You don't need to die to demonstrate that. General anesthesia suffices.
(FYI, for the benefit of those who have never experienced it, GA is a very different subjective experience from sleep. Even in dream-free sleep you wake up with a subjective sensation of time having passed. Not so with GA. The time you spend in GA is just completely gone. It feels like you went through a time warp.)
Exactly, I was under GA once. If felt like sugary vapor, and I started to feel funny. Then I blinked, just for a second, and when I opened they eyes, I suddenly felt that I can't focus my eyes and everything is blurry. They told I was out for 6 hours, but to me it was just a blink.
I've been under GA several times, the experience differs pretty drastically actually. When I had my wisdom teeth out it was much like you describe, as though a period of time had simply been excised from my reality. Other times the awakening was so slow that it was like I was slowly piecing reality back together from its base components.
My hospital mates told me that sometimes people go from GA to real sleep. Probably in that case they do feel some time passing and have difficult awakenings. Probably that's what happened to you.
There's a somewhat related issue there: the medications used for general anesthesia don't just suppress consciousness and the overall function of your body, they also suppress the ability to record memories. That's part of why patients can carry on conversations during amnesia induction but report no memories of those conversations.
> The time you spend in GA is just completely gone. It feels like you went through a time warp.
I've heard this a lot, so I was surprised the one time I went under GA and it felt more or less like a normal dreamless night's sleep. I remember a sharp transition from awake -> out, but coming around felt like waking up groggy after a few hours sleep. Since then I've wondered if that's unusual or if people who feel like time passed just assumed it would be that way so don't mention anything.
I've been under GA, and yeah, first you feel cold in your vein where they start plasma infusion (without the drug yet I believe) and then you wake up in post op. No sense of time.
GA is insufficient demonstration though -- it is possible that memory recording and time keeping parts are down (there are several ways brain keeps time iirc), but other parts are working. I think there is always some electrical brain activity under GA, so something is still going on, just not enough to track time.
I'd call it "interesting" but not "fun." Also, there's some evidence that it can cause long-term cognitive impairment, but I guess that's probably true for any mind-altering drug.
You don't need to die to demonstrate that. General anesthesia suffices.
(FYI, for the benefit of those who have never experienced it, GA is a very different subjective experience from sleep. Even in dream-free sleep you wake up with a subjective sensation of time having passed. Not so with GA. The time you spend in GA is just completely gone. It feels like you went through a time warp.)