The great paradox is to understand perception using perception ;-(

As my old sig said: "if our brains were simple enough to undersand, then we'd be too stupid to know what a brain was".

You introduce some negatively emotive words to cover your argument - spurious, brainwash. What I was describing was the process of getting access to the part of our brains that does 95% of the heavy lifting without our conscious intervention*. That 'world' (if you can enter it and exit it) does not feel like the controlled hallucination we call 'reality'. And all those prophetic dreams and visions, meeting future selves and so on, are descriptions of those visits to areas that other beers don't reach.

That does not mean that these experience are worthless. Intuition is only guesswork as far as the conscious mind is concerned. For the unconscious mind, intuition is the precise answer to a chorus of input.

And further * conscious intervention * in these processes is itself the result of response to a chorus. We may see choice, but I believe there is none: although this is an altogether different kettle of fish than fatalism or skinnerism. (But for another day)

This chorus 'mechanism' is such a basic process in the brain. A neuron is downstream of multiple inputs (the axons of upstream neurons). In some cases there may be 1000s of these inputs to a single neuron via the dendritic connections. (And of course 'downstream' does not necessarily indicate a linear process - just the up and down part of any neuron). Whether a particular neuron will 'fire' down its own axon, depends on the chorus of inputs.

In recent conversations with a researcher in this area, I suggested that an analogy for the dendritic chorus might be a music quiz called 'Name that tune". When the neuron 'recognizes' the tune, it presses its quiz buzzer, i.e fires down its axon. Dr D suggested a 'mechanism' for this:

"There is a particular spot at the neck of the axon where the intracellular currents converge and if right, make the axon fire.  These currents are essentially waves, and one can expect interactions between waves. It all is further complicated by the inhibitory inputs, which tend to be located in a particular place: I think, close to the cell body."

I repeat that I do not reject the experience of these other worlds, I suggest that there might be an explanation for the origin of them that is not metaphysical, but physiological. And also this is an explanation that doesn't require scientifically indefensible breaks with science, such as time going backwards, sideways or every which way.

The evolution of science has also been a history of finding more mundane explanations for 'irrational belief'.

The power of 'visions' is not diminished by the physiological explanation. That these visions are internally generated does not diminish them, any more than Einstein's visions are invalidated by the fact that he 'saw' many of his solutions while walking the baby round the park 'daydreaming', rather than in front of a blackboard.

You can't be me, I'm taken