Outer body experience

[RanMan]

Just throwing this one out there because I want to vent.
I'm wondering if anybody else experiences this. I call it an outer body experience.

It's hard to explain it but it bugs the crap out of me.
I get this about once a day. I feel like I'm looking down on myself trying to control my actions from above or when I'm doing a certain task, it feels like someone is wispering in my ear and telling me what to do but there's nobody else around or if I'm sitting idle, I feel like I'm doing something.

These feelings I've been getting are really starting to scare me, it's hard to describe, my wife thinks it's from stress but I differ.
Could this be a form of a partial seizure?

I've had EP for 26 yrs. but only started getting these feeling about 2 years ago.
I didn't tell my Doc. because he might think I'm nuts.
(Maybe I've been on the meds too long)

Randy

[Bernard]

I've not experienced it, but I did run across some info while researching something else a few weeks ago. Apparently, out of body experiences may be related to sleep paralysis (which may also be related to some types of seizures - like the speech paralysis which you mentioned in another thread).

Here's a page describing how to induce an outer body experience when in a state of sleep paralysis. There is a lot of other info that page as well.

[howdydave]

Howdy Ran Man!

Do you have temporal lobe epilepsy?

They sound like simple partial seizures to me.

One thing that I have discovered...
A lot of simple partial sensations that we look upon as a curse are levels of self-awareness that many yoga practitioners would kill for!

Part of my "Know Thyself" is Jnana yoga and meditation. I have discovered that simple partial seizures give a lot of us what I like to call "flashes of insight"

[Bernard]

Lol. Can't you just see it? People dedicating their whole lives to finding and opening a door within themselves while others find the same door is a motorized turnstile sucking them in whether they like it or not. :shock:

[Elisa]

Ran Man those happen to me all the time, and many others with temporal lobe epilepsy, it is a form of a seizure or aura. I call those my "little seizures" . Lots of times I get very tired after wards.
You should tell you doctor and nope I don't think he will think you are crazy. I think you will find that he has other people that have told him the same thing.
Elisa

[Bernard]

That's a good point Elisa.

If you don't tell your doctor what is going on with you, he is really handicapped in trying to help you. I'd rather a doc thought I was crazy than miss out on diagnosing important changes in seizure activity if I had epilepsy.

[Spacedoubt]

Tell your doctor.

I have had epilepsy since I was a baby. I now know that I have been having simple partial seizures since I was a kid. I had a clean EEG when I was about 8 years old and was proclaimed to have outgrown epilepsy. I was taken off my meds. So, every time I had a tonic clonic after that, my mom said that it was just an exception and that I was still cured. I grew up haveing simple partial seizures and complex partial seizures, thinking I was crazy. Of course, I didn't want to discuss these experiences with anyone.

Then, in my twenties, I had a tonic clonic that almost killed me. I was finally refered to an epilepsy center. They asked "Does this ever happen? Do you ever experience that?" That got me to open up. I finally discovered that I wasn't crazy, I was just having a lot of simple partial seizures and complex partial seizures.

Don't be afraid to tell your doctor. They've probably heard it before, many times, and if they know what's going on they are more likely to be able to help you get better.

[keeley]

I go through the same thing. That could easily be a simple partial seizure. I get them. I have temperal lobe epilepsy. It feels like a dream, it feels like your detached from your own body. The best way I can describe it: Have you ever seen being john malcovich? Yeah, just like that. lol It is scary as hell to me though.

[1096]

yeah me too randy. look into depersonalization, depression and some related
disorders... because i get a lot of the above.

i write really insightful lyrics, plays as proof - have since my whatever-it-is began.

the levels of self awareness i've developed are definitely not taken for granted here but i don't think i'd kill to have them.

my mum said there's an entire cult movement "mystics" that think the petit mal is some sort of divine spirit entering/leaving us because we're "chosen" ones.

i guess the yoga people fit into a similar sort of category

[Bernard]

Using virtual reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences — the sensation of drifting outside of one's own body — in healthy people, according to experiments being published in the journal Science.

When people gaze at an illusory image of themselves through the goggles and are prodded in just the right way with the stick, they feel as if they have left their bodies.

The research reveals that "the sense of having a body, of being in a bodily self," is actually constructed from multiple sensory streams, said Matthew Botvinick, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, an expert on body and mind who was not involved in the experiments.

Usually these sensory streams, which include vision, touch, balance and the sense of where one's body is positioned in space, work together seamlessly, Botvinick said.

But when the information coming from the sensory sources does not match up, when they are thrown out of synchronism, the sense of being embodied as a whole comes apart.

The brain, which abhors ambiguity, then forces a decision that can, as the new experiments show, involve a sensation of being in a different body.

The research provides a physical explanation for phenomena usually ascribed to otherworldly influences, said Peter Brugger, a neurologist at University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland.

Out-of-body experience induced

[brain]

Bernard?

Link no longer good

But just to note:
I had that experience with one of
the generic anti-epileptic drug, and I never had such
before, and it freaked the crappyola out
of me! I didn't know what it was and I
thought I was "separating myself" and
did not know how to put myself back
together. A Nurse stated it was called
'depersonalization' and we went through
the medications and the generic that I
was on was notorious for having that type
of reaction - unfortunately, so she called
Eckerds (defunct) and they got the other
generic (their brand) at no charge if I would
come in and they would replace whatever I
had left.

Then years later again with a different brand
of Zonisamide (Generic) and it was even worse!
Now I'm with the brand name and it's working.

[Bernard]

Wow that was fast. The article was there just last night. No problem, I changed the link to a different newspaper. The article was syndicated from The New York Times, so you can find it in many places by searching for a sentence of the text I quoted above.