I have a friend who had that experience. He was coming down from LSD, vaped some THC-heavy pot, and experienced a powerful burst of anxiety which momentarily interrupted his short-term memory. He then had the experience of "coming-to" with his body on full alert, for no apparent reason. As he struggled to understand what it was about the world that made it feel so terribly wrong, but failing to find anything in his safe, cozy environment that might explain it, his anxiety mounted - until it got so bad he experienced another short-term memory interruption and the cycle began again. This went on for close to an hour, a repeated cycle of panicking, blacking out, waking up, looking around, panicking, before he was finally able to communicate with his friends, who helped him take a benzo and end the experience.

While it sounds like it must have been a nightmarish experience, what's remarkable is that my friend doesn't regret it at all. As he worked out what was going on in his mind, he discovered that he had to force himself to remain calm in order to maintain a continuity of consciousness. Every time his focus slipped, he'd black out again - so he spent that entire experience focusing on the physical sensations of anxiety, separating those perceptions from his understanding of reality, and directing his consciousness away from worry and toward calm. After it was all over, he says he came away with a much, much improved ability to maintain awareness of his anxiety and to choose how to respond to it appropriately, instead of just freaking out and reacting.

I think that this is one of the big values of psychedelic experience: by inducing intense, unfamiliar states of mind, we can gain perspective on the inner operation of our cognition, and learn to distinguish between the sensations we experience and the physical realities they respond to. Over time, by bashing your consciousness to and fro in a variety of directions, you can gain more and more insight into its operation, which can help you increase your conscious control over your internal experience and therefore improve your life.

> by inducing intense, unfamiliar states of mind, we can gain perspective on the inner operation of our cognition

Yes, this. I've found, though, that the intensity can often be dialed back significantly, while still achieving comparable, certainly more comfortable, and sometimes even better effects.

I think there's absolutely a time and a place for nuking one's ego psychedelically, but it's broadly better to chip at it — if, to torture the metaphor a bit, with a plasma cutter instead of a chisel...