In my personal oppinion, I believe he just couldn’t handle the truth. In my life, i have been striving to access my subconcious and concious control so that I can achieve a state in which lucid dreams and waking life are indistinguishable. After 7 months of intense work on this project, i was able to close my eyes and enter the lucid world, and then open my eyes into the waking world - both were almost exactly the same except the lucid world was like the negative of a photograph. Black and white, where white should be black. The ultimate state of living is one in which a person has ultimate concious control and can design thier reality as they fit. They essentially become god. In essence, I have been trying to end up where your friend is. I have wanted to seek out a psychiatric ward and ask if i can come in and spend some time with individuals who claimed they could fly, so that they could teach me how. We lock up the people who can control thier destiny, yet those who really are in the jail, are the business men and women who have no control of thier reality and walk around answering thier phones and going home to thier kids every day.
The real problem here in my eyes is that he went into this state unknowingly and thus was not prepared for it, or had doubts about entering a state of total control.
In ways, I envy you friend because he came close to becoming the god of his reality. It is just a shame that he had not the right state of mind or experience to go “right, I understand the situation I am in, so I will make the best of it.”
A person who has had experience with psychedelics will probably empathise. The first time you take them, everything shocks you because you couldn’t believe it was happening. But after you unlock that door, and understand how things can change so rapidly, you begin to control the integration of these factors, and suddenly you can walk around, do the shopping, play with the kids, etc, in your altered reality, without appearing any different to anyone else, as you accustom to the effects of the altered state.
It is a shame your friend tried to deny his altered/new-found state, which ultimately ended up in him forcing his reality into a ‘bad trip’ in which he believes will not end. I encourage him, once he has grounded himself, to keep lucid dreaming, but only after serious introverted and extroverted conversations to define where he wants to go, his limits, and to obtain the headspace that if something unexpected happens, it is better to be calm and understand it. Fear is only the lack of understanding.