aspies and dissociation
How do you measure your rem sleep??
I know I can not get rem sleep with less than two and a half hours sleep. I dream at about hour three of sleep and again at 6 hours of sleep. When deprived of all sleep for seven days I can go into rem sleep during a fifteen minue nap.
I messure the rem sleep by a feed back moniter that wakes me if I stop breathing during the night. Its some thing like a eeg with charter. But it was origanaly to study my REM Behavior Disorder in other words I dont all ways get sleep paraisis so let say I dreem that Im fighting I could throw a hard left hook in my sleep.
Ive wondered if this is a symptom of aspergers or something else too. I often get into unusual states of mind that arent substance induced. To me I feel a constant slight feeling of the world around me being fake like im in an artificial reality. Sometimes its more severe than others. When it gets more intence it can be hard to think cohearently. Also I have a constant visual distortions. If I think about it especially I always see a slight field of static and auras and other mild distortions.
It gets like this for me too. Everything is surreal and I feel I lose myself a bit. Kind of a loss of continuity because the world doesn't look the same way that it did before.
I'm an aspie and I don't experience that much dissociation. I didn't experience it at all until last spring in May. It happened again in September.
I'm not even sure if it was dissociation or some other altered state but it was so noticable and impossible to ignore.
At co-op I was in my work station and everyone was in the other room at lunch and I could hear them from where I was. All of the sudden the conversation they were having slowed down. I slowed down. Time seemed to slow down. There was a support pole in the middle of the room. As soon as I walked around it I bumped into these floating marble sized balls of light hovering and dancing in front of me and it wasn't like they just appeared. I noticed them as soon as I made my way around the pole as if they were hiding and I just couldn't see them because the pole was in the way. I knew it probably wasn't real but I wanted it to be because it was neat. Against my better judgement and after I checked to see that nobody was around I tried to grab one of the balls of light. As soon as I did that I woke up and everything returned to normal.
The second time my mom was around and out of nowhere these circular areas of visual distortion appeared all over my field of vision. They were like little droplets of water in my vision refracting light so that everything behind them was distorted.
I was so startled by this that without even thinking I exclaimed "whoa" out loud. My mom heard me and wondered why I was so startled and I had to explain it to her. This was a very depressing time so it was probably related to my mood. I attempted suicide two weeks after the episode of dissociation.
dancing_penguin
Pileated woodpecker
Joined: 6 Jul 2011
Age: 39
Gender: Female
Posts: 178
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I experienced something demi-similar when I were a kid. Sometimes if I stared too long on someones head on tv, it would actually become larger than it would normally be.
Lol i get that quite a bit as well, i believe its called the dolly zoom effect. where thing start too look like they zoom in and then out and then in and then out, and just like you, i have to focus on the object for a bit for it to happen,
Hehe, both yes and no, there is a camera trick that is called the dolly zoom effect, it's when the background appears to change size relative to the subject. But what I am talking about is when the actual heads of real humans on tv appears to change size relative to their bodies.
lol the dolly zoom is just the best way to describe that when it happens to a person O.o i guess Macroscopia and Microscopia would be better way to put it but that doesnt happen as often as things zooming in for me haha
I came across a name for symptoms like these the other day when I was reading about migraines (I don't think I have experienced this related effect myself, but it was very interesting to learn more). The name is actually Alice in Wonderland syndrome, aka Todd's syndrome (which sounds more professional, but it looks like it is mostly the first name). According to wikipedia (link), "Sufferers may experience micropsia, macropsia, or size distortion of other sensory modalities. A temporary condition, it is often associated with migraines, brain tumors, and the use of psychoactive drugs" and also may be a symptom of early mono. The article also says kids are more likely to have this occur, or you can get it as you are falling asleep. Some other sites also say that it can be related to temporal lobe epilepsy.
Also note there the link to alterations in the perception of time speed, which I think was also mentioned in this thread somewhere, as well as other odd perceptual changes (smells, sounds not seeming right).
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Sometimes when I'm out in public, I get a disturbing feeling like you've described. It usually happens in large groups of people, or a very unfamiliar setting with at least one new person, and it's often something important like a church service. I feel detached, as if the people around me aren't real, and the feeling starts small, growing more and more intense. Usually it passes, but there are times I have to step out and recharge by myself.
When arguing with someone, I frequently have memory problems about the argument itself. Like, my emotions are so strong that my logical mind goes blank. This results in me only figuring out what to say later on.