...ether has three effects as dosage increases: At low doses, it causes the effects you described, a disconnection between mind and body. At higher dosages, it causes unconciousness. At higher doses still, it causes death. You can't play with anything like this because (1) you can't control dosage and (2) the toxic effects for a certain concentration of any chemical vary within the human population. This means that the dosage (say the amount of chemical per kg body weight) that is toxic to you may be significantly more or less than for me. On top of that, even in controlled dosage situations, like in surgery, with carefully controlled mixtures of gases applied by an anesthesiologist, the lines between the different stages are too blurred. It wasn't reliable enough to knock someone out without killing them, so they use other things instead of ether most often. In addition, ether is used widely as a solvent in meth labs. Trying to get your hands on ether these days is a good way to get negative attention from the county sherriff's office.

Plus, I think your posted purification method for getting ether fromauto products is bunk. I think a good lot of the petroleum distillates are going to prefer the ether phase to the water phase. (When it talks about the two layers separating, we say that it forms a water phase (below) and an ether phase (above) like oil and water). Like dissolves like. Petroleum distillates are oily, and will like the ether better than the water phase.