What Anaesthesia Taught Me About Time
Have you ever been under general anaesthesia?
I was recently under general anaesthesia during an organ transplant surgery, and it made me realize something so strange. The weirdest part wasn't falling asleep; it was how a chunk of time felt completely sliced out of my universe. Between closing and opening my eyes, there was no darkness, no dreams, no waiting - not even the slightest feeling of time passing. To everyone else, hours had gone by. The surgery was finished, and the world had simply moved on without me. But to my own consciousness, that whole block of time was just... gone. It was never actually lived.
It really got me thinking: what if time, as we perceive it, is just the way our minds read the world? Maybe the universe itself isn’t actually moving forward from past to future. Maybe time only feels like a sequence because our consciousness can’t take in everything all at once, so we experience reality frame by frame.
What if, in a higher dimension, every possible state of being already coexists? What if there’s no true flowing time at all, only relationships between different states? It might simply be our limitations in this 3D world that force us to think in terms of “before” and “after” in order to make sense of reality.
I guess objective time is just a shared coordinate to keep the world in sync. But lived time can only ever be felt within our own minds. When my consciousness was temporarily switched off, time completely lost its meaning to me. The universe kept going, but that piece of the universe never truly reached me.
If consciousness disappears completely, what does ‘time’ even mean to the self?