There were no drugs involved in my strange, sleeping mishap. That's why I call it a bizarre screwup or an accident of some kind. It happened just as I described it in that article. It started when I focused too much on the hypnogogic shapes you see when you're falling asleep. Somehow, doing so disconnected my conscious mind from the sleep cycle, so I was experiencing it from the outside.
It was lying hanging onto a train from outside the car, like James Bond or something, so I couldn't relax and sleep like you're supposed to (by sitting in the seat that's there for you inside the train). So the sleep cycle happened as normal, with all the physiological changes, but my conscious mind somehow managed to isolate itself, to hide itself away in my brain or wherever so that it remained aware of the complete sleep cycle. Instead of a train, it was more like hanging onto a rollercoaster because of all the ups and downs.
Anyway, I've never taken DMT or anything stronger than cannabis. And I've only had two powerful experiences with cannabis, one of which I wrote about too.
There was something paradoxical about my sleep mishap, but it's not exactly what Hindus say is possible. I don't know whether they should be given the benefit of the doubt on this. The question is whether the ego or the personal self can be entirely eliminated in anything that can be called an experience. If it's not eliminated in the awareness of the nothingness in deep sleep, why on earth that should that be a calming experience? It wasn't remotely calming in my case. Rather, it was unspeakably boring and exhausting because it prevented me from sleeping for an entire week.
The voice that accompanied my sleep experience was just the inner narrative that's part of my daily conscious life. It was the conscious me, the one that seems to have executive control of my cognitive and motor functions. But in the sleep ordeal, I was stripped of most of my powers, as it were. I found I couldn't visualize things, so I was reduced to chanting mantras, to observing the horror of this discombobulation until morning.
