Anyone else with Synesthaesia?

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Growing up this made me aware that I was really weird. I told it to one person and they made fun of it so I kept it to myself until I met a PsyD w/ autism. I have a few variants of synesthaesia: smells to shapes, thoughts to shapes, music to emotion/feelings. I've been completely obsessed with shapes since I was little. Banknote art is something I can stare at for hours. There are shapes within shapes on various world currencies. The languages they are written in are another long-time autistic obsession/interest. Anyone else?

Explaining myself is not easy. It's as if I have a 55 gallon drum for a brain and a coffee straw for a mouth/ability to get it out. Some feelings I cannot explain either. Especially the ones connected to music. When I play music, I typically get depressed afterward and feel empty. I don't know anyone who knows what this is like.

One song that gives a weird feeling/emotion that I can't explain is this:

Yes, I have many forms of synaesthesia and I didn't know it was an unusual phenomenon until I was in Uni.

I can't imagine perceiving words, letters, numbers, sounds, or textures in any other way.

I wish I was like that....

To add, although it sounds totally bizarre, I have an emotional connection to rain. I would explain more but I don't think anyone will understand this.

This song describes me in many ways, as sad as it is, it is EXTREMELY comforting:

Would "Walking in the Rain With the One I Love," by Love Unlimited, be comforting?

I'm a straight man, by the way.

I'm just talking about songs about rain which are comforting to me.

Straight also. The forementioned is quite different. Songs about rain don't do anything although your song selection is par excellence. It is the rain itself. At times when it hasn't rained for a long period I'd use my last dime to drive far away just to be in it. When I was in high school I didn't have an umbrella so I would walk slow in the gutter to be soaked, but I enjoyed it. During heavy abuse when I was really young, the darker the sky even a black sky, the better I felt. The harder it rained the more secure/safe. There is more to it though.

After a semi-brief hospital stay in which I was hit with 2 different o p i a t e s a few times a day, there was a period of months afterward where this part of my mind was scrambled. I was getting phantom smells which were memories and more.

It is quite complicated to explain and it is hard to relay the aspects of this without appearing unrelatable and nutzoid. Can you imagine explaining any of this to an NT????? Or to a thumb-twiddler taught by standard psychology? Imagine the labels they would pummel you with.... I only say the twiddling since I've lightly mentioned it to a previous psy and they attempted to label it wrongly iaw the standard models. When I 1st met a post-doc PsyD with autism, he recognized a litany of autistic attributes within the first 5 minutes. Very thankful to begin to have seom sort of understanding now. The more I study and recognize myself in autistic studies, I have become sort of resentful since it didn't have to be so hard.

I have it too! And I think I know exactly what you're talking about with that Depeche mode song. I get that feeling with a lot of songs, like after listening to Black Hole Sun or even anime songs like Again from Full Metal Alchemist.

I also sort of see music in my head similar to the way it looks in Osu (A rhythm game).

YESSSS! It is quite a few songs as well.

Yes. Its a beautiful thing
Most of mine are sound input yielding various other things. I do seem to have a little control of what it activates tho.

This makes it quite useful to help decipher / understand the world.
Try and explore it.

I feel that bombarding ones being with depressing words and chord progressions can lead one to sit in that vibrational frequency.
In my humble opinion.

I have some difficulty understanding what synestaesia truly is, but Im pretty sure I have it. Id actually like to catalog the relationships between various shapes, colors, letters, numbers, days of the week, months, sounds, textures, etc. For me, time also exists on a specific spatial plane. I did a digital painting of a human lifespan before.
Depeche Mode is my favorite band of all time partially because they have such a strong, complex sensory feel to most of their music. I actually attended a Depeche Mode fan event at a club recently. It was amazing. A lot of cool, odd, accepting, beautiful people. Actually, I painted a picture based on that particular song. I love them so much. Sorry for going off subject.

Oh! I also have a personal connection with the rain and moon. Hate the sun though.

Hmmm ... I didn’t really realise i had it for a while. My daughters piano teacher had tone to color synaesthesia and that Was what I thought it was for a long time. I’ve always had sound to taste but just thought that wa my general weirdness even after I was diagnosed with AS. Like most of us I’m easily over stimulated by sound and have noise cancelling headphones and so on. I especially respond to ripping fabric sound/taste. I’m also epileptic and sound/vision/taste are clear triggers. I can no longer drive myself due to the epilepsy but one seizure where I lost control and drove off the highway and rolled down a bank, left me with a clear memory of the taste of breaking glass - very weird!

I don't (think I) have Synesthesia but I think I understand this one: on this forum, it's very rare to mention something, no matter how strange, and not have someone relate. I know there are several people around who find rain soothing and comforting and thunderstorms exhilarating.

Definitely have it.

In first grade the first ten numbers each had color, gender, and personality.
I mentioned it here before and a mom of an autistic child was quite taken with my number synesthaesia. Asked if I had more example. Sorry that I never got back to her about.

Anyway two is blue ( a cute little baby number), three is orange, and is an annoying brat with food all over its face, four is a cool color -green -slightly female, Five is gray, and no gender, six is me (red and outlined in black). I was six in first grade and my baby sister was two. Seven is yellow, Eight green and female (its even shaped like a female). Nine is the second in command of the family (sort of a mom figure) and ten is black, and is the stern father figure who rules the ten digits.

Have it with other things. Music can have color. Bach tends to be dark. Mozart green. Different pop songs have color-especially when deejaying.

Ice cream and cake make me image castles. And by extension the whole continent of Europe.

Visual(mostly)/auditory to tactile/proprioceptive syneasthesia for me, and as others have said, it's something that I had no idea was unusual until adulthood, and then rarely spoke of to anyone once I realised the kind of reactions I'd usually get.

The main difficultly is that there are no words to describe the tactile and proprioceptive sensations which sounds and sights elicit - they don't feel "like" any common sensation that there are everyday words for. The best I can do is to describe it as feeling like the sights and sounds travel over and through my body, and that I sense my body subtly changing in position and dimensions.

Generally, it doesn't give me any serious problems day-to-day; though rooms with geometric or tesselated surfaces can make me feel rather disorientated and dissociated - for example; when walking over tiled floors, I can feel very uncertain whether my feet will reach the floor and lose perception of how fast I'm moving. I think it might also contribute to my excessive startle reflex - something like a small bird flying across my path gives me a strong sensation of it flying "through" me somehow, which can make me jump.

I also always see the world overlaid with strong "visual snow" and migraine-aura type hallucinations which mould themselves around whatever I'm looking at. However, I put that down to my visual centre's pattern-recognition circuits being a bit over-active, and I don't think it would qualify as being syneasthesia as it only involves the one sense.

Rain & moon, YESSS!