What is this? Is it anything to do with AS?

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I used to get the big-small thing quite often(if I am thinking of the same thing), but it mostly mellowed out and doesn't happen very much now. Usually it would happen when I'm in a bright room and staring at something. Suddenly I will feel like everthing around me is getting closer and I'm getting farther away. It's weird, almost like an out of body experience. Generally it would last for a couple minutes and during that time I become very sensitive to everything around me. I don't feel sick usually, but I do feel overwhelmed. I would get a tingly feeling all over my body like pins and needles, but it wouldn't feel unpleasant neccisarily to me, sort of like my body is falling asleep(similar to how a foot falls asleep).

I almost used to think of it as a "highten" sense of awareness, but it was really wierd and I agree with the vision looking wrong thing. Everything would look as if it was curved if that makes sense. As if I wasn't really there and just looking at where I was through a high powered telescope. My body wouldn't feel like I was there controlling it. More like it was just something I was attached to and not something I was "in"...

I also get migraines but usually its because I did something stupid, like forget to eat much of anything for a couple days and forget to sleep hardly at all. Then I can even feel it coming, it starts as a dull ache and pretty soon any light at all in the room will set me off. Unless I am in total darkness and quiet I'll start heaving like I'm going to throw up and feel like someone is picking the inside of my skull with an icepick... >.< fortunately they don't happen very often. The last one happened at a friends house and that was really embarassing. I spent almost 2 hours laying in his bathroom in a fetal position with the lights off. I came down from what for me seems like 20 minutes feeling better and he told me it was 2 hours (which was I found was true when I looked at a clock)...

Maybe I'm just a wus about migraines still... I probably could count all my migraine experiences on one, maybe 2 hands.

I had doctors that were trying to figure out why I had headaches for a long time. At one point one of my doctors said I "didn't have" migranes because they just didn't fit the pattern. They never have been able to do anything about it (accept once they did stabilize them when they were getting really bad), and they have been fairly unpredictable.

I don't have seizures, but I notice that I unconciously slip into some other kind of state. It's hard to explain. My eyes will slip into the back of their sockets, and it's like they aren't "active" (I can't think of a good word to explain it). This will usually happen when I am bored, disinterested, somewhat tired, or stressed with what is happening around me. But it has happened also sometimes when I am just sitting down and not active for a moment (when I am at the CPU or reading).

I think I drive in an unusual manner, although I don't know if it's related to this. I have noticed if I am not listening to the radio/music I will suddenly became "aware" of what is going on even though I have been driving the whole time. I knew I was driving it's just my mind wasn't thinking and my eyes were just on autopilot on something.

Your second thing does sound a lot like zoning-out, which I experience quite often.

My teachers used to mention it on my report cards, as "he seems to be in his own little world all the time" or "he stares out the window a lot" (which they took to be a disciplinary problem, in the form of my not paying them the proper attention.) Later on, I found that I could doodle little drawings in the margins of my notes while the teachers lectured and "space out", and somehow not consciously remember anything they said, but still remember it when taking tests by remembering what I was drawing. The teachers would get very frustrated and mad about my drawing and seemingly tuning them out while they talk, which made the fact that I would generally pass tests based on their lectures with almost perfect marks that much more confusing to them. I guess that in a lot of ways, it's like being in a trance, I used to think of it as self-hypnosis or something like that, I know I would feel pretty strange when I "snapped out of it", and usually I'd find it hard to talk (which made those moments where the teacher would "put me in the spotlight" with a question when I "wasn't paying attention" predictably awkward for me.)




The way you described that reminds me of something that used to happen to me when riding in a car very fast, where suddenly it seemed like everything would get "hyper-real", where the colours would suddenly look too bright, textures would stand out in insane detail, and then all the scenery would seem to close in around me in a way that seemed to vivid and perfect to be reality, which would then spark a very disturbing sensation that everything I could see was a paper-thin facade with a different reality behind it, that immediately behind the brightly-lit shell of hills and cliffs and trees I could see were catastrophic voids and gulfs and planes lit in their own dim sunlight, or girders and braces to hold the entire sham of my surroundings up, and I'd feel nauseous and panicky thinking about the infinite bottomless pits of space that were yawning beneath the paper-thin pavement under the car. And I'd want to scream and explain to everyone around me about how they were all being fooled, tricked by an optical illusion, about how I could FEEL the real, nightmarish reality of the universe, how I could see right through the mask of the truely insubstantial matter around me, about how all they needed to do was just think through it all and they'd fall through the paper into the universe beyond. But I could never talk or move until after the feeling had passed and I "snapped out of it".

I guess this was all some kind of panic attack or something, but it feels a LOT like zoning-out, and a little like deja-vous, too, now that I think of it. And also a little bit like that feeling from just before I solve a trick problem, when I realize I'm just one simple step away from the solution; at that moment, I don't know what the verbal answer is, but I know I have solved the problem and know the answer, it just hasn't "translated" into words yet; if that makes any sense. I tried to describe the sensation of "zoning out" to someone once, who told me that I was describing "transcendental meditation" perfectly, and he seemed disturbed that I've been doing it my entire life without any training in it ("that can get dangerous, you don't want to do that on your own!"), which struck me as being just as goofy as being told that there's no way I could have eaten food my entire life without being trained by an enlightened master to chew each bite twenty times before swallowing, that nobody should be able to do that without choking. I mean, everyone zones out, right? (Well, I guess every aspie seems to zone out, but I guess it certainly didn't come naturally to my friend....)

Something like this has happened to be as well although not to the same degree as you. For some reason I can't remember but I think they may be associated with my headaches, but I don't remember for sure. Sometimes I would get nauseous (I get very sick to my stomach every once in a while in a car, but I haven't noticed any pattern as to why). It's the bright colors and "insane" textures you mentioned of that were reminiscent to me. It has happened a couple of occassions when I was driving. I think both cases were at night. I ended up pushing my head up just above the steering wheel so I didn't have to see an of the lights away from the road, and did my best not to avoid focusing on the lights of the cars of he road. It was still very stressful. Usually though it is when I am in the car as a passenger. This is certainly because I have some awareness of when it is coming on and make of run for home, or some place to sit down when this occurs. It both cases when I couldn't I did not have this opportunity.

yagaloth....your hyper reality descriptions reminds me of a discription by a famous existentialist (whose name elludes me, perhaps Camus?)He described walking on a beach and picking up a rock and how the name"rock" and all our hystorical or personal associations which "define" rock were stripped away....kind of scarey feeling...floating in the universe.Also, reminds me of the religion I grew up in Christian Science...my understanding of what they were teaching was that all physical matter was an "illussion" that had been created when the mist went up in the garden.First the world was created in spirit...ie...the spirit of a tree,a rock,a human...then a mist created the illussion that thes things were actually "Physical"....perhaps you saw through the mist(see that it doesnt happen again, young man, or I will have to have a serious talk with your mother about this....lol)There was a guy who used to belong to the CS church who wrote, Illussions....interesting book, got him kicked out of the church though(Richard Bach?)

I think there are different types of "zoning"...I have "daydreams" were I vissualize events and have practice conversations in my head....but I also have feelings were my body is moving but I am not really in it but fel like I am just looking out the eye holes of an object that is transporting me...I evidently am not very good a steering this object because I'm always ramming it into doorways and hallway corners.(dissociation?ussually in social situations)

Again, I'm relieved I'm not alone about something that made me think I was losing my mind at the time.

What would you say it is? A panic attack (I don't get them often enough to be absolutely certain, though the sensation was similar)? Aspie hyper-sensitivity (it didn't seem much like that, although the exaggerated colours and textures do seem to hint at that)? Or a kind of waking dream prompted by something like a trance caused by monotonous over-stimulation? Or something else?

Fortunately, it happened only a few times to me and it hasn't happened in several years, but it was upsetting when it happened. It was definitely a feeling that everything was too vividly detailed to be real, which could only mean that reality is a fraud committed against me for reasons I couldn't completely fathom, and I knew that trying to chase out the logic of it could only lead to madness but I couldn't stop myself from trying to follow it anyway, and on top of the frustration of that was the knowledge that I was the only one who could see through the fraud and I couldn't understand how nobody else had seen it before and couldn't see it then. After I managed to "snap out of it" and pull myself together, I figured it could only be schizophrenia or something, and so I worried at the time that I would eventually end up one of those homeless guys who wander down the streets talking to sewers and listening to the voices in his head - I figured that was a matter of when, not if, I would finally finish losing my mind. (Well, so far I think I'm doing OK, anyway, and I don't worry anymore....)

Yes, that does sound familiar, both the existentialism (philosophy has always tragically been a weak subject for me, in that I haven't had an oppotunity to devote any attention to it) and the dissociation of piloting my body remotely, which I felt often in my teens, but increasingly more rarely since then to a point where I haven't felt that way in years.

The thing with the mists reminds me of some rather strange lucid dreams I had many years ago, where, upon realising I was dreaming, I decided to take a look around at all the things that I was not supposed to see, things that would have been "off screen" in the dream otherwise, such as the scenery behind me, and the back of my own head; everything that was supposed to be in the line-of-sight of the dream was perfect in every detail, while everything offscreen was un-formed and shapeless like melting glass and shimmering like pink metal, and objects were frighentingly distored and of the wrong shape (my body, seen from behind, was a quivering and vaguely cross-shaped object with a single leg, made from that strange pink material, melting into a floor of the same stuff which flowed organically into the walls and swept up into a ceiling that blended into the detailed parts of the room I was meant to see.) I could catch only the briefest glance at all this in the instants before I woke up, as if I were kicked out of the dream with an error message like a crashed computer program. I think that something essentially similar was what I expected to see in the hyper-real moments I mentioned earlier, if I had forced the driver to stop the car so I could look behind the things I was supposed to have ridden right past: just half-formed glop or empty spaces or darkness with a carefully painted mask in front of it.

The odd thing there is that I've read that damage or scarring to one of the temporal lobes can cause not only TLE, but symptoms that mimic AS.

*thoughtful*

Nova, that sounds like *exactly* what I get.

On the board where we were discussing the Big/Small Thing, there were some people like myself who were still having it happen in adulthood, but more still who said they remembered getting it as a child, but it seemed to have gone away as they grew up. I wonder if that fits in with what some AS articles say about it being as if Aspies live in a permanently childlike state? Are there perhaps parts of our brains that fail to mature?

Somehow, I missed that the first time I read novawake's message, about the pins-and-needles feeling. I wish I'd seen it sooner.

I used to get that, not on my entire body but mostly in my face and neck, in my teens up to mid-20's in age; I haven't had it in a long time. Once or twice, I lost consciousness from it, and usually when it was really bad I would see strange flashing lights, hear buzzing or ringing in my ears, and smell or taste weird things; I might also feel nearly unbearably cold spots on my skin... it would all last a few seconds and go away. I associated it with some seriously nasty cramps in my toes and soles of my feet.

I figured out that, when I started getting the cramps or started seeeing some of the flashing, I could take an iron pill and it would all go away before things got really nasty, and concluded at the time I had mild anemia or something. Eventually, it just went away, and I haven't been troubled with it in about 10 years. Maybe the iron-pill trick will be helpful to anyone else troubled with this?

*guessing* Maybe it has something to do with a vitimin or mineral deficiency, or an electrolyte imbalance? It may be significant that it was worst in my late teens, and stopped at roughly the same time I stopped growing?

When I was younger, between about age 12 to age 16, I would get headaches so bad that they would make me sick to my stomach and I couldn't do anything except lay in bed. Those stopped, the pins-and-needles thing started, and then went away, and today I get maybe one mild headache a year and never get the pins and needles.

The headaches stopped at roughly the same time I stopped drinking soft drinks and anything with caffeine in it, and I don't know for sure if that's related. Also, prior to age 16, my family had been eating a lot of green vegetables we were growing ourselves (especially green beans with ham ), but after that we could afford to buy more groceries, and started eating more meat. Over the last several years, I've made a point of eating more beef and fewer vegetables and hardly any pork, and I drink mostly water. Maybe changing my diet was all it took to get over it all?

In any event, I haven't had any real problems with headaches or the mysterious pins-and-needles sensation in many years. And that's a good thing

I get things that are very similar to both of those things.

Sometimes I'll look at objects and it will seem as though they are very small while still looking like they are their usual size.

As for surroundings... they can be unreal, sort-of-real, hyper-real, or feel like a threatening dream. In the threatening-drem state, I get other visual distortions- objects appearto be at an angle, straight edges tilt as I run my eyes along them, and walls ripple sometimes. If this sate gets deep enough I can start hearing voices.

once in awhile i'll get the feeling that something is really huge and really tiny. Its hard to describe. the last time it happened my mom was rubbing my back and it felt like her hand was really huge and then really small. the closest thing i can compare it to is when you go to a hardware store and there's the gigantic bolt or screw or thingie all the way down to the teeny tiniest one and you think "how can these be the same thing?"

That's it, exactly. Or very far away and very close up at the same time, and your brain can't decide which it is.