The common account
The most frequent report is the loss of the boundary between self and everything else. People describe the disappearance of the observer, not a change in what is observed. Time and space stop organising the experience. Many accounts contain little or no visual content, which is one of the clearest differences from psilocybin, LSD, or N,N-DMT.
Emotional tone varies widely. Awe, relief, and profound peace appear often. So do terror, grief, and the conviction of dying. A single experience can contain all of them, and the sequence is not something anyone can predict in advance.
Return is often gradual and disorienting. People re-acquire language, then identity, then autobiographical memory, in roughly that order. Weeping and laughter during the return are ordinary.
How it is measured
Research relies on instruments developed for other psychedelics. The Mystical Experience Questionnaire, the Ego Dissolution Inventory, and the Challenging Experience Questionnaire are the ones that appear most often, alongside standard mood and wellbeing measures administered before and after.
These instruments have real limitations here. They were validated on longer experiences with more content. They ask people to rate, in retrospect, a state that suspended the capacity to observe and encode. And they are self-report throughout. The numbers in published papers should be read with that in mind. See the state of the research.
Difficult experiences
Fear of dying is common enough to be treated as ordinary rather than as a sign that something has gone wrong. Physical distress appears in a substantial fraction of accounts. Some people describe a state of confusion or agitation with no recall of it afterwards, which is disquieting for everyone involved.
Difficulty during the acute window does not reliably predict a bad outcome afterwards. Some of the most difficult experiences are reported as the most valuable months later. That finding is consistent across the psychedelic literature and it should not be used to wave away harm, which is exactly how it is often used.
Why accounts vary
Individual metabolism varies, and CYP2D6 activity in particular varies on genetic grounds. Preparation, expectation, physical setting, and the relationship with whoever is present all shape what is remembered and how it is narrated afterwards. Toad secretion introduces compositional variability on top of all of that.
The practical consequence is that no account, including a very compelling one, tells you much about what a given person will experience. Preparation that promises a particular experience is setting someone up.
The limits of language
Descriptions of non-dual states are unreliable by nature, because the person describing them was, by their own account, absent. Every account is a reconstruction assembled afterwards by a self that was not there.
We teach students to hold this lightly in both directions. Take people's reports seriously as reports. Resist turning them into cosmology. And notice how quickly a community can develop a shared vocabulary that shapes what its next members experience and how they describe it.