What Are Altered States of Consciousness? I Looked Into Everything—and What Felt Scary Changed

Key takeaways

• An altered state of consciousness is a state in which your sense of time, your body, and yourself shifts from its usual alert-mode configuration.
• It is not a mystical experience reserved for special people. It can arise before sleep, during deep absorption, or in low-stimulation environments.
• The point is not to chase an intense experience. It is to create some distance from your usual reaction patterns and learn to read your own experience again.

It’s 11:30 p.m. You brush your teeth and get into bed. But you keep replaying the one thing you should have said in tomorrow’s meeting—or rather, the meeting that already happened. Your mind fills in the other person’s expression on its own. “Maybe that made me look bad.” “What should I say next time?” You are paying an extra fee for a scene that has already ended.

Then the notification sounds that bothered you a moment ago seem far away. Something half like a dream image appears. You check the clock: only five minutes have passed, but it feels much longer. Were you asleep, or awake? It is a little unclear.

You probably know this. Right before sleep, images can begin to appear differently from the way they do during the day.

What may be happening here is an altered state of consciousness.

An altered state of consciousness is a temporary shift in how we construct our sense of time, body, and self, compared with our ordinary state. In English, it is called an Altered State of Consciousness, or ASC. There are many possible entry points: the edge of sleep, deep meditation, absorption in music, flow during exercise, or environments with reduced sensory input.

Did you think, “Here we go—another vague spiritual argument”? That caution is reasonable. The phrase *altered states of consciousness* often comes wrapped in strange production value: “awakening,” “another world,” “your life will change in an instant.” Honestly, when it is sold that way, it is hard not to pull back.

But I do not think we should treat this as an ornament for mystical experience. It makes more sense to see it as a familiar phenomenon that can occur when the brain rearranges its usual way of processing information. It is not only about extraordinary people. There may be an entry point even in the few minutes when you are standing in the kitchen, absentmindedly waiting for water to boil.

When the editor in your head takes a short break

At 8:17 a.m., you are on the train platform reading a short message from your manager: “Can we talk this afternoon?” That is all it says. Yet your mind immediately connects it to your performance review, something you said badly, and next month’s living expenses. Nothing has happened, but inside your head, it is not just a trailer. The final episode has already started.

At times like this, the editor in your head is working too hard. It plans ahead, predicts danger, and grades you. This is normally a useful role. But especially on a tired morning, that editor seems to show up with a red pen and mark up every page. You have probably read “Can we talk this afternoon?” and found yourself unable to focus on work for the rest of the morning.

In 2003, Arne Dietrich proposed the transient hypofrontality hypothesis [1]. The prefrontal cortex is involved in higher-order cognition, including planning, judgment, and self-monitoring. The hypothesis suggests that when its activity temporarily decreases, our usual self-checking and time management may become less dominant, changing the quality of consciousness.

It is a little counterintuitive. More mental activity does not always mean a richer experience of consciousness. When the meeting in your head is always in session, the sensations right in front of you may not even make it onto the agenda. When the prefrontal cortex loosens its supervision slightly, pre-verbal sensations and associations that would usually be dismissed may have room to emerge. This is part of why its relationship to creativity has been discussed.

The world often tells us: think more, manage more. But I do not think staying in the director’s chair at all times is maturity. The ability to think is necessary. But trying to drive your whole life with thinking alone is like entering a parking lot with your foot still on the accelerator. At some point, you have to ease off, or even what you can see starts to narrow.

That said, this is not an attempt to explain every altered state through the prefrontal cortex alone. Other brain regions and individual differences matter greatly, and Dietrich’s hypothesis is only one part of the broader picture. If we skip that and say, “Turn off the prefrontal cortex and anything can happen,” the conversation gets careless very quickly. The brain is not such a simple switch.

Honestly, while writing this article, I have lost focus after checking one notification and somehow ended up on an unrelated shopping site. Not only is the director not directing—the director is on their phone. That is its own problem. But sometimes, when the director’s voice gets a little quieter, I realize before I can explain it: “Oh. This is what I was afraid of.”

Why inner imagery can increase in an empty space

Many people imagine altered states as something brought on by intense stimulation: loud sound, a special ritual, something far from ordinary life. But there is an entry point in the opposite direction, too: reducing stimulation.

In a 2024 study on floatation therapy, Helena Hruby and colleagues reported experiences of softened body boundaries and distortions in subjective time in a floatation environment with greatly reduced sensory stimulation [2]. Floatation therapy reduces input to the skin, muscles, vision, and hearing by moderating water temperature, buoyancy, light, and sound.

When there is less information coming in from outside, the brain does not simply do nothing. This is easy to misunderstand. Going somewhere quiet does not necessarily make your mind completely blank. Rather, the activity of the default mode network (DMN)—a network involved in autobiographical memory, imagination, and simulations of the past and future—may shift.

Your sense of the boundaries of your body, and even your sense of what time it is, are things your brain constructs every second from sensory information. When there is less material to work with, those familiar boundaries can become a little less stable. With less information coming from outside, images and memories that had been waiting in the background may move forward. Silence does not mean nothing happens. It can make what you could not hear before more noticeable. It is a little like how, on a night when the refrigerator stops humming, the room suddenly feels larger.

Think of a Sunday afternoon, after you turn off the shower. You hear only the low sound of the ventilation fan. The work message you were worrying about a moment ago suddenly feels far away. Steam clouds the mirror, and it feels oddly unclear where the warm air around your arm ends and your skin begins. You do not need to assign some grand meaning to that. But it is a small-scale example of how reduced sensory input can shift the sense of self.

Have you ever come out of the bath, picked up your phone, and briefly forgotten why you opened it? Usually, the thought is immediate: “I have to reply.” But for those few seconds, the reason to hurry becomes slightly less convincing. It is a very small shift. Still, in the sense that it takes you a step away from an automatic reaction, it should not be dismissed.

The more I write about this, the more I think that people who fear altered states may be afraid of losing control. But when our usual control loosens by one degree, we may notice thoughts we have been gripping tightly for years. “I have no value unless I do everything properly.” “If someone dislikes me, it is over.” At times, we can see these as thoughts, rather than as facts.

When the noise in your head settles, what comes up? Probably not an impressive answer. It may be the message you have not replied to. It may be the laundry you left sitting there. Or it may be something honest that you have kept putting off.

The brain is not breaking down—it is changing how it routes information

Hearing that altered states involve the brain functioning differently from usual may make you uneasy. You may wonder, “Will I stop being myself?” I do not want to reassure you carelessly here. If anxiety is intense or you have concerns about your physical or mental condition, there may be times when it is better not to try to shift your state of consciousness on purpose.

But a 2020 study by D. Vatansever and colleagues offers another way to look at this [3]. During altered states of consciousness, they observed a reorganization of hubs that often serve as centers of information transfer in the brain, along with changes in network connectivity.

It is not that the building itself is being rebuilt. It is more like station construction: the gate you normally use is closed, and the flow of people gathers through another passage. The brain’s structure does not suddenly become something else. Instead, the regions that serve as central points for passing information along may change. That rearrangement may appear as shifts in the expansion or compression of time, the felt distance between self and surroundings, or the way thoughts come together.

This is close to lived experience. When someone is under pressure, the whole world can be occupied by one problem: a reply from their manager, their account balance, a chat screen that still shows no read receipt. All the traffic of attention gets concentrated there, and no other exits are visible. Sometimes this is not only because the problem is serious. It may also be because the brain’s traffic management has become biased in that direction.

On Monday at lunch, you accept a hot coffee at the convenience store register. You have been replaying a mistake at work, but the heat of the cup makes your fingers pause, and the cashier’s “Thank you very much” sounds unusually clear. The problem has not disappeared. But the arrangement in which that one problem was the center of the world breaks apart for a moment.

Did you think, “One coffee is not going to change your life”? Exactly. This is also why we should not make altered states into an all-purpose answer to life. Their value is not in dramatic sensations. It lies in the possibility that a fixed way of seeing can move. Before you are swallowed by a problem, you may notice: “Right now, I am cramming too many people into one passageway.” That alone can sometimes change what you do next.

• Images or words appear in fragments as you are falling asleep.
• You become absorbed in music or exercise and realize you have not checked the time.
• Looking at a view, you step slightly outside your immersion in your own worries.
• You remember the same event from a different distance than usual.

None of these experiences is proof of a special ability. They are everyday fluctuations in consciousness, continuous with ordinary life. In fact, if you have been searching, “Is something wrong with me?” this may be worth knowing. The brain is not a single unchanging block. It changes how it lets information flow depending on the situation. That change itself does not need to be treated as abnormal right away.

Knowledge alone rarely reaches the circuitry of our reactions

“If you just change your mindset”—if that were enough, this would all be much easier. I think that advice is only half true.

Of course, knowledge can help. Being able to say, “I am exhausted, so I am thinking pessimistically,” or “This is an anxious prediction,” can make a real difference in some moments. But then, a second later, you open the unread-message screen again. You understand it intellectually, yet your body reacts first. Many people suffer in that gap.

In 2002, Jiri Wackermann and colleagues studied the ganzfeld method, which creates uniform sensory stimulation, alongside hypnagogic states. They reported a relationship between alpha and theta activity and subjective experiences including visual imagery [4]. As external information decreases and a person moves closer to sleep, inner imagery may actually increase. A quiet environment is not a machine that empties the brain.

Again, it is better not to make this only about emotion. When external stimulation becomes more uniform, there are fewer objects pulling at attention. As a result, internal imagery and fragmented memories may be more likely to enter awareness. In states closer to sleep, the strict reality-checking of waking life can also loosen, allowing images and words to appear more freely than usual. That is why the harder you try to think of nothing, the more things may come up. The brain can be a little contrary that way.

At 10 p.m., you see a glass left in the sink and think, “I could not even put this away again.” Intellectually, you know you are simply tired. Still, your stomach feels heavy. This reaction did not begin with knowledge alone. Old memories, bodily tension, and your usual self-evaluation are all moving at once. So adding more rational explanation may not always catch up with the speed of the reaction.

You probably know this too: the night someone told you, “You worry too much,” and you ended up blaming yourself even more. You heard the correct explanation, but somehow did not feel any better. There is no need to bring weakness of will into it. The circuitry of our reactions is not rewired just by reading an explanation.

Altered states are not meant to make problems vanish by magic. They can offer room to set down the microphone that ordinary thinking has been holding so tightly, and to work with emotion and bodily reactions from another angle. With that room, a person who would have been immediately consumed by one comment from their manager may be able to pause for one breath before replying. It is small, but in daily life, it can make a substantial difference.

I believe that understanding something in your head and changing your life are different things. Knowledge is a map. But reading dozens of maps does not change the bodily habit that makes you freeze at the actual corner. Sometimes it is only when emotion, memory, and bodily sensation are included that we can choose again.

So a retreat does not end as just a vacation

Simply resting in nature can make people feel somewhat better. You wake up to daylight rather than an alarm. After eating, you do not have to rush to clear the dishes. There is time when you do not take your phone out of your pocket. Even that can loosen reactions that had become fixed.

But I think it is a missed opportunity to turn a retreat into an upscale version of a vacation. Eating good food somewhere beautiful and saying, “I feel refreshed,” is not a bad thing. But if it ends there, then on Monday morning, when “Can we talk this afternoon?” arrives on the train platform, it is easy to fall back into the same reaction.

A retreat can be more than escapist soothing. It can be a place to update the way we live inwardly. I want to be clear about that. It should be a space for encountering everyday reaction patterns and bringing new options back through lived experience. If rest is all you need, a weekend spent sleeping until noon may do the job. But to touch questions like, “Why do I shrink in this moment every time?” or “What am I trying to protect, and what am I giving up?” requires a setting that takes you a little outside your usual life.

nehan’s *Journey to See Your Life Flash Before Your Eyes* is a two-night, three-day retreat in the forests of Yatsugatake. It gradually combines sound, breath, and practices that work with bodily sensation to create distance from emotions and old beliefs that can be hard to reach through ordinary thought alone. It is not a place to spend passively. It is designed as a process for actively reviewing your reactions in an environment that takes safety into consideration.

You may think, “I already more or less know how I really feel.” But believing you know and having your reactions change are different things. Can a person who blames themselves in front of Sunday-night dishes treat themselves a little differently in that same moment the following week? That is what makes bringing something home meaningful.

Of course, if you are experiencing intense anxiety, confusion, or concerns about your health, please do not force yourself to seek a deep experience. Altered states are not a competition. They are not something to compare with someone else’s dramatic story and think, “I need to go deeper.”

Your pace and safety come first. And if you can step a little away from the usual editor in your head, you do not need to rush toward an answer. You can choose again, just once, the reaction you have been choosing automatically for years. That one time may matter more than it seems.

FAQ

Q: Is an altered state of consciousness the same as sleep? A: No. Some states, such as the period before sleep, may share certain features with sleep. But altered states of consciousness include a broad range of states in which the sense of time, body, or self differs from usual. You may remain aware of being awake while the usual dominance of your thinking loosens.

Q: Will I see frightening things in an altered state? A: Experiences vary widely. Some people have strong imagery, while others do not visualize anything in particular. The value of an experience is not determined by whether images appear. It is best to avoid environments that intensify anxiety or situations where you push yourself alone, and to choose a setting with appropriate safety and support.

Q: Do everyday concentration and absorption count as altered states of consciousness? A: There are differences in degree, but becoming so absorbed that you lose track of time, or the sensations that arise before sleep, can be considered everyday examples of altered states. However, ASC research includes a wide variety of states, so we cannot conclusively reduce all of them to one mechanism.

Understanding something intellectually does not necessarily change the familiar reaction that shows up in an afternoon meeting. There is another path: revisiting that gap through bodily sensation and states of consciousness.

In our free online course, we explain more concretely why the same worries repeat, and what stages a retreat can move through before bringing you back to everyday choices. This is not a collection of dramatic experience stories. It is about learning to read your own reactions.