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Gigantism

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overthinking the unthinkable
Has anyone ever found themselves feeling like a tiny spec at the centre of their own enormous body? Huge fingers like balloons, limbs like tree trunks. Feet so far away they might as well be on another planet. It's a really bizarre sensation. This has happened a number of times without any substance use. Usually while lying in the dark.
 
I've experienced this a number of times through out my life. Mostly when I was a child. I'm unsure if it is a panic attack or what, but I know what you mean. The sensation to me is a mix between the strange enlargement and feeling small within the room I'm in. Almost as if the walls have expanded in all directions. When it happens to me now a days, it tends to be in the dark as well.

Sorry I don't have much more insight into it than that. Honestly this is one of the first times I've had anyone even understand the sensation, let alone have personal experience. What I do know is that it used to terrify me. Now I'm much more in control of the situation when it comes up (thanks to a combo of meditation and getting more used to the altered states of DMT/Shrooms), but it's also not as intense as when I was little.

Glad to know I'm not alone.
 
Also glad it's not just me! I dont remember it as a child. The experiences I have had were not alarming but very profoundly real. I can offer no insight either.
 
I think I know the feeling, had it frequently in childhood. In adult life it happens I think sometimes when I am hungover or otherwise poisoned/sick and also mostly in darkness. It's like I close my eyes and everything I think of, it changes scale either to super huge or to infinitely small. It can be my hand or teeth. it's like some sensors/sense we have, which we typically don't even feel the presence of, are glitching.
 
Generally we consider our center of being to be somewhere between our eyes, or at least I do unconsciously. I dont practice deliberate meditation however I am a life long spontaneous meditative person if that contradiction makes sense.

I can quiet my mind at times where youd least expect it, for instance sitting on an aircraft 10 mins before jumping out of it. I think this somatic glitch, as you guys kindly offer the terminology for, comes during moments of spontaneous meditation coupled with sensory deprivation.

It's almost like feeling a sense of being from the perspective of a cell in the body rather than from between the eyes as a full scale organism.
 
When I used to meditate I experienced this semi-regularly when going into deeper states (or however you say it). Balloon-like fingers are distracting lol. I forget what else went along with that particular sensation, I think it also spreads to the forearms and you feel some sort of weird numbness.

I agree that it seemed to be related to proprioception. Around that same phase I lost the positions of body parts (e.g. convincing feeling that limbs are oriented in other directions, eyes are pointed in different direction than they actually are) and the perceived location of sensations relative to the head changes (or I guess center or something might be more apt if it is no longer in your head).
 
I would get something very similar when I was a child. I've mentioned this on the forum before. Ann Shulgin described something similar in ione of the chapters in the first half of PIHKaL. Sometimes I would wake up in the night and feel simultaneously tiny, as you describe, and also huge - and also polar contrasts like completely inky black and clearest white, completely smooth and thoroughly crumpled, all simultaneously and paradoxically seemingly rapidly alternating as well. There was always this impossible to describe visceral sensation, like "being inside my own teeth and bones. All-in-all I found it enjoyable for all its bizarreness.

While it faded away as I entered adulthood, I have had it recur spontaneously, although less intensely, a few welcome times in recent years. It always seems highly 'existential' to me, if that makes any sense.
 
It's interesting that for some it may be an uneasy feeling where as others revel in it. I wonder if never remembering it as a child, only as middle aged human, makes any difference. I think any altered state that isn't horrendously slapping me around I tend to revel in and enjoy or even try to prolong.
 
I first noticed this in my late teens. Then around 20 it happened from time to time when I was just sitting, both with closed and open eyes. Then I don't remember feeling it in many years. That was before I started with psychedelics. Now once in a while, not to seldom, I get a feeling that is very similar, if not identical, to the first feeling of this.

I've almost always associated it with being a baby, or perhaps a foetus. It's not uncomfortable but interesting and I usually stay in the feeling for some time.

Would it perhaps be what they call 'Changes in felt bodily form'?
 
sometimes, usually in states of heightened anger, I experience the inverse of the phenomena described by above posters. I will feel like I am a frightfully large being inside of a very small container. My awareness grows up and out of my body from head and shoulders and I feel like I'm spilling out of this meek frame.

It's intense!
 
Wow, I had this exact same experience as a child, I thought it was a me thing.
Still happens some times.
I allways thought it was the trauma from being born, not sure why.

downwardsfromzero said:
I would get something very similar when I was a child. I've mentioned this on the forum before. Ann Shulgin described something similar in ione of the chapters in the first half of PIHKaL. Sometimes I would wake up in the night and feel simultaneously tiny, as you describe, and also huge - and also polar contrasts like completely inky black and clearest white, completely smooth and thoroughly crumpled, all simultaneously and paradoxically seemingly rapidly alternating as well. There was always this impossible to describe visceral sensation, like "being inside my own teeth and bones. All-in-all I found it enjoyable for all its bizarreness.

While it faded away as I entered adulthood, I have had it recur spontaneously, although less intensely, a few welcome times in recent years. It always seems highly 'existential' to me, if that makes any sense.
Click to expand...

^This summarizes it pretty much, went from feeling like everything is infinitely far away to infinitely close, ordered to caotic visions, a infinitely big rock balanced on top of a infinitely small one, for me it was a sickening and unbearable feeling, I had it the most with fevers.

It always ends with a incredibly caotic sensory input swirling around me, and me being completely quiet and chill in the middle.

Last time this happend to me Ive been able to "get through" rather than trying to shake it away, since this is a "scripted" sequence of feelings.
 
murklan said:
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Would it perhaps be what they call 'Changes in felt bodily form'?
Click to expand...


The bit they mentioned about the body folding in on itself has happened to me while tripping. But never 'sober'. The feeling of size and scale has never happened while tripping but only sober. Not that I'm saying that excludes either from either state.
 
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