effects from head impact...
A few years ago, during a smoke session at a friend's house after a day at the river (tired and dehydrated), I took a rip off of the big 2' glass bong and hopped suddenly up off the couch to pass it to the next person in the circle (while holding in the hit). This was a bad idea....
As soon as he took the bong from my hand, my vision began to tunnel and fade and my headspace began to rapidly cloud. Knowing that I was about to black out, I tried to get lower to the ground and away from any obstacles before I lost motor control.. But I wasn't quick enough and lost my bearings too soon. I lost consciousness before I hit the ground.

I had fallen a short distance into a TV cabinet, cracking a rib on a cabinet pull and striking the base of my skull on the edge of the TV console. This knocked the wind out of me and gave me a mild concussion, and I was unconscious for about 10-15 seconds during which my eyes rolled back and I experienced mild convulsions, according to objective accounts. I then rapidly began to re-acclimate to reality, was able to speak within 10 seconds, and had the capacity to interview the half-dozen stoners in the room and adequately deduce what had happened within a minute. This was surprising, considering...

As I was falling, looking back at the console I was about to collide with, my senses blacked out completely as I lost all bodily awareness. I experienced an odd dream-sequence into which my mind seamlessly integrated, much like a normal non-lucid dream state during sleep, which lasted a subjective 45 minutes or so. The transition was utterly seamless and much like a rapid DMT flash, in that it seemed to be a sudden shift into a continuum of experience which was already existent before I arrived; That it was always there, and I just slipped into it by passing out unexpectedly and hitting my head at the key moment.

The normal dream scene (a long, bizarre conversation in a Toys-R-Us warehouse with a young woman I'd met at a fest who was dressed in a doctor's coat and carried a clipboard), then rapidly disintegrated in a manner highly similar to the onset of a breakthrough dose of DMT at the peak of an LSD trip (which I had not yet experienced at this time). "I", as a point of reference in reality, ceased to exist and as a result so did normal perception of time, space or anything else familiar. It was as thoroughly immersive and confounding to normal language as non-differentiated LSDMT space. There was subjective eternity and absolutely no presence of thought whatsoever; merely perception. If I did have the ability to reason and form thought, my assumption would certainly have been that I had died or suffered some irreparable head trauma which had severed my perception of reality.

Instead, my bodily senses began to return before my mental faculties, which eased the transition back to waking consciousness. There became an awareness of an intense pain in my neck, and a feeling of something painfully pressing into my back. These sensations occurred to me as something unpleasant that I desired to remedy, and correspondingly I found that "I" existed at all, and "I" was aware and seemingly capable of taking action to avoid this pain. This triggered a coming to my senses and a sudden influx of sensations of all sorts. My mind had no knowledge of my surroundings or situation, and I did not remember having passed out or fallen. I did, however, quickly remember where I was, who I was with and what we were doing before I fell; My mind began rapidly assembling a possible story of what had happened in a flurry of scattered and confused thoughts which seemed to present as visual and auditory hallucinations which intermeshed with my rapidly crystallizing perception of reality... This subjectively minutes-long haze of scattered disorganized thinking happened during intense time dilation that lasted just a few seconds before I was fully aware of my surroundings.

I suddenly became fully aware of my body, surroundings and that I had struck my head on this TV console and knocked myself out. There were also six people silently staring at me with slack-jawed expressions, who had apparently all been just sitting there watching me twitch around for 10 seconds without moving a muscle to help. ... My immediate reaction was to ask the person immediately in front of me how long it had been since I hit the cabinet, and rapidly repeated it to other people in the room until I got a ballpark range of 10-15 seconds. This confirmed my assumption that I had blacked out and my mind began to settle and recognize what had really happened, and I began to slowly take care of my injuries and move somewhere comfortable.

---

This has always been a confounding experience to me. The combination of sudden loss of blood pressure to the brain and a sudden concussion ought to produce some altered perception for a while... But it was a surprisingly intense and profound event, regardless. If it had not been for my previous experiences with DMT and other psychedelics, it would have been a massively disorienting and frightening experience which may have led me to panic and exacerbate whatever mild brain insult I received.

Holy crap, this is a long post!... Long in short; It was a fascinating experience, and while it's quite the mental exercise to ponder, I would love to read more into altered states of consciousness such as this and what physiological mechanics are involved. I wonder what research has been done into altered states during head trauma? It certainly seems to be common enough.

I'm glad you made it through the accident alright.. Take care of that Noggin!!

I often wake up in the night with DMT visuals.... Many activities that are normal for most people will cause psychedelic episodes for me - I guess that is just how my brain works. If I stand up to fast I will get a head rush that leaves me with crazy visuals... I have even had an Ayahuasca ceremony that lasted 8-9 days before (I just stayed altered even long after the plants were physically out of my system).

Brains are super funny.

I almost drowned once... Was in a undertow and as I was blacking out my spirit left my body for a while.... Was nothing like DMT or Salvia in any way... Actually I dont even think DMT and Salvia are like each other in many ways.... I have never had any psychedelic experience remotely similar to that drowning experience though - it was completely unique from everything else I have ever experienced.

I have had dying experiences with psychedelics but those were very very different from actually drowning...