NDE's are not like drug trips.
How true.
I have had several LSD trips in my lifetime (though I would never go for another shot now). Most of those trips were mediocre and worth no special mention, crap acid I suppose. However, two of those trips, widely separated in years, were where, as best as I could tell, the quality and dose of LSD was very good.
During the first of those two trips I was hallucinating very heavily. At one point, near the beginning of that trip when the hallucinations started to kick in, I was standing in the middle of a small public bar where there was someone wildly playing an accordion with most of the rest of the occupants of the pub singing along with gusto the words to the music -- it was loud and to my tripping mind close to total chaos. But I was standing in the pub watching this with my lower jaw (metaphorically speaking) dropped right down to the floor because what I was seeing (quite literally as part of the hallucination) was musical notes (just like you would see on a music score) issuing out of the accordion and out of the mouths of the singers mixing in the air and then swirling around the pub popping like bubbles to make room for the new notes entering the air. I couldn't believe it, this was my first ever trip and had no previous experience of anything like this, but I sure could see it. That was a good part of the trip, from there it started to go badly downwards and I ended up on a very bad trip (I would never want to go through that again). Hallucinations were very, very heavy and, while they were happening, I utterly believed in them as real and was reacting to them as such -- I'm talking about quite literally demons appearing out of thin air and shit like that. So I'm seeing and feeling things that had
no basis in normal reality. So, in effect, I was finding myself in a state of sheer psychosis, totally absorbed by and lost in the hallucinations. The really heavy hallucinations would come in waves -- I'd be in it for a while and believing it, and then they would subside for while. When they subsided for a while I had enough senses to realise that they were hallucinations and was mentally fervently praying to God that they didn't return (they did) -- I was so terrified of them and I knew them to be hallucinations, at least for the periods of time during the trip when I had some semblance of lucidity. This went on, back and forth from periods of psychosis and fully believing the hallucinations to be real to periods of relative lucidity, for several hours and then the trip gradually subsided completely away. At the end of it all I got home and my hands were in a state of tremor with just how frightened I was of what I had just been through with that trip and the hallucinations. I went to bed, eventually slept and when I woke in the morning I still had the tremor in my hands, it was a Sunday, so didn't matter I didn't have to go to work. On Monday the tremor was gone but my mind was still in ribbons from it. The important thing for me that I got out of this as the years went on was that I knew what it was like to be psychotic, I knew what it was like to hallucinate very heavily over a prolonged period, 6-8 hours, and it sure ain't any nice place to be. But it was important for my learning.
The second of those two trips happened years later in very different circumstances -- out in the countryside and not the oppression of city night-life (which is what I find city night-life to be). That trip was really good, lovely mild hallucinations, things more colourful taking on new malleable shapes and so on, but
all based on things that did exist in normal reality, in no way frightening, and at all times I was completely aware that I was hallucinating, not getting lost in it and mistaking it for reality. Along with that there was a very, very pronounced felt sense of expansion of self -- rather like would happen to one through a very, very successful meditation (which I also have one experience of) -- so much so that a huge chunk of your normal egoic self just vanishes. Beautiful sensation but in my experience with a caveat, that there was in the background to that a kind of 'frenetic energy' to it, I would assume caused by the acid.
The kicker for me was that a couple of years after having the bad trip I had an NDE -- it was really good and things that were happening in it could in no way be said to part of normal human existence. In fact they are so out of 'normal human experience' that lots of people start to slap the 'hallucination' label on everything that is happening in NDEs. When they do that they are totally missing reality. There was nothing in my NDE that in any way, shape or form corresponded to even a suggestion of a hallucination (quite the reverse, the NDE was more real than our normal reality) -- and I would think myself in a better position to know that than most of the armchair pseudo-scientific 'sceptics', none of whom to my knowledge have any experience of what it feels like to be psychotic and what it feels like to have an NDE. The two are completely separate things.
Going back to the second of those two trips I would note of the NDE and expansion of self in it, or loss of ego if you want to look at it from that direction, that that state in the NDE (and also in my meditation experience) in no way matches with the similar sensation when this happens in a trip. Again (in my experience) the two are distinctly different. In the NDE and the meditation experience of this kind of thing the 'frenetic energy' is
entirely absent, the condition feels markedly 'purer' than in a drug induced trip -- so much so that you really can't compare the two as equivalents, slight similarity yes, but not direct equivalents.
So in all, yes, in my experience, drug trips and NDEs are totally different beasts. And certainly NDEs are no hallucinations.
P.S. For anyone trying tripping for the first time: choose who you do it with, the location, the time and the activities you will be engaged in while tripping very, very carefully. LSD is putting a loaded gun to your skull if you don't show it respect before you pop the tab. You have no idea what's going to happen, treat it with great respect. I think that was grossly missing in the naïve innocence of my first trip. I sure wised-up after that. What a lesson!