Ketamine and Dissociation
Although many of ketamine’s effects can be found in other hallucinogens such as LSD, one is unique to the ketamine experience — a sense of dissociation in which the mind seems to leave the body and float in space. Ketamine users often refer to this experience as entering a “K-hole.”
Although this experience can be frightening, most users want to experience it and intentionally take a high dose to induce dissociation. The experience of dissociation is, almost by definition, surreal. One user named Paul writes about one of his dissociative experiences:
In this space I experience myself as a Museum exhibition. I am a life-size statue, with my back to one of the walls, floating about 20 meters from the ground. As I look down, I can see people wandering in and out of the Museum.
Others report that dissociation held some surprises that were not always pleasant:
Then suddenly, I was back in my body, lying on my bed. “Wow,” I thought, “it’s over. How abrupt!” I tried to sit up. Suddenly my body was gone again and the room dissolved into the blackness of the void, my reality being quickly pulled out from underneath my feet… This process was actually a little scary, as I had some fear of never making it back to conscious reality, my body lying in a hospital in a vegetative state as my consciousness stayed stuck in a weird, repeating loop.
For some users, dissociation resembles near-death experiences. They report leaving their physical body and sometimes mystically traveling through a tunnel toward “the light.” Ketamine can reproduce all aspects of a near-death experience. Many users who have written about their experiences report the conviction of being dead, talking directly to God, seeing heavenly visions, seeing their bodies down below on Earth, entering other realities, and seeing a replay of their life’s experiences. Some ketamine users report that they enjoy toying with the idea that they may not return. At the same time, ketamine users have the contradictory experience of knowing that they are not physically near death. Kevin, a regular ketamine user, reports,
I was in a state in which I thought there was a reasonable chance that this time I’d gone too far, and would not come back. I did not feel anxiety about this, just some slight concern (about ending my life with so much still to do). From time to time I would check that my heart was still beating, that I was still breathing and that I could move my hands; each time everything seemed OK, so I was reassured that I had not died.
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"The worst thing that's ever happened through ketamine was sniffing so much of that dehydrated crystal that I lost my entire septum."
Anonymous
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