My experiences with the temporal lobes of the brain started when I was seven years old. While living in a Catholic orphanage, I came down with temporal lobe epilepsy. Finding myself living in that place, which otherwise was a very good home for children, created a lot of stress, and I think , triggered the disorder.
I was not an orphan, though. The circumstances of my parents' divorce had placed my brothers and I there. We still had a family, and we visited them whenever we could.
One Sunday evening, sitting in my grandmother's dining room, eating vanilla ice cream, I suddenly left my body. I floated just below the ceiling and looked down on my brothers and my father all having their ice-cream. I was completely terrified. I now know that I was feeling fear because the "fear center" in my brain was involved in the process. During the seizure, my thoughts filled the gap. I was very sure that something was wrong with being out of my body. Actually, I was afraid that I would get punished somehow. My upbringing was Catholic; fairly traditional, and nowhere in the Catholic dogma I had learned was there any talk of out-of-body experiences. I felt very sure that out-of- body experiences were not allowed, and if you got caught having one, you'd get in trouble.
So there I was, floating beneath the ceiling, terrified, and wanting nothing more than to get back into my body. I don't know how I did it, but somehow I "willed" myself back into my body. But the seizure was more forceful than I was, and I couldn't stay there. As I remember this experience, which was the most powerful out of body experience I had, I spent some time being in my body and out of it at the same time. Since then, I've read about other experiences like this. But at the time, I thought I was the only one.
I didn't have a lot of out-of- body experiences, but there was another experience that I did have often, and I remember being sure that they happened every single night. I told an adult that I didn't sleep at night, but they refused to believe me.
What would happen was that I wake up in the middle of the night with a feeling that everything was very dense and heavy. I was amazed and frightened at my own strength at being able, say, to move my arm. I laid absolutely still, afraid to use my own body. With my eyes open, I experienced macropsia. Macropsia is a visual illusion that everything around you is very large and very far away. When my eyes were closed, I seemed to be looking into an infinite space. At the center of the space, and unimaginable distance away, there was a point of light. And absolutely brilliant, incredibly powerful light. Its presence before me seemed to have a tremendously emphatic quality; as if it were shouting something at me. I had a strong sense that it was trying to say something very specific. And, whatever it was, I did not want to hear it. I actually has a strong feeling wanted to kill me. Now I know that it was quite a valid perception. That infinite space, and the light that I was seeing, both happen in the near-death-experiences. My intimation that it had something to do with dying was actually quite accurate.
I experienced other strange things during my seizures, but nothing else with quite so much impact. I felt strange electric buzzes and tingles running through my body and a very-difficult-to-describe sense that the inside of my body was white. The word refers to a color, but this was not a visual experience. I "felt" white on the inside. As though it were a sound I was 'seeing'.
More/Source
