After it had happened, I walked out into the sunlight, into the city’s first snow. A crowd of birds took flight, softly carving through the air. Below them the earth shimmered. The world trembled in silence.

I sat down at a cafe, took out the pocket notebook, and jotted down, “The shivering cold we feel as we step into the brazen wind and the scattered snow is not ours. Snow has no bounds. It is everything that we are not. It is God. It lives just below the horizon of our consciousness. In the end, there isn’t an end at all. All is before birth, after death.”

What happened?

An hour earlier, I walked into my friend’s apartment, sat down on a soft surface, cross-legged with my back straightened. The meditation pose added a touch of the sacred.

“Will I stay normal long enough to turn on noise cancellation on my Airpods?”

“I am not sure, but probably.”

“Right. I’ll do that as I lie down.”

“Sounds good.”

I could feel my pulse.

“Take your time to get ready. No rush.”

I took a few deep breaths.

“I am ready.”

By then he had confirmed I was indeed looking for a breakthrough experience. He had suggested the appropriate dosage, measured precisely with a milligram scale, and loaded into the vaporizer.

In truth, I had no idea what “breakthrough” meant. The little I knew about DMT was that it is physically one of the safest substances one could consume, and it is an extremely powerful psychedelic compound. A friend had told me that three years ago after his near-death experience. When I heard it, my mind went, amazing, I want to know what that feels like. At no point did I stop to consider what exactly would need to transpire for a mind to go, I think I am about to die.

Think about that for a second.

So it was easy to say “I am ready.” How strange could it be?

My friend passed me the meticulously prepared device.

“Press the button, hold it up to your mouth, inhale for seven seconds, hold your breath so fresh air pushes the smoke down.”

No problem. Not a particularly complicated sequence, I thought. How hard could it be?

One second in, heat arrived in my mouth. Fine so far.

Two seconds in, I could already sense my throat getting irritated by the smoke. The urge to cough was pressing. Unwilling to lessen the trip’s intensity, I kept the inhale going despite the growing discomfort. My friend was counting for me, both audibly and with his hands, so I would have clear cues on when to let go. I focused my attention on his hand to distract myself.

Strange sensations crept up at the four-second mark. My body was slowly melting away as a door opened, a door to a world so alien that I couldn’t make sense of anything. I felt a tingling of violence in that world. A sardonic voice jokingly said “welcome” with telepathy, as if scolding me for taking up space, all of it so inexplicably familiar, as if I had been there before, as if I was born there, even though this was my very first.

Five seconds in, the urge to cough had disappeared. Physicality was no longer relevant. I didn’t have a throat anymore.

Six seconds in, breaths disappeared. I couldn’t understand breathing. What is it? How does one breathe? I thought I had stopped breathing because I didn’t know how. I knew I was alive, but it felt close, it felt like maybe, maybe I was about to die once the oxygen in my body ran out. In fact, throughout the entire trip I didn’t know if I breathed.

Another two or three seconds later, I heard my friend’s voice, “You can let go now. Lie down.” Out of those two instructions, the first meant nothing to me, the second I couldn’t comply with until my friend helped me fall back. He later told me I was staring at him. I didn’t know, because my vision began to shut things out. With eyes open I saw nothing. I wasn’t trying to see or confused by why I couldn’t see. I simply didn’t have eyes anymore, the same way I stopped having a throat.

I vaguely heard him uttering the word AirPods. I think I was perhaps faintly aware I wanted to do something with it, but the physical parts of my body had already disintegrated, and my mind was in shambles, each piece rearranging to form a larger whole that didn’t belong to me. It didn’t matter that ANC wasn’t on, though, because like my eyes and my throat, my ears also went missing.

Explosion.

A hyper-dimensional world ruptured instantaneously with a ceaselessly expanding topology, all from a singular point of entry: my consciousness. It wasn’t me but all me. Incomprehensible. The concept of “my consciousness” persisted for another second or so, after which the notion of a self became utterly ephemeral. It was in the air, then quickly gone.

There was a release of energy from a state so compressed that it had been inaccessible my entire life. The closest thing I can point to is the theorized black hole to white hole transition, matter crushed past the point of existence, erupting outward again.

The realm was divine, as if it had ultimate authority, ultimate judgement. I was plummeting upwards ferociously and uncontrollably, as the remnants of my mind fought to hold on, in vain. I received punishment for refusing to let go. I knew letting go meant death.

A name was proclaimed, at the tip of the universe's tongue. It was never spoken, but I heard it, a thousand times over. Someone with my name was called, first gently, then impatiently, then urgently, then furiously. Who was she? Who was being called? My mind had a vague sense it was me, that it was my name, but it couldn’t be sure. Or rather, there was no subject in “being sure.” It was paradoxical and simultaneous, knowing and not knowing.

The ridiculous notion of “Rebecca” was nothing but a name that floats in the ether with not a body and not a mind and the utterance of which produces nothing but a mute sound to be heard by no one.

Nightmarish yet beautiful to the extreme.

To the right of my vision, or the semblance of a vision, an entity was there. Not a figure exactly, but it did have a higher-dimensional form. A density. It didn’t have a face but it had a direction. It was oriented toward me completely. I understood that it had seen this before, countless people arriving here, fighting, refusing. I was not special. I was not even interesting. The entity was watching me the way an elder watches a child who has just broken something precious and wants to lie about it. Patient. Unsurprised. Offended.

It shouted at me to let go. I couldn’t and I couldn’t, but I knew I had to. I didn’t have a choice.

“Rebecca, you really fucked up this time.”

“This is it. You’ve reached the end. Die.”

“Let go.”

I had come close to drowning — or thinking I was drowning — when I was 11, off the coast of Balicasag, a coral island in the Bohol Sea in the Philippines. It had an incomparably dramatic underwater topography, where the seafloor abruptly drops off into steep walls that plunge 40-50 meters down. The island was encircled by an underwater cliff, making it ideal for snorkeling and diving.

It didn’t matter that I was a terrible swimmer, since most of the seafloor was shallow enough to graze with my toes if I pushed myself down. I was going out into the ocean a few times every day with my family, watching the corals, the bright creatures threading between them.

I became complacent. I swam far. As physical exhaustion caught up, I floated on my back to catch a breath without the snorkeling tube, staring at the sky above and the ocean that cradled me, mesmerized by the vastness of this world that I couldn’t comprehend. I drifted in awe, basking in the serenity.

Some time had passed, perhaps ten minutes, perhaps twenty.

“I should get back to land now.”

After reattaching my goggles and the snorkeling tube, I plunged into the water.

Little did I know, a bottomless void was waiting for me. I panicked and began thrashing, as I realized I had travelled far, far past the cliff.

The distance between that experience and present day makes it difficult to remember exactly how it felt, except for the fear. Fear has a vividness that is hard to forget. That first sight of the void, that first thought of the distance between me and the land made the possibility of death real to an 11-year-old.

The admonition was crushing. This imminent death was more total, more annihilating. I had no physical body and everything was out of control.

I struggled and struggled. I had such trouble coming to terms with death, even when I knew it had to be done. I had to die, yet I couldn’t. I continued to suffer.

Eventually, I gave in. I gave in to the idea of perishing, of my parents finding out this is how their daughter went.

Where would I be taken now?

I continued to fall upwards, now with even more violence. A thousand shards of light pierced through me, unforgiving, each with the emotional weight of many lifetimes. It was such radiant brokenness, every shard a wound, every wound sublime.

If only you could see.

Time was not a concept. At no point did I think, this was a psychedelic trip and it would be over soon. While I was in there, everything was final. It was the only reality.

Then something happened. A sensation so feeble I almost missed it. Air moving in my chest. I didn’t know I was capable of breathing. It was simply happening, the way a tide comes in. I had no part in it. I lay there and let it happen, exaggerating each breath just to make sure it was real, feeling my ribs expand against the surface below.

Then vision came back. Not all at once. First, light. Then shapes. Then the ceiling above me, and my friend's face.

Sounds returned next. Crisp. They didn’t come to me in my ears. Instead, I went to them where they were, out on the streets, distant. The sounds were spatial, acute, directionally sharp. If someone had asked, I would’ve been able to tell exactly where each source of sound was. I was attuned to the world in ways I had never experienced before.

Up until this point, even when I was breathing, seeing, and hearing, I still didn’t understand that I had a body. In a way, an endlessly deep and immeasurably wide universe collapsed onto a small human brain the size of a mini pumpkin, powered by a small human body, in a merely three-dimensional reality.

How could that be? How could it be that what I had just experienced took place entirely in my mind? What a ridiculous thing.

I repeatedly tilted my head up to look at the rest of my body. I must have done that about ten times. I curled my fingers, clenched my fists, touched my face, uncrossed my legs from the seated meditation pose earlier, wiggled my toes, still breathing heavy. I looked around to make sure I was indeed where I thought I was.

I couldn’t believe I was alive, and from that erupted a new-found gratitude for life.

After settling back into the world, I finally opened my mouth to ask my friend how long it had been.

“17 minutes.”

Well, I certainly didn’t know this kind of 17 minutes existed.

I sat up once I was confident I had complete control over my body.

“I know you had planned on writing about it. Would you like to do that now?”

“I don’t know how.”

Outside, the snow was falling.