Once, when I was twelve or so, I was staring at a mirror, gazing into my own eyes.
My ego began to dissolve. Its like you forget who you are, “who is this person I’m staring at?”. You begin to see yourself as someone else; that person in the mirror isn’t “you”. You see yourself as you would any stranger on the street. I don’t think our brains were made to deal with mirrors.
Quite the experience.
The same thing seems to happen with sustained concentration on anything, such as a word. If I keep thinking about and/or repeating a word in my head it will start to seem weird and unusual, and surely it’s spelled wrong or completely the wrong word for it’s subject. I lose recognition of the word.
So I might try the mirror thing you describe and see if I can unrecognise myself.
Slight nitpick, your ego wasn’t desolving (you weren’t thinking “there is no me”) you were thinking “who’s that person there?”. If your ego dissolved you’d have achieved nirvana according to buddhists.
I was driving to Albuquerque, which is about a one hour drive from my little town in the middle of the afternoon. I passed a minivan, which was going about 10 mph slower than me.
The back window was open.
There was a dog looking out.
It was waving a hat at me.
When I looked again, I realized that the rear windows of that minivan don’t even open. I was not fatigued, sleepy, or under the influence of any mind-altering substance. Some things cannot be explained…
I once very clearly saw an 18 wheeler pull out of a cotton field, directly in front of me. I had time to stop, which I did. After a moment or two I realized there was no truck and no cotton field. I was extrememly exhausted at the time.
Only on drugs.
Then again, no, there was that one time I went three days without sleep, due to a horrible juxtaposition of final exams, my job, and the fact that I had to move. I was all alone in a telemarketing center at four in the morning, and this potted plant looked exactly like a woman, except when I looked directly at it.
When I looked directly at it, it looked like a potted plant. When I looked at it out of my peripheral vision, it looked like a woman in a gray jumpsuit, standing there, watching me. About drove me nuts before I got off work; it was enough to make me wish I had some drugs, preferably something to stave off the need for sleep. Fortunately, after that I was able to go home and go to bed; that six-hour shift was the last thing I had to accomplish in that awful three-day period.
Only once, and it had nothing to do with drugs.
This is kind of a wierd story. I was watching the Star Trek episode where time stops on the Enterprise and Picard and a few other people go onto it wearing armbands to make time go normally for them. Anyway, the stopped time caused Picard to see a smily face in a cloud of steam escaping from something.
Anyway, after the show was over I went to bed. My bed is on one side of my bedroom, and my closet is on the other. As I was lying in bed I looked towards the closet, and I swear I saw that same smily face in the white closet door. I couldn’t get to sleep for hours after that.
I guess the moral is, watching Star Trek makes you have hallucinations. 
I’ve had some interesting hallucinations in my day.
Once, on salvia, nitrous oxide and pot, I was lying around in my friend’s room with all the lights off and the computer playing the album “Hail to the Thief” by Radiohead, with a Winamp visualizer going full-screen. I started flying through the “tunnels” presented by the visualizer, and then I began to fully experience the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, all in about 20 minutes. I saw, did, felt, and heard everything they saw, did, felt and heard, from birth to death, each and every single one of them, and after each one died I could use the knowledge I gained in their life in the next life (kind of a reincarnation sort of thing). It was quite terrifying for the first couple of minutes, but once I got into the hang of it I rather liked it.
Another time, on 300 mg of DXM, I saw a bunch of storefronts…a bunch of random stores people owned. I was having really deep psychedelic thoughts about how life is so fake, and all those store owners set up their store every day and do all their fake stuff all day long and go home and commit more fakery before going to bed and then waking up the next morning to do it all over again. I also saw a powerful vision of what would happen to me 5 years down the line if I didn’t keep my drug use in control. I saw myself failing at life, but as a possibility; that is, I saw that it was very possible for me to get addicted to something and fail at life, but it was also very possible to keep my drug use in check as I was doing and still do. Basically a ‘you have the power to keep this from happening; don’t fuck up’ thing. My friend and I then watched an online Shockwave animated series called Catman; I found out a week later that Catman had dialogue. The sound was up plenty loud enough to hear it at the time, I just apparently blocked out all the dialogue. I just thought at the time that the idea was it was a bunch of cool looking animations with interesting background music.
Once, on just weed, I had closed-eye visuals of a hallway, maybe 10 feet long, which I was standing at one end of and looking down to the other end of. The hallway started stretching and getting longer and longer, until it was miles and miles long and I could see the whole way. I opened my eyes, closed them again, and saw the same sort of thing but with a palm-tree-lined road rather than a hallway.
Oh, and sometimes on DXM (which is, BTW, legal; may be illegal in high doses, I’m not sure), when I close my eyes I can still see all around me. It’s like a negative of a picture, though; it’s all dark where it would (if my eyes were open) be light. Very weird. I’ve heard of two other friends experiencing the same thing. And this isn’t just a thing where my eyes are closed and I think I see the outside world; I really do see it. And one time when one of my friends was doing that, I waved my hand in front of her face when her eyes were closed and she didn’t know I was going to wave my hand in front of her, and she saw it. I have no idea what that’s about. I swear to God it’s all true, though.
I was once working against a deadline in the studio. It worked out to four days and three nights of no sleep. Stay awake long enough, and you start to see weird stuff.
Around three A.M. of Day Two, I kept seeing birds swooping around the studio, but only in my peripheral vision. There were a couple of really big, black birds too.
Those stupid birds really pissed me off. I was trying to work and they kept swooping past me. At least they were quiet.
I’ve only halluncinated once. It was from having a high fever. I could see little figures walking along my wall and pushing boulders. Wierd.
Once. I had a funny reaction to the painkillers I was taking after I had my impacted wisdom teeth removed. I couldn’t go to sleep because of the tall figure wearing a black shroud, with the glowing yellow eyes, which was standing at the foot of the couch where I was sleeping. So I got up and hid behind the couch until he went away. I think I acted completely appropriately under the circumstances.
After the late-night “Indian” went off the air, my girlfriend and I saw marching men on Melba Toast.
We also saw our friend Phil turn into a neanderthal lookin’ guy. He was rather neanderthal lookin’ anyway—this just exaggerated it.
Back when I was but a wee monster, we had this painting. It was a big pond, with two boys fishing. One day I just laid on the couch and stared at the picture. The boys started reeling in their rods and casting them, again and again. I don’t think they ever caught anything.
Yeah! This sounds a lot like my experience when I was about 7 or 8 years old. I had a terrible sinus infection, complete with high fevers. I was on some kind of medication at the time of the hallucination, but I don’t remember what it was - probably just antibiotics. I don’t know if I was awake or asleep, but I remember sitting up and looking toward the end of the bed. The bed seemed to be extending into a long road; sometimes the bed felt like it was tipping back, so I would feel like I was staring up a cliff. In the distance were little stick figures pushing things around. Occasionally one would push a rock or something in my general direction. I thought it was pretty neat.
I had tactil hallucinations (dt’s) when I was 24 and quit drinking. I didn’t have insurance, so I went to my Grandmother’s to dry out. I did not realize how dangerous that was. I’m told that it is also an impressive feat, detoxing oneself. Just so you all know, ethyl alcohol is the most widely abused drug in the history of all Western Civilization.
I am schizo-affective and I often hear things, like voices, especially when I am sleep deprived. I understand that when I hear “voices” that do not belong or are inappropriate to circustances, they are not real, so that doesn’t count. If I have doubts, I ask my wife if things are real. It’s hard being crazy. Sometimes, I think I see thinks but these are usually at the edge of my peripheral vision so I usually discount them.