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Weird Psychological Thing Re: Big/Small

anonymous post from earlier in the thread ... just reading about the juggling thing has convinced me this will probably give you the desired effect ...

By chance the other day I found out my housemate gets this feeling too. And at the same time we seem to have discovered a way to induce it. We were messing about juggling and started using various objects of different sizes and weights. My housemate tried two juggling balls and a Smint, and after a few seconds stopped abruptly and said 'I can't do this any more; it's giving me the big-small feeling." He was quite freaked out and worried he wouldn't be able to sleep that night.

I was very surprised to find out that he'd had this before, and asked him about it - like me he associates it with terrible childhood nightmares and fever dreams that are thankfully getting rarer nowadays. I tried the trick and found out that after a few seconds it does indeed create a mild form of the sensation we've been talking about, in me at least. So if any of you can juggle, try doing so with two heavy-ish juggling balls and a small, light breathmint or something, and see if it works for you.
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I've had something similar. I wouldn't say it just happened as a child as I can remember it happening in my twenties.

The best way I can explain it, is just a weird feeling, if I had pictured say, a small stick man lifting a very large boulder.

I used to be able to bring this feeling on, but it just seems like a long time ago now, although I still think about that feeling.

It's nice to see that others have this, it's a bit mad.
 
i still get flashes ... 9-year-old fortean apprentice has been there too ... the pinball comment i made above was echoed by a friends partner recently ... the commonality is surprising given the almost intangible nature of the feeling
 
I think I had something like this around when I was about 11 (1981-ish). I might have had a bit of a fever, and I could see/dream a large boulder rolling slowly, and a footballer running fast in front of it, but the boulder was always keeping up with him.
I've also got a feeling that this was arond the time that Laurie Anderson had her hit song "O Superman" and remember waking up in the early hours and constantly hearing the "ha, ha, ha" part of the song on a loop in my head!
 
Simon said:
I've also got a feeling that this was arond the time that Laurie Anderson had her hit song "O Superman" and remember waking up in the early hours and constantly hearing the "ha, ha, ha" part of the song on a loop in my head!
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That is a really strange song to hear in the early hours of the morning, it's true. Why Can't We Live Together by Timmy Thomas has the same unnerving effect on me at that time of night.
 
Not sure if this is the same phenomenon, but:
When I was between 6 and 8 y.o. I often had the feeling when looking at my hands that they looked smaller than normal.
It was almost like watching them from the opposite side of a telescope or binoculars. It was not a permanent thing, it happened once in a while.
 
think elsewhere on the thread there is the pink floyd line from comfortably numb off the wall as referring to this feeling "when i was a child i had a fever my hands felt like two balloons"
 
Ilikepencils said:
I've never experienced the big/small thing. Now I feel in the minority after reading this thread!...
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Me too.

It's odd, because when people describe a feeling, emotion or reaction that I don't actually experience myself, that lack of experience is almost always accompanied by at least a sense of recognition. And I suspect that's normal for most of us.

With this though, there's nothing like that - and that, as I say, seems quite odd, but also quite interesting.
 
I think I've already described here my big/small sensations; like a portion of something unfathomably enormous and spherical (a bit like a planet I suppose) being viewed through a tiny toy stage set, usually experienced when I've been ill with a fever. I've tried to discuss it with my boyfriend, in the hope that he understands it but he's never had a similar sensation. Disappointing really!
 
Talking of getting the sensation during a fever, when I was little I got the big-small sensation when I was ill, except I saw a vision of a Royal Family (not the British one, it was the impression I got) and they were furious or panicking or both when just as this feeling reached a crescendo they calmed down immediately as if it didn't matter in the slightest after all. Whatever "it" was.
 
Like Spookdaddy, I have been intrigued and mystified by the thread since it started.

It does call to mind a tv show I saw a decade or more ago. The properties of various noxious plants were being discussed in connection with their use by witches to alter consciousness. It may have been Henbane which was said to disturb a part of the brain which dealt with scale. Visions of fairy-like creatures and tiny animals were reported by those who had experimented with these plants in modern times. :?:
 
It's amazing to know that other people have had the big/small feeling!

I would get it quite a lot as a child. The best way I could have explained it would be to imagine picking up something you could see was tiny, like a dried pea, but having the unexpected sensation of picking up a large medicine ball. The original poster's description of a lump of clay suspended by a hair struck a chord with me.

Nowadays, the feeling manifests itself in the sensation that my hands are the 'wrong' size. As if they contain the sensation of a pair of hands that are ten times bigger than my eyes would have me believe.

I've always explained it to myself by reasoning that the area of the brain responsible for predicting the weight and scale of objects must have to handle very complex sets of data at all times, and any kind of confusion would be keenly felt.

I can often 'cure' the feeling by picking up a familiar object and handling it for a while. Either this 'recalibrates' my perception of objects, or is simply distracting enough to take my mind off it.
 
I thought I'd posted here but couldn't find it.

When I was around 2-3 I remember looking down at the carpet in the living room and seeing a toy American Western Steam train followed by Native Americans on horse back. The next thing I'm down on the carpet about to be run down by the train and the following Indians all very much now life size and very real!

I just can't recall if I was dreaming but I feel I wasn't. I didn't have a steam train or Indians toys though.

I'm amazed the amount of fourteens who have had this experience as until AIWA syndrome came along I had never heard or read anyone one else experiencing it.
 
I've had this too, and I think perhaps I posted to this thread about it years ago, but I've seen become "Anonymous" and can't find it.

Haven't had it for years though, probably since about age 9-10. It was worst when I had a fever and the feeling would be accompanied by ordinary sounds becoming very loud. I once had a terrifying ordeal in the bathroom while sick because the toilet seemed too large and far away and then when I flushed it it sounded as if the whole house was being consumed in a tidal wave. Horrible, I'll always remember that.

Usually I would have these crazy nightmares where nothing happened except alternating between big/heavy and small/light. I would be made of something fragile and light like styrofoam and then being crushed under a huge truck, then I would be outside the truck and feeling light again. Over and over. I'd wake up in a sweat. Never thought other people had nightmares like that until I read about it here.

I also found the feeling could be brought on by holding a ball in the palm of my hand and curling my hand around it. Not like the juggling some people have mentioned. Just holding the ball.

But like I said, it's been a great many years since I had this feeling and I can almost not remember what it feels like. Nothing seems to bring it on now.

Wait, that's not entirely true, I've just remembered a time when I was 18 and experimented with opium. I was going down some stairs, and looked down, and my feet were very far away and quite small, but I was huge and tall and balanced on the tiny feet. It wasn't at all unpleasant and strange like the nightmares, just funny, and reminded me of Alice in Wonderland. So I'm not sure if it's entirely the same phenomenon.
 
I had many strange experiences as a child when I was ill. In fact my interest in all things Fortean probably came from these inexplicable ' paranormal ' events.
The big/small thing. Demonic visits/ threats. Time lapses etc etc

I have only just discovered that Benylin ( common medicine given to children ) causes hallucinogenic effects. Apparently according to this link . . .

http://www.drugrehabwiki.com/wiki/Benylin

Benylin has similar effects to LSD :shock:

That may explain alot !
 
Amoradala said:
I had many strange experiences as a child when I was ill. In fact my interest in all things Fortean probably came from these inexplicable ' paranormal ' events.
The big/small thing. Demonic visits/ threats. Time lapses etc etc

I have only just discovered that Benylin ( common medicine given to children ) causes hallucinogenic effects. Apparently according to this link . . .

http://www.drugrehabwiki.com/wiki/Benylin

Benylin has similar effects to LSD :shock:

That may explain alot !
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It would explain a lot.
 
The ball of clay/fine thread is the closest for me. Following scarlet fever I used to get the image in my head of a huge rock (think minor asteroid) perching on a fine needle. It would make me feel nauseous and uncomfortable, probably akin to the feeling some people get with fingernails on a blackboard. This lasted until maybe my twenties and I can't re create that feeling anymore. Weird.

Reminds me a bit of the Peanuts cartoon where Linus suddenly announces that: It's happened again, I’m aware of my tongue ... It’s an awful feeling! Every now and then I become aware that I have a tongue inside my mouth, and then it starts to feel lumped up ... I can’t help it ... I can’t put it out of my mind. ... I keep thinking about where my tongue would be if I weren’t thinking about it, and then I can feel it sort of pressing against my teeth ... The last bit sounding as if his tongue is too big for his mouth, I wonder whether Schulz based that on personal experience?
 
Amoradala said:
I had many strange experiences as a child when I was ill. In fact my interest in all things Fortean probably came from these inexplicable ' paranormal ' events.
The big/small thing. Demonic visits/ threats. Time lapses etc etc

I have only just discovered that Benylin ( common medicine given to children ) causes hallucinogenic effects. Apparently according to this link . . .

http://www.drugrehabwiki.com/wiki/Benylin

Benylin has similar effects to LSD :shock:

That may explain alot !
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It's just dextromethorphan, common ingredient in many OTC cough medicines. Honestly you have to take a rather enormous amount to "trip" from it - when I was in high school the recommended dosage to bring on a decent trip was the entire bottle of cough syrup, which would also often cause nausea and vomiting. Yes, I will admit that I tried it, but even after a whole bottle I didn't trip, just got very tired and dopey. Adults who enjoy dexing (DXM tripping) usually skip the cough syrup and go straight for the pure version of the drug, available as a powder, for this reason. To bring on effects of the LSD-level you need to take a very, very high dose, which cannot be safely done with cough syrup.

Surely in children the dosage would need to be much lower, but you'd still have to be taking quite a bit more than the prescribed dose to bring on a trippy feeling. I do think it's likely that some people's parents would be overly generous with the syrup! However, I also think most parents tend to carefully measure children's medicine with the provided cup/spoon. It just doesn't seem likely to me that most parents would be accidentally giving their children half a bottle of cough syrup.

However, fever is known to bring on sensations like this, without any drugs or medicine, and that seems to me to be a very likely explanation when children have these experiences while ill.

A lot of common OTC medications are psychoactive and can cause dramatic effects when taken in large doses, though. Also, people with sensitivities and drug allergies can have severe effects even when the drugs are taken in small doses. I had a friend whose schizophrenic symptoms were exacerbated by certain drugs, which she had to avoid at all costs.
 
My former boss once told me that when he was a child he would have weird episodes where time seemed to slow down - people would speak and move in slow motion etc. after a few minutes things would go back to normal. As he grew up he worked out that he could induce the state by moving one of his hands over the back of the other in a particular way. As he was telling me this, he started turning pale and said that just talking about it was starting to "tip" him into the state! I told him not to carry on in case he made time slow down for all of us... :)
 
My mother sometimes reminds me that as a small child, possibly aged about 4, I once drank a whole bottle of cough mixture and slept for a full day.
She asked a neighbour who'd been a district nurse for advice, and was told to let me sleep it off.

I wonder why Mother didn't get an ambulance right away? That's what I'd have done if one of mine'd done that. Perhaps she was afraid of getting into trouble for letting me find the stuff.

Anyway... that's what drinking a full bottle of Veno's will do. ;)
 
escargot1 said:
My mother sometimes reminds me that as a small child, possibly aged about 4, I once drank a whole bottle of cough mixture and slept for a full day.
She asked a neighbour who'd been a district nurse for advice, and was told to let me sleep it off.

I wonder why Mother didn't get an ambulance right away? That's what I'd have done if one of mine'd done that. Perhaps she was afraid of getting into trouble for letting me find the stuff.

Anyway... that's what drinking a full bottle of Veno's will do. ;)
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Hehe, when I was a teenager I had mono and was given codeine liquid to help with the pain (I couldn't swallow my own saliva because of the swelling in my throat). I was miserably ill but often in inexplicably high spirits - at one point I even remember sitting on the sofa and breaking into a fit of giggles. Turns out my mother didn't bother to read the label on the codeine bottle and was just filling the little plastic cup to the brim and giving it to me - which was 4x the prescribed dose. Can't say that I had hallucinations but it did take the edge off the sickness!

If you're anywhere close to my age or older, Escargot, I'm not surprised at your mother's response. I'm rather shocked at the things my own parents let me do as a child. They were very relaxed about things that these days we are more worried or even paranoid about. To hear my mother tell it, my grandmother's generation was even more laissez-faire about children. It's amazing any of us survived!
 
When my oldest was just a toddler I had been awake most of the night with her coughing so had gone to the chemist to get some cough medicine.
I gave her a dose after we came home. I was so tired that when I sat down for a moment I promptly fell asleep.
I was awaked by a glugging sound and found she had pushed over a chair and climbed onto the bench to get the mixture . Utterly horrified I put her in the pusher and raced back to the chemist.
They measured how much she had drunk and said that she would just sleep it off . She didn't but when we went to get groceries later we didn't get them as she had a stomach upset and we had to come home to clean her up.
 
About 10 years ago I was talking to my mum about odd things that have happened to us. I began telling her about my big/small experiences. I got as far as telling her about a tiny metallic sphere I used to see or sense or imagine ,I don't know what and she finished my sentence off by telling me that it was massive and was everything that existed. Which is what I was going to tell her! I was amazed that she had had the same experience over the years.
I used to experience it in my early to mid twenties. Sometimes it would happen when I was in that half asleep/half awake state . Sometimes the feeling would just come to me anytime. I would see a tiny metallic ball that I knew was absolutely everything that existed apart from me looking at it . It's quite difficult to describe . I haven't experienced it for 20years or so.Funny thing is that I actually miss it because it gave me a nice cosy feeling.
 
Don´t know if this qualifies as being along the lines of the light/heavy feeling that many report in this thread: As a child, I would have a recurring "vision" when falling asleep of me holding a matchstick in both hands and spinning around with it as if it were very heavy and getting heavier due to the centrifugal force. I would do this on an elevation in a lawn type of ground, a bump on the ground overgrown with grass.
It was a strangely meaningful scene to me, and I have often thought back to it.
 
escargot1 said:
My mother sometimes reminds me that as a small child, possibly aged about 4, I once drank a whole bottle of cough mixture and slept for a full day.
She asked a neighbour who'd been a district nurse for advice, and was told to let me sleep it off.

I wonder why Mother didn't get an ambulance right away? That's what I'd have done if one of mine'd done that. Perhaps she was afraid of getting into trouble for letting me find the stuff.

Anyway... that's what drinking a full bottle of Veno's will do. ;)
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Just seen this, there are several times I banged my head as a kid, which today would have resulted in a trip to hospital and neuro obs, but not in the 70's. My folks just gave me a cuddle until I stopped crying and went quite :eek:

Probably explains a lot about me now o_O
 
I injured my back when I was about 13 (I fell onto a metal fin on an old rocket casing) and could barely walk at the time and had trouble for some time after. The parents' view was "Don't make a fuss etc". (Had back problems all my life all centered on the region wot hit the fin)...it seems to me that folk in the 60's often were frightened to make any kind of fuss about anything.

During my childhood, this seemed to be a recurring theme - don't rock the boat, don't get involved, keep walking, none of our business, don't make a fuss etc. Is this a hangover from the war years?
 
I used to get this too.
Always when I was ill and staying at my nan's.

It was weird in that everything started to pulse and it always centred on a boot like the Old Woman that Lived in a Shoe kind of boot.

It would pulse and just get bigger and bigger as I seemed to get smaller and smaller. Used to really make me feel scared, especially as it was always at my nan's and always when I was ill/had a fever.
 
Coal said:
I injured my back when I was about 13 (I fell onto a metal fin on an old rocket casing) and could barely walk at the time and had trouble for some time after.
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Young for a rocket scientist.
 
Anonymous said:
Can anyone help?
Me and my band member Steve have the same strange psychological phenomena but haven't met anyone else who has it.

it's a bit like that thing you get when you are tired or poorly where things go far away and big, only this is different.

It's hard to describe, but is basically an unbearable (stomach going) feeling triggered by thinking about (or dreaming of) a contrast between large and small. A prime example is thinking of an enormous block of heavy dense grey clay, suspended from a long hair. aaarrrrrgggggggghhhhhhhhh!!

Can anyone offer any explanations? Are we mental? Is it like synaesthesia or not??? (see the Man who can Taste Shapes!!!)

Any info much appreciated,

You can mail me on my work address: [email protected]

:)
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I used to experience this a lot as a child...

It's good to see someone else who expressed it and have put it in words...

Matt
 
"usually experienced when I've been ill with a fever. "

This made me recall a recurring fever dream I had when I was little. It involved me feeling like I was on one end of an unimaginably vast see-saw, which started going up and down ponderously at first, but then faster and faster. At the point where the vertiginous sensation was becoming unbearable, the dream would suddenly shift to a sensation of me becoming liquid and swirling down some spiral hole into an abyss. I only had this fever dream once since childhood - when I was feeling extremely ill after getting food poisoning around 15 years ago.
 
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