Difficult to Describe

[honey moon groyper]

From at least five years old (I have reason to believe it may be earlier) I have been able to induce myself into mental (perhaps it is more than mental) states that I find difficult to describe. I have tried many times to explain it to other people and have never felt confident in my description. No one that has listened to me has ever been able to relate either. I am making this thread in hopes that some of you may have similar experiences, can help me describe it better, or understand it better. I will start by briefly describing these three things and then doing my best to refute the typical first explanations. Before I continue, I will also add that each of these is similar in a few ways. 

• it requires ~15 minutes of deliberate concentration to induce the state. However, there are times where I have entered this state without trying to.
  
• I have to be lying down with my eyes closed, but I do not need to be tired or there to be no light
  
• My mind is highly active and, once I have entered the state, I no longer have to deliberately concentrate to maintain it.
  
• Once I have entered the state, I am most often in my mind imagining myself in third-person perspective. However, I sometimes only have abstract images in my mind (lines, electric arcs, shapes, etc.)
  
• Once I have entered the state, most of the time I can cease it at will, but this is not always true. After ceasing, I find it much easier for awhile to fall back into it, voluntarily and involuntarily.
  
• Each of these mental experiences is accompanied by a physical sensation.
  
• I have never noticed any sort of mental fatigue after being in one of these.
  
• At least 50% of the time, I could do this on command provided I could lie down and had about fifteen minutes.
  

The Three States:

1. Out of Body: In this state, I feel weightless and visually imagine myself leaving my body. As I concentrate deeper, the distance between me(in some sort of ephemeral state) and my body increases. As I concentrate less, the distance decreases.
   
2. Miniature: In this state, I feel that I have shrunk to a much smaller size and, similar to the above, my size decreases as I concentrate more. Additionally, I understand that my size is changing not in absolute numbers (you are now five inches shorter,) but rather it is a matter of proportion to my old size (you are now 1/16th your old size.) My size typically reaches a microscopic level. 
   
3. Mental Claustrophobia: I am not confident about this title. I have never been claustrophobic in a plain sense. I like sleeping bags, tunnels, etc. Moreover, it would be more accurate to say that this State is one where I feel that One Thing In Particular is closing in on me rather than all of the space around me closing. I have experienced this either as being crushed by a massive object, smothered by a growing thing, or coming into a highspeed collision. From what I understand of nuclear fission, I feel that this experience is the first of a chain of similar events, all with explosive power.
   
4. Multiple at Once: I often have them together in various combinations.
   

None of these are pleasant at all. It does feel forceful and violent. I do experience them in varying degrees of intensity. There have been times where it is so intense that it does become  quite unpleasant. Again, in trying to describe what this experience is like, I struggle to find the words. This is really the heart of this post: as I attempt to describe this, I feel that I am trying to describe what it feels like to look at the color green. What does it feel like to taste milk? walk on sand? listen to music? The only satisfactory verbal explanation is to describe your emotions or to compare it to another experience. 

Unsatisfactory Explanations:

1. Dreaming (lucid dreaming): There are some similarities here to dreams of course. Most importantly, despite experiencing a great deal, I have yet to see any connection between the sensations I have in these states and the outside world. However, I am still not convinced that what I am describing is a dream state. This is primarily because I have always had intense and vivid dreams (I remember many dreams from before five years old) and in no way does this feel analogous. In my dreams, I have rarely had any sort of agency. In any of the three states, I am mentally free within the confines of the state. Additionally, there is no strong connection between sleep and the Three States like there is for dreaming. Lastly, I have often felt that I could not distinguish between a dream and waking memories, especially after waking up. I have never experienced any sort of confusion like that with the Three States.
   
2. Drugs: I have been experiencing this since at least five years old and I still do not do drugs or drink. I have never had a prescription for anything other than antibiotics, pain, and a rash. 
   
3. Sleep Paralysis: I have experienced sleep paralysis many times, often with nightmares, and am familiar with the sensation. None of the three states leaves me immobile.
   
4. Sensory Deprivation Inducing Hallucinations: I can and have reliably induced this state in myself many times. In this case, low light and minimal sound are much more important than it is for the Three States. Additionally, when I have done this I have only ever experienced auditory hallucination which is never apart of the Three States.
   
5. Hallucinations: I cannot rule this out. However, I have never heard of someone being able to induce a hallucination at will.
   

Possible Next Steps:

1. Has anyone had similar experiences?
   
2. Am I missing a simple rational explanation?
   
3. Ideas for Personal Experimentation
   

P.S. This may not be the right subsection for this thread. Please feel free to move as needed.

[The_Author]

You would do well to practice the real world Aryan sorcery of Space Magic.

See subsection Space Meditation: https://templism.substack.com/p/templist-meditations

See also subsection Black Sun Magic: https://templism.substack.com/p/imperium

You are perhaps a natural Aryan sorcerer.

---

Perhaps research Alice in Wonderland Syndrome:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_in_W...d_syndrome

Under the influence of certain bad off-brand medications, I have myself experienced a weird feeling something along these lines, having to do with an abstract feeling of "largeness" or "growing" of myself or my surroundings despite a lack of visual perception of anything increasing in size. It is like an increase in awareness, the way in which, if you close your eyes and observe your hand, it will feel "bigger".

It is not often mentioned that the spatial sense is not dependent upon any of the other senses, located as it is in the inner ear. It is possible to have a distortion, or hallucination, of this sense without any of the other senses being affected.

[Hamamelis]

I think I know something similar: I have experienced certain states of altered perception & consciousness when I had high fever as a child, and have at some point learned to access these with concentration. It would appear to be less intrusive than what you describe. I don't find it especially pleasant or unpleasant, but it's interesting enough that I do it from time to time.

In the state I can usually access easily, I first visually focus on some point in my field of vision. It will then "shift" very close to me, while the periphery moves far away. It feels like I'm shrinking next to something that was very small compared to my original size, until that thing towers over me. Depending on the forcefulness of the experience, this is accompanied by a feeling of dissociation, like falling "out of myself".

Similarities to your descriptions:
- I need to be lying down for this. (EDIT I just tried it sitting, seems to work very weakly)
- It makes me feel very small, vanishingly so.
- Once I have achieved this voluntarily, it will be easier to re-enter that state for a while.
- I find it very hard to describe.

As for explanations, I have always been happy with "it's something your mind can do". I have never gotten anything useful out of the experience, so I'm not especially curious to what is going on.

[Guest]

I wonder if these sorts of experiences are aspects of "disassociative identity disorder" without the malicious contemporary framing. Sometimes I have moments where I feel the emptiness or filled-ness of space around me intuitively and feel like I am able to spread out from my body into the empty spaces.


Have any of you had ideaesthesiac visions? It is noteworthy that these visions often precede actions of greater agency, sometimes by a couple weeks. I think it is a very worthwhile to try and have such visions. I will give advice if anyone is interested in technique. I don't think anyone should describe the forms or corresponding concepts they see on a public forum.

[Mason Hall-McCullough]

I've experienced something similar to what OP describes and I think it's a proprioceptive issue:

Proprioception is occasionally impaired spontaneously, especially when one is tired. Similar effects can be felt during the hypnagogic state of consciousness, during the onset of sleep. One's body may feel too large or too small, or parts of the body may feel distorted in size. Similar effects can sometimes occur during epilepsy or migraine auras. These effects are presumed to arise from abnormal stimulation of the part of the parietal cortex of the brain involved with integrating information from different parts of the body

Since childhood it would happen occasionally, usually while tired, and I managed to induce it last year by meditating for 30 minutes (which I did not do again because it was unpleasant, and when I stopped it took about 10 minutes to feel normal again). As well as the experience of feeling small/disconnected that you described, it also involved touch feeling very unnatural, especially my tongue in my mouth feeling too large.

[JohnTrent]

I have little to say on the phenomena described by posters above, but I have similar experiences. These are hard to remember, because I do not write most of the experiences down. Some of these experiences are similar to the Alice in Wonderland Syndrome / Miniature ones described, others are similar to the abstract Claustrophobia that comes about during times of lucid reflection, and the Out-of-Body category too. The Out-Of-Body one produces a distinct event, where I feel like a being guided by an unknown puppeteer, with the feeling of an invisible string attached to my body. There are multiple memories from childhood that take place in a purely third-person sense, but no sensation is brought to mind; it is almost as if it is separated from the usual lineage of time, a break in the sequence [Note: this sometimes occurs in dreams, where the first-person POV is removed in place of what appears to be nonexistent movie scenes or a flashing set of images going at incredible speeds. Will post a recent account of this in the Dreams thread whenever it happens again, because they can be quite irregular]. Some of them have nothing at all to do with restfulness or a resting position, occurring while I am in movement. During those times, I experience a grander sort of excitation, esp. in the case of the Claustrophobia category. A dosage of 500mgs of L-Tyrosine can be of assistance in channeling this, along with the exercises in Rudolf Steiner's How to Know Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of Initiation. Unlike the description by the OP about its "forceful and violent" nature, I can undergo these experiences without trouble, sometimes being a subtle addition to the day.
One different experience not described above involves a set of visuals in the mind's eyes, where you begin to see a flow of different antiquated symbols: some appear to resemble a Runic language, others of a Egyptian hieroglyphic variety, but there is no true consistency in the pattern. There are others that are unrecognizable to me. This would happen to me as a child (~6yrs old) whenever I would unknowingly enter a meditation state, and it sometimes recurs from time to time without warning. Whenever this happened as a child, I would think that I was tapping into something from a distant era, or that something was being communicated to me through the arrangement of symbols.
There are other experiences of this sort that can be described, but since those ones were all induced from chronic insomnia, I don't find them very valuable for discussion.