This is very interesting for me because I have almost the inverse experience of this. When I was a child I was diagnosed with migraine induced absent seizures. I think it was mostly a "we don't really know what this is, but here's a diagnosis so you can stop bothering us". I mostly grew out of it, but a few times per year I'll have an episode.
What will happen is that suddenly and out of the blue I'll completely lose any sense of reality. I'll have words, but that's almost it. I have no sense of self. If it happens when I'm doing something, like walking around the grocery store, I can still identify where I am, and what's going on, but there's no real sense of me doing it. It almost feels as if I'm in a video game and I'm "above" myself. My consciousness completely disassociates from my body. When I was a kid it would scare the absolute shit out of me and I'd panic. Several times I would run away from where I was, thinking I was going to die (it's really hard to explain the sense of not having a self, but it's incredibly frightening). As I've gotten older I've been able to deal with them as they subside within 60-120 seconds.
This sounds similar to depersonalization episodes [0]. I used to have regular episodes myself, and they scared the hell out of me. It didn't help they lasted 10 days, but strangely enough never more and never less. The experience is indeed hard to describe, but the video game analogy clicks with me. I usually describe it as experiencing life in third person.
Depersonalization is really bizarre and unsettling. During the pandemic while working from home (and shortly after our first child was born), I started to get these periods of time where life didn’t “feel real”. A room in my apartment wasn’t a room; it was just an arbitrary box that my body was inside of. Things that had substance or meaning started seeming sort of “hollow”, and I felt like I was watching a movie about myself rather than experiencing it. I started Googling and depersonalization / derealization showed up in the results.
I’d like to say it’s gone away since it first appeared two years ago, but it hasn’t entirely. The “not real” sensation seems to linger in the background of my life permanently now. I notice it’s worse if I’m stressed, haven’t had sleep, or haven’t hung out with any friends in person in a while. I also wonder if working remotely via Zoom meetings all the time contributes to the problem; it would be interesting to know if diagnoses of depersonalization spiked during the pandemic.
Frightening. The longest I had one was about a day. Most come and go very quickly now since I've learned to manage them. I feel like the longer I panic and think about the longer they last.
I've had a similar experience, but only once, and only induced as an accidental side effect by months of mental and physical preparation. About ten years ago, I spent three months where I almost singularly (outside of my software job) thought about and prepared for a powerlifting competition (amateur, not crazy strong). This would be my second competition (and at the same location), and every night before falling asleep, I would visualize the entire day, from waking up, to driving to the location, weighing in, sitting in the stands, walking up to the platform, and completing the lifts. What I would be wearing, what I would eat, what books I would bring. What lifts I would attempt, and how I would warm up.
During the competition, while I was on the platform, I felt like my consciousness was ten feet above my head, and all my actions happened autonomously, without any conscious direction. I can hear, on the video someone recorded, my father yelling my name from the stands, but in the moment I had no conception of that. I bumped into the spotter while resetting my stance on one of the squats, and didn't even really register or respond to his presence.
It felt incredibly powerful, but that's probably because of all the purposeful preparation that led up to it. I can't imagine how terrifying that would be to have happen at random without any warning.
Do you lose muscle control? I imagine you'd still be walking around the grocery store, just without a sense of agency of which steps you take, right?
Somewhat unrelatedly, I've recently been toying with a philosophical idea: what is the inverse of solipsism? Solipsism is the belief that the Self is the only real thing, since it's the only thing that can think. Everything else, and everyone else, may all be false perceptions. So I am real, and everyone else is a figment of my imagination. The inverse of that would be that everyone else is real, and I their collective mass hallucination. Who am I to say that I exist? The best way to exist is to not believe in one's existence. I wouldn't say I exactly subscribe to it, but I do enjoy thinking about it.
> Do you lose muscle control? I imagine you'd still be walking around the grocery store, just without a sense of agency of which steps you take, right?
No I maintain full muscle control, physical feeling, etc. It's much harder to explain because of this. It's more or less sudden onset ego death, which is why it's so frightening when it happens. You can only get so used to it, and even now as an adult my heart still races although I don't panic.
One physical way to think about it is that my movements feel like they precede my thoughts about that movement, but I'm still thinking and bringing those movements into existence. Time gets jumbled during these episodes much like what happens the moment before you're knocked unconscious, but the unconscious part never comes.
The only time I've been able to replicate even a small part of these episodes was when I was very very high. I was probably 16 or 17 at the time and I hadn't had an episode in a long while. I smoked a ton of weed with one of my friends and parts of that high felt like these episodes, though much more subtle. So I would say if you've ever been so high that you have a hard time keeping track of time, and you often get stuck in these mini loops of saying or doing the same thing, it's kinda sorta like that, but not really.
may be you need to look at what buddhists are saying about no-self and hindus are saying about brahman and compare and contrast your experience with these texts. What you are describing looks completely normal (except for migraine) and is in fact expected as per these texts.
Can I quote this story in an anecdotal context in a book I’m writing about Why We Play?
Sorry for such a short, bizarre reply. Your comment and GP are fantastic accounts, and I genuinely appreciate you both for sharing these experiences. Let me know if you have questions, but certainly no need to reply otherwise. Cheers :)
Yeah I can still drive. In fact, I’ve had episodes while driving.
It’s not dangerous. I still know where I am, how to drive, and what’s going on. It just doesn’t feel like I’m doing it. So if I think “I need to pull over” and then I pull over, it’s as if I’ve observed myself doing that in some sort of higher abstracted state. I’ve thought the action into reality, but I had no connection to my body doing the action.
The hard part to explain is that I can still “feel” my body during these episodes. But it just feels like data being processed by my brain. I have no sense that the things I’m feeling are me, or a part of me. This is why the video game analogy sometimes works.
If you’re playing a game you’re making decisions, you’re physically controlling the actions (through a keyboard or controller). You might even have some haptic feedback that you can feel. But you have no sense of that character being you. You have no ego connection to that character, at least not in any meaningful way.
That’s what these episodes feel like. It’s like experiencing an ego death, just very quickly and without any lead up or warning.
Why does it seem that way to you? They specifically detailed they can still act in the expected way, just with dissociation. Nothing inherently dangerous about that. To get a driver's license, I don't think a sense of self is required at all. Just the knowledge of the script.
What will happen is that suddenly and out of the blue I'll completely lose any sense of reality. I'll have words, but that's almost it. I have no sense of self. If it happens when I'm doing something, like walking around the grocery store, I can still identify where I am, and what's going on, but there's no real sense of me doing it. It almost feels as if I'm in a video game and I'm "above" myself. My consciousness completely disassociates from my body. When I was a kid it would scare the absolute shit out of me and I'd panic. Several times I would run away from where I was, thinking I was going to die (it's really hard to explain the sense of not having a self, but it's incredibly frightening). As I've gotten older I've been able to deal with them as they subside within 60-120 seconds.