The feelings of the walls of the room suddenly racing away from you, or the feeling that your hands are suddenly 10x as big and everything you touch is tiny, are terrifying for a growing kid. Heck even talking about it now tingles those fears just a bit, but now I can for the most part logic myself out of it.
I slept with a light on in my room for many years, that was the only thing that helped.
Perhaps related: Seeing the World (and Writing It) with Alice in Wonderland Syndrome https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19342909 09-mar-2019
Feels like the cubes part of the "metachaos" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UPUhn9hpTU
Also interesting to see people they experienced this when sick as children. I did too, I remember two instances when I had fevers and was seeing such things. Some objects would suddenly have the wrong size, or my parents would appear like they're very far away. It was a scary experience that I think would be much less scary now as an adult, but definitely not something I'd like anyway.
I remember asking my parents about it like everyone experienced it when I was maybe 8 years old, and they had no idea what I was talking about. It stopped happening involuntarily a long time ago (maybe late teens - I'm in my 40s now), but I'm sure I could still induce it if I really wanted to, specially if I'm tired and laying down in a dim room.
Sometimes I would be riding in a car, looking out the window and suddenly the "panic attack" would occur and I would beg the driver to slow down. Even when they stopped the car completely I would still be freaking out. "No! Go slower!"
It was increasingly disorienting. My wires felt crossed. A scary movie would make me sad instead of scared. My sensation of hot or cold were different, sort of “distant”.
A psychiatrist told me I was simply anxious, and gave me some meds. Eventually I was fine. I don’t know if the meds really helped or if the issue went away on its own.
Just reading about this stuff is scary to me. Being in that state for several weeks felt like I was losing my mind.
frotaur•6mo ago
gyomu•6mo ago
I have a number of such weird things, the most dramatic being probably that I remember experiencing vivid synesthesia until age 4/5 or so, which kind of faded away has never happened since.
gehwartzen•6mo ago
Nevermark•6mo ago
Obviously a simple example of fatigue of neurons encoding one perceptual quality enabling the over expression/perception of its opposite. But it just demonstrates how fragile our conscious perceptions are to every day minor sensory/perception deviations from their nominal correspondence.
After/during a traumatic experience, my mind disassociated from a basic aspect of reality. I knew what I perceived was completely nonsensical and misleading, but that didn't attenuate the very dramatic and warped perception in the slightest, for months.