Alien feelings, mental malfunctions

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I'm really new to talking about this. The whole AS thing. I don't know for sure if this has anything to do with it. I don’t know where to start.

Panic attacks can induce this range of bizarre feelings, but I sometimes get them even when I’m not having an attack, and they induce an attack, rather than an attack inducing them.

It can be triggered by excessive stress, but it often comes on randomly, no warning at all. Suddenly my mind just snaps into a completely different, foreign state. I can feel the transition, and when it happens I think to myself “Oh no, not this, not now. Great. Here we go.” It’s an overwhelming sensation of mental overload, overstimulation. And my imagination, which is normally very vivid anyway, suddenly becomes hypervivid, incredibly enhanced, to the point that I feel like I have just acquired a whole new way of “seeing”. Like the mind becomes so real that the images it produces POP out of the rest of the “background” mind, as vivid as a blood splatter on a white wall. Like I’m on the verge of seeing the thoughts in external reality, but not quite.

The thoughts come at random, and they’re colorful, illogical, beautiful, beyond real definition, and even help to inspire my art, but sometimes they’re frightening, because I have no control over them. Sometimes my mind takes reality, it takes whatever scene I’m looking at and morphs and distorts it in the most freakish ways… like my mind “shows” me what it would look like to hallucinate, and it’s so strikingly vivid in my head that I sometimes become convinced that reality actually IS going to start contorting and making no sense. I sometimes become paralyzed with a sense of impending doom, waiting for reality to just turn into a kaleidoscope of jumbled nonsense, to just slip away right before my eyes. And instead of hearing songs or tunes playing in my head, I hear random creepy noises. My mind even starts to distort noises. So I flip out and start panicking. Everything becomes louder, more detailed, like I become TOO aware of my surroundings to the point that it causes a mental glitch. I could just be sitting here in my room, and suddenly the room feels like an alien landscape, even though I logically know it's still just my room. And I become startled at the slightest sounds or sights, sometimes misinterpreting them. My perceptual sensitivity heightens and widens and I don’t know how to handle it.

I remember sometimes getting sensations similar to these as a kid, wondering what it all meant. They sometimes frightened me, but they were usually mellow enough to merely intrigue and baffle me. These feelings, and the secondary feelings of confusion and wonder that they would induce, make up some of the most prominent memories of my early childhood. I would sometimes feel them so strongly, as young as the age of 6, that I'd say to a friend "I feel really weird..." And when they'd ask why, I could never give a clear answer, and it frustrated me to the point of tears sometimes. I was aware, even as a small child, that I was feeling certain feelings that could not be put into words… feelings that were markedly different from any other feeling, feelings that no one else ever talked about. And I always wondered why they happened to me. I never spoke of them to anyone, because I knew that others most likely would not understand. But it’s becoming more and more intense as I get older. And I’m bursting with the desire to hear that someone else out there has felt something similar.

Does anyone know what I’m talking about? Am I even making any sense? Do I sound utterly ridiculous? I feel like I might just delete everything I typed on this forum and never speak of this stuff again. I feel way too exposed.

You don't sound ridiculous. I've had moments like that too. Not exactly the way you described them, but somewhat similar. I call my experiences "Matrix moments", because the way they hit me, I suddenly feel disconnected from reality around me, almost like I've come unplugged from the Matrix and I see people and things around me kind of almost as not actually being real. It's like when you say a word out loud enough times, or you look hard enough at it in writing, and the sounds and scribbles suddenly cease to have meaning and become pure abstracts. Except, the whole world becomes one big abstract. My senses are heightened, but my cognition gets muted-- for example, I hear everything, but I'm not listening to anything. I remember once, I went into that state while visiting one of my friends, and she had this black and white striped rug that I just stared at, and I got really lost in it to the point that I was tangled in the striped pattern and I couldn't get out of it.

Doesn't seem like the way you experience it is quite to the point where you experience actual synesthesia, but it does sound sort of similar. I've had that too. Often when I have a panic attack, I'm so overwhelmed with sensory information that my brain just kind of stops caring about making sense of incoming signals. The prevalent idea behind AS is that it is essentially a set of coping mechanisms for such sensory overloads, so I suppose this feeling of detachment and alienation is par for the course.

Matrix moments, that's a good term to describe stuff like this. I've felt pretty similar to how you described your experiences. How the whole world becomes one big abstract. I've never actually experienced a sensation of becoming entangled with objects or patterns... that's really interesting though. Wow.

I do get mild synesthesia when I smoke marijuana, but it is not pleasant. My brain turns into a chaotic warzone between my senses and my logic. My mind and my grasp on reality becomes a vast mine-field, and each sensory input is like a tank rolling through it, or a bomb being dropped on it, etc. Being high makes me act and feel psychotic. I don't smoke at all anymore, and even just the smell of it triggers intense anxiety for me. I could write extensively on elaborating what being high feels like to me. My reactions to marijuana have always been profoundly powerful and bizarre, but no one ever seems to take me seriously. People always tell me it sounds like I'm describing and acid trip or something, and they seem to think it's impossible to have such a reaction to marijuana. You know how people are. That's a whole other topic though.

YES. THANK YOU. As a kid I would have these feelings of everything around me being unreal, or too real, and all of a sudden every detail, every speck of light, every sound, would just enter my brain all at once and leave me paralyzed, and then I would proceed to have a massive anxiety attack.
I also relate to the matrix moments.
Glad to know I am not the only one.

Wow I don't know what I'd do if I didn't discover WrongPlanet. The more I read and post on these boards the less alone I feel.

Yeah weed does the same thing to me, makes my heart race and feel really fearful and anxious.
I can relate to the matrix moments. Sometimes I feel completely enmeshed in the world of objects, like I am part of the chair I am sitting in or I am growing out of the floor instead of separate to it. Other times I feel like I have taken a step back from reality, and i'm watching everything I see through my eyes on a screen.

welcome to our neat little club,
Super
Cool
Useful
Man

I'm a girl, haha. Looks like you're gonna have to come up with a new acronym.

Well that's good to know that I'm not the only one. These feelings are starting to make a little more sense to me, in regards to why they happen. I don't feel like such a mutant organism anymore.

i've read on the net somewhere the word autism comes from greek and its meaning is "escape from reality."
the glass door in my parents' house, in what used to be the kids' sleeping rooms, has patterns on it. i saw animals and humans forms that no one else saw. i can daydream about different realities, including alien landscapes and ETs, and make a complete story out of it easily. i get so absorbed that once as a child i was standing with a bunch of other girls and daydreaming. when i came to the others were gone and i didnt even notice.
all my life the world around me seemed unreal and dreamlike. no wonder i want to go to another planet... the other girls would laugh and i didnt understand what was funny. they'd talk and i wouldnt understand what they're saying. i had a feeling like i'm floating.
if i'm in a place with too much noises coming from different directions and people moving in different directions, i might get a sensory overload. i got this way once and there was someone new i met and he held out his hand. i didnt take it. i froze. i stared into space and couldnt move or talk.
it's not ridiculous at all, but simply the way the electricity in our brains works. yes, it has a lot to do with autism. bill gates lives in a world of computers and that's the real world as far as he's concerened while the "other" world is just in the background, something foggy. and dont get me started on albert ainstein. i mean, going back in time.... if you belive that can be achieved then you're really not living in the real world...

I know exactly what you mean. Daydreaming has been a major obsession and coping mechanism throughout my entire life. As a kid, and even now and to a greater extent, I made up my own planet with its own name, its own continents, landscapes, weather cycles, environments, plant species, animal species, humanoid species, political systems, religious beliefs, conflicts, and other fantasy-like elements. I'd incorporate dinosaurs into the world too, since dinosaurs were (and still are) one of my major obsessions. I'd spend most of my childhood drawing, making up my own creatures and writing facts about them, drawing dinosaurs and writing facts about them, and just shaping and molding my fantasy world. I still do it. I have a whole alternate life and I can escape there any time I want. Sometimes I sit staring off into space for 5 hours at a time lost in my inner world, editing and shaping my experiences. I forget about and neglect my responsibilities while I'm doing it. My parents and teachers always knew me for my elaborate imagination, and I've won plenty of 1st place awards in art contests drawing dinosaurs and made-up creatures. I feel so childish to still be this obsessive over a fantasy world, but if I didn't obsess over it, I'd feel like life was meaningless. The real world, especially the social world, seems so painfully boring and repetitive by comparison.


I've heard that Einstein may have had autistic traits. I'm obsessed with science, (right now with evolution and cosmology in particular) I read about it for the majority of my day during most days. Going back in time may be theoretically possible, so it's not really not as farfetched as it initially seems. Most scientific concepts seems farfetched until you learn the details, because science is largely counter-intuitive, and a deeper understanding of mathematics is necessary in order to really understand a lot of concepts. But the concept of time travel opens up a colossal list of paradoxes. It's really interesting.