[SERIOUS] People who have had amnesia and recovered, what was it like not knowing who you were?

This isn’t as good of an example as most of the other stories in this thread but I do think it’s pretty interesting and I haven’t had a chance to tell it before (on reddit, that is).

This occurred during, I believe, the summer after my senior year of high school. I and some of my friends had decided that one of our last hoo-rahs before we all went off to college would be to get together and eat some mushrooms (of the decidedly “magic” variety). To my knowledge, only one person out of the group of nine or ten that we had had taken shrooms before. I definitely hadn’t, I was excited but also a bit nervous as I had heard some stories about very bad trips.

So, fast forward to the day of, we’re all at my buddy’s house since his parents were gone for a few days, we divide up the shrooms amongst ourselves and eat them in peanut butter sandwiches. Some of my friends wanted to take their whole dose at once, though myself and a few others wanted to take part of our dose and then take the rest a bit later when we knew we were okay for more. Of course, there was also a copious amount of a certain other naturally-occurring mind-altering substance being combusted throughout this process so we weren’t all that organized. So I take my first small dose (about 1.5 grams) and after about 45 minutes when I’m still not trying to claw my eyeballs out (didn’t feel much of anything at that point) I decided it would be safe to take the rest, another 1.5 grams for a total of a three gram dose. I felt pretty good about it. What I didn’t realize at the time, however, was that the second sandwich I had eaten had not been my second sandwich with 1.5 in it; it was a sandwich we had prepared for one of our friends who hadn’t arrived yet, and it had a little over 3 grams in it. This realization dawned on me just as I was starting to become very anxious and jittery as the “come up” began in earnest. I was, to say the least, somewhat perturbed.

The last thing I remember is taking a big hit from a bong, hoping to calm myself down a little bit before things got out of hand. It didn’t work very well. The next thing I can remember – and I do remember this relatively clearly as it was quite jarring – is slowly lifting myself off the couch, with absolutely no idea where or who I was, and the only thing I could think was, “Where is my sword?!”

It turns out I had experienced something quite common with psychedelics known as “ego death”. To my understanding, this is essentially a total loss of any notion of the ‘self’, if that makes sense. It makes sense to me in a way that is hard to express with words. Basically what happened is that after that bong hit, I pretty much collapsed onto the couch in a really strange position, with my knees bent and my face directly pressing into the couch cushion. I don’t know how long I was like that – not more than 20 or 30 minutes, but all of my friends had already wandered into other parts of the house by that point. I woke in the same position.

Here’s the part that I personally find the most interesting about what happened – while I was zoned out in my own little world in what can only be described as the ideal ass-pounding position, I’m pretty sure I lived out several decades of a different life. It took place either a long, long time ago or in a world that I had created in my head (likely just a derivative mash-up of the many different fantasy series I’ve read). I was some kind of aristocrat or noble, as I recall owning land, and at some points I wore a sword and a suit of armor as well. I do remember having a family and children though I don’t remember anything about them. I sorely wish I could recall more specifically about this dream-thing but it was extremely hazy even as I was coming to, and at this point it’s barely a collection of vague images and noises.

The point is, though, I distinctly remember waking up in my friend’s family room but believing - knowing, even – that I was whoever I was in that dream. Even though it sounds funny and ridiculous, that’s why my first thought upon standing was to reach for my ‘sword’. I had a different name and home; no details whatsoever about my actual life were apparent to me at that point. For a few seconds, it was actually terrifying. Imagine being some fellow from the medieval age, and waking up in a room with a TV, sound system, and all the other trappings of modern life. Again, it sounds really dumb, because I obviously am not a person from the middle ages, but I swear that’s what it felt like for a few moments.

After I woke up I slowly started to kind of process where I was and what happened. The first conclusion I came to was that I obviously was not a medieval lord. Then, oddly, general knowledge of “things” started to dawn on me before knowledge of my actual identity did. That is, I slowly began to vaguely recognize some of the things around the room. The lamp. The couch. The bong (I still think it’s funny that this was one of the first things I recognized). Then I kind of did a pat-down of myself, and I remembered what pockets were. So I looked in my pockets and I found my wallet, and I remembered what that was for. One of the oddest sensations here that I’m really trying to convey is that I honestly did not recall how I came to have prior knowledge of these objects at the time – it really did feel like I was seeing them for the very first time and that some tiny voice in the back of my mind was informing me as to their various purposes and meanings.

Once I had my wallet, I looked through its contents and found my ID – even though I still wasn’t completely sure how I knew what a wallet even was, I instinctively must have known that my ID (not to imply I was actively aware of what my ID was, either) would be in it. Once I saw it, details from my personal life began to flood in increasingly quickly, and I started to piece things together. One of the last things I can recall from the “psyche” or whatever you want to call it that represented the ‘dream version’ of myself was this profound sense of loss. After only a few minutes, despite the fact that I was again aware of who I truly was and (at some basic level) what was going on, I could almost feel the definitive moment when that other ‘me’ slipped away and was gone. At that moment I vaguely recall experiencing something very much like what I imagine people are talking about when they say your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. It was just another strange sensation in an afternoon filled with them. The way I suppose I’d describe it is that it was like watching a slideshow of my ‘other’ life, hundreds of thousands if not millions of slides long, playing at ten thousand slides per millisecond – and yet, oddly, I felt that I was somehow able to perceive each of these impressions distinctly, and some part of me remembered each and every one of them. I apologize again for how vague and odd this sounds; this bit was by far the most difficult to put into words, hopefully you can at least understand why that is from my explanation.

Anyways, shortly thereafter I was more or less back to my normal self (on mushrooms, granted) though I still felt somewhat off for an hour or so after. I found my friends ripping around the back yard in a go cart (coincidentally, that was possibly one of the most hilarious images I can recall from that day – two of my friends, with this crazed, intense look on their faces that can only result from psychedelics – absolutely tearing through the yard, easily going 20+ mph, screaming their heads off like little girls). After a few minutes of dealing with more anxiety I eventually loosened up and enjoyed what was potentially the happiest 8-10 hours of my life to date (did I mention it was shark week when we did this? Because it was fucking shark week, and shark week on boomers is something you have to experience to understand).

I’ve always been really interested in what happened to me but unfortunately it’s difficult to have any kind of real discussion regarding the events or the phenomena which caused them to occur given the nature of what happened. All I can say is that while I may not remember much in terms of specific details I can still definitely remember the feeling of absolute panic that came over me when I woke up in what was for all intents and purposes an entirely different life. It’s particularly interesting to me because I’ve heard stories of people who will have some kind of head trauma or something like that and will go into a coma and have a similar experience, where they live out years and years in their mind in some other life. I even recall reading about one person who supposedly became depressed in his real life after losing the wife and two children he had raised in his ‘dream’ life. It’s a really strange concept, I wish I knew more about what caused it and that kind of stuff.

/r/AskReddit Thread