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incidentally i wonder how many others know about this other experience [feeling one is the size of the universe when falling asleep] i'm referring to here. it used to be extremely common for me. when i found out about “alice in wonderland syndrome” it was revelatory; i extremely don't have that syndrome but i recognised the described effect https://social.noyu.me/@hikari/statuses/01JB4B1ZJ9PR8K0YJH8ZSHGR7G
it's just normal for me to try to fall asleep and suddenly my proprioception is fucked up and i feel like i am dancing on a pinhead, and then that i am as large as the cosmos itself, and every state in-between
if you have your eyes open during this there is the bizarre horror of feeling you are a giant in a world made for giants. the horror is one of the body variety. my self-concept includes my size, and suddenly my size is off by orders of magnitude
but, and i can't stress this enough, alice-in-wonderland-syndrome is when you get this during normal waking life, i think. which would probably fuck you up. i do not have that syndrome. my brief glimpses into that other world only happen at convenient moments
oh, i think the most amazing part of it is that you get to be the big bang and the big crunch. i do not mean in an intellectual sense, that is literally the experience. i can empathise with the universe in this respect
or a rapidly expanding cloud of radioactive gas produced by a nuclear bomb, i suppose. it does feel good. being a nuclear bomb definitely would feel good
non-nuclear-bomb-empathisers dni
a common point of the responses i've gotten so far is people seem to get this when they're ill! yeah, i think this is true for me too. as we have recently learned, i usually don't notice if i have a fever, but i think this is a fever symptom for me, together with worse balance
@hikari far out!
up to a point it sounded like what iirc alice shulgin describes at some point in pihkal
but this is just so. far. freaking. out.
i have a hunch this may somehow be related with ... let's call it primacy of abstract over embodied thought? not everyone has that for sure. at the other end you may have aphantasia i guess. anyway i've hardly ever met anyone who even notices sensorial aberrations, as a kid when i tried to point em out to people they didnt understand what i was talking about like at all 🤔🤔🤔 they just sorta assumed that ... everyone sees the same thing?
@unspeaker oh, no, feeling like you have changed size by orders of magnitude is a profoundly embodied experience. if i were to dissociate from the body it wouldn't feel the same
@unspeaker i don't think it's that far out! i have to reach for unusual metaphors to describe it, but i think it's straightforward as Things Wrong With The Brain go
@hikari I’ve had that a few times when running a fever. Very odd, but interesting-odd rather than scary-odd.
@riotnrrd yes! i think it's rather enjoyable even in its own way