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Weird Psychological Thing Re: Big/Small

Not so much perception of objects as big/small, but sometimes I feel for no apparent reason like I'm too big, or everything around me has become very small.

I haven't been toking from any bottles that said 'Drink Me' on them or anything recently...
 
BlackRiverFalls said:
Not so much perception of objects as big/small, but sometimes I feel for no apparent reason like I'm too big, or everything around me has become very small.

I haven't been toking from any bottles that said 'Drink Me' on them or anything recently...

I feel that fairly regularly. And funnily enough, it always reminds me of Alice when she is trapped in the lizards house as well. Its an odd feeling but kind of cool.

I can also "turn myself round" in my body which is also cool. I have to be lying down and I just kind of force myself to think I am lying the other way up and can hear any noises out of the other ear (if a noise is coming from my left I can hear it in my right ear etc.) When I come out of it I can physically feel myself swinging back round 180 degrees to land the right way up. I've not read through the other 10 pages yet to find out if anyone else has reported this but I will.
 
I used to bounce of the stairs when i was a kid, usually wearing a pink dressing gown that I've never owned.

I have had the feeling, tho not for a while, that my head was enormous and my mouth and eyes were just tiny almost invisible slits in that same huge mass....

(while writing this Comfortably Numb by Flink Poyd has just come on the radio. "My hands felt just like two balloons.....")
 
Thanks for the link Bannik. I was amazed to see so many other postings about the same feeling of floating down the stairs.
 
I used to float down the stairs regularly, until I was about 4 or 5. I stopped being able to do it when I started thinking "I shouldn't be able to do that".

And I've been getting the big/small feeling just by reading a few of the posts on this thread. Can't actually read all the way through it because it's making me feel weird and queasy :cross eye
 
I can also "turn myself round" in my body which is also cool.

You mean kind of like that bit in Terminator 2 where Arnie slams the T1000 face first into the wall and it morphs itself the other way around? :eek!!!!:
 
When I make glass beads, the bead in the flame seems to be enormous! Later, when I take the beads out of the kiln, they are soooooo small. Must be an attention thing.
 
BlackRiverFalls said:
You mean kind of like that bit in Terminator 2 where Arnie slams the T1000 face first into the wall and it morphs itself the other way around? :eek!!!!:
:laughing: No, not quite! I meant that if I lie down just now with my head pointing towards the window I can make myself feel like its my feet towards the window. Though last time I tried it I only got halfway round. Perhaps I'm losing the knack?
 
Well

This condition happens when one is dieing or is having a near death experience,check your pulse.
Bill.
 
When I make glass beads, the bead in the flame seems to be enormous! Later, when I take the beads out of the kiln, they are soooooo small. Must be an attention thing.

I always find that with garden plants. They look so big when I buy them on the market and while I'm carrying them home, then when I put them down in the garden they're tiny again.
 
apologies if this has been posted before

Child's play is all a question of scale, say scientists

Tim Radford, science editor
Friday May 14, 2004
The Guardian

Researchers have unravelled one of the mysteries of the two-year-old mind: why toddlers try on dolls' shoes and try to drive tiny cars.
It's simple. They haven't mastered scale. A team from Northwestern University, the University of Virginia and the University of Illinois report in Science today that they videotaped children aged 18 to 30 months trying to slide down slides too small for them, trying to squeeze into miniature cars and trying to sit in dolls' chairs.

"Even infants can discriminate the size of objects, so the question is why children sometimes ignore the fact that the objects are so small," said David Uttall of Northwestern.

The study seems to confirm a theory of how the brain works: that two areas deal with visual information. One recognises and pigeon-holes objects ["That's a chair!"]. The other decides how to use the information ["I could sit down!"]. People recovering from severe stroke often have problems coordinating the information. Now it seems that very young children have to learn to do the same thing.

The children were left in a playroom with a pedal car big enough to sit in, a child-sized chair and an indoor slide. Then they were taken for a walk and when they got back they found only miniature replicas of the big objects. Yet 25 of the 54 children made 40 errors of scale, trying to slide down the tiny slide, or squeeze into the miniature car.

"In scale errors, the usual seamless integration between the two systems in the brain momentarily breaks down, and the size of an object is not incorporated into the child's decision to act on it," said Judy DeLoache, of the University of Virginia. "However, once the action begins, children do use size information to adjust the motor behaviour."
 
Yes--I've Gotten This Sensation Too

In my case, It's nearly like placing something very thin, like the ends o my glasses, or dental floss, against the bottom of my eyes.

I also feel it when I'm very ill, or when I touch something with a bevelled edge, like the end of a sofa arm.

...Weird, eh?

Oh, if someone's said anything like I have already, sorry, I'm so impatient that I skipped from the second to the last page.

Nick
 
I just read the whole of this thread and the horror! when I read about the block of clay hanging from a hair. I used to get feelings like that all the time. I also got the people's heads going bigger/smaller - I remember looking at a teacher reading a story and her head getting really big and sort of floating. Then I snapped back.

I used to get recurring patterns in my head when I was trying to sleep - either lines drawing patterns on their own or symmetrical square patterns being continously created. They would keep me awake for a long time and were very exasperating.

I can still induce the big/small thing though I had pretty much forgotten it until now! I always felt very 'different' as a child, although despite having many weird sleep experiences, including sleep paralysis, I don't have mental health problems that I am aware of. Just slightly different sensibilities. As an adult I have met more kindred spirits and feel less odd!
 
This is so wierd! So its not related to stress then?

I wondered if it was some kind of wierd psychological trauma madness type of thing that need concern me. Now, we're all freaks, or I and my sister are completely normal!!

The hair in the ball of clay thing bothers me though...

I suppose the answer to the questions I had about all this is that there is no answer. Its just a brain thing. Like when I used to float in my dreams I always landed. For years people told me it was symbolic or that you would die if you landed. My whole back would prickle in anticipation as I watched the ground coming up fast under me and I would thud into the ground. I panicked about what it could mean for years. Then I watched a programme years later about an electrical discharge from an overactive brain shooting down the spinal chord resulting in a jolt of the legs during sleep. I dunno...all those worries!
 
I had one of these big/small experiences the other day. I was walking home from work and I called into the supermarket. The whole front wall is glass with transfers on it and I often sneak a glance to check my reflection! I was carrying a document bag - it's slightly bigger than A4 but it was crammed with paperwork and books. Anyway, as I looked at my reflection, the bag seemed really, really small against my leg, but I could feel that it was, in fact, pretty heavy. The more I looked, the greater the discrepancy seemed until I got thoroughly creeped out and sped into the bright lights of the supermarket! I did it again on the way out - a cool way to induce the feeling even if it is odd.
 
minuscule immensity

This might more properly belong to another thread or forum, but being a new user I am unfamiliar with protocol!

Since I was a child, although far less frequently in recent years, I have occasionally experienced an odd sensation while I was asleep , which then continued for several minutes after waking. The sensation is not really what I would call a dream although there can be a visual element. It is more adequately described as a sensation of something that is hugely immense, but at the same time indescribably tiny. The disparity between the two superimposed perceptions of size is so distressing that it has, on occasion, made me vomit. Accompanying this feeling is a sensation of texture, something I can only describe as sponginess that is solid but somewhat pliable.

It has been suggested to me that these feelings are the night terrors that children often experience, but I wonder if there is something more, as a couple of years ago I happened to mention this unbearable 'huge/tiny' feeling to a friend who looked shocked and then admitted that they had experienced this also, but had never known how to describe it. Since then I have asked quite a few people and about a third have been able to relate to what I am talking about. There seem to be variations in the visual element; I for example seem to see a huge stone column that is so big that I can't wrap my arms around it, but at the same time is so small as to be like a single strand of hair. Others associate another image or a particular colour with the feeling, but the common core is the disparity in perceptions of size. I cannot express how truly disturbing this feeling is.

It has occurred to me that it may be a subconscious attempt to reconcile what we know about the size of the world/universe with own own apparent insignificance, though I doubt that such thought processes would have been happening in my head when I was six and first experienced this feeling. Besides, I'm sure that this theory is at least a partial plagiarism of the late D.Adam's 'Total Perspective Vortex'!

Regardless, I would be interested to hear people's theories, particularly if they have experienced the same thing, as anyone who hasn't will probably think I am talking nonsense...
 
I think there's a thread about this somewhere...
 
Title is something like 'Strange Feelings about Big vs Small'. I had a similar thing when I was younger, to do with small things getting big with a whoosh as I was trying to sleep, really horrible in a very strange and unexplainable way.
 
This is something I have experienced all my life, although less so as I have got older. It now occurs if I am unwell (flu or such) so I put it down to fever.
 
I hadn't seen the original thread when I posted the above, but I have been sitting here for an hour and I think I have read them all....

given that this is such a prevalent experience, there must be some reason for it...

It seems to be associated with a few other factors, anxiety, tiredness, delirium, nausea, migraines, and various visual and sensory disturbances.

there MUST be a name for this.

though I have a feeling perhaps it is dismissed when it occurs among children as night terrors, and adults probably feel it is too infrequent or trivial to seek advice about.

I know this discussion is probably exhausted but I have just discovered all of this......
 
light said:
It seems to be associated with a few other factors, anxiety, tiredness, delirium, nausea, migraines, and various visual and sensory disturbances.

there MUST be a name for this.
There is, Alice in Wonderland syndrome. Which is a brilliant name for it IMO because whenever I get it I am reminded of a picture in my Alice in Wonderland book of Alice in the Lizards house with her arm out of the window and her foot out of the chimney! :) This is before I knew there was a name for it.

There are another couple of threads, also associated with migraines etc. Enjoy. :)
Here
And here
 
so far i've only read the first page, but it reminds me of a weird recurring dream i always had.
i always thought of it as the "bouncing over the moon" dream
i would be bouncing off of the earth, at incredible speed and impact i'd imagine, except it felt so soft and comfortable, more comfortable than i've ever felt out of a dream.
and similar to others experiences described above, it's scary enough to be odd and thrilling, but still comfortable!
opposites too is what i notice!
i'm gonna continue reading :p
 
I get these sort of sensations if I'm falling ill.

It scares the bejesus out of me and when I was a child I used to start crying and/ or hyperventelating when it happened.


This is probably too much information but I remember one incident when I was about 11/12? I was having a dream about a maze, it too had a retro computer game kind of look about it. All I remember now is this ballbearing thing going around the maze and lots of red/ gren neon lasers on a black background.

I was looking at it in a birdseye view and remember I was getting a worse and worse headache in my dream as the ball went round and round...


Anyway, it must have got so bad as I awoke from my dream actually being sick :( Odd.

Such a horrible thing though to wake up as you're being sick, wonder what was first, me feeling ill so having that dream or the dream making me feel icky...
 
Funnily enough I was thinking about this the other day: my friend at uni got the big / small thing whereas I have a hard / soft thing going on and the feeling always centres around my head / mouth / teeth.

I'm sorry I can't offer you any explanation for this sensation, but I just wanted to let you know that I know what you mean!
 
As an adult, having long forgotten the horrible big/small thing, I think I accidentally found a way to nearly bring it back. I had a necklace of beads made from some milky-coloured stone, with one big bead in the middle and the rest of the beads gradually getting smaller on each side. I was dangling it between my fingers, looking at the beads and suddenly had no idea what size they were. One second they were simply huge, which made no sense between my fingers and thumbs, next minute they were small, but mostly there was just no size information to what I saw. I think it was the presence of too many curves - rounded beads, the curve of the dangling necklace, plus the decreasing size of the beads from the centre outwards - which confused me. I could do it any time I tried with this necklace, but I only tried a few times because I didn't like the feeling that something had 'gone wrong'.
 
I do still get the big/small thing but its not as common as when I was a kid.Usually when Im tired or feeling ill.

I also remember flying down the stairs.
 
Ok, I guess this is off topic. I apologize. I just wanted to say that Chez, you have one of the most awesome avatars I've ever seen! :D
 
As an arachnophobe that Avatar creeps me out-but it is very good!

I fairly often get a small thing when driving to and from work whilst tired. The road will seem far away and small, almost like a tunnel effect, and its difficult to determine how close cars in front of me are. It gives me a headache as I squint and shake my head to try and clear it. I've always just put it down to tiredness and tenseness from driving on the motorway in rush hour traffic but it is disconcerting.
 
Thanks for the comment on the avatar guys :D

I spoke to my Mum on the phone today, and decided to ask her about the big/small thing.She said she used to get it, but hadn't for years,however my brother says he still gets it sometimes
 
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