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Comment by m_fayer | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating. I experienced something very similar as a kid, with huge grey spheres in a black void. They felt implacable, indifferent, yet malicious. And I had a sense of futility and utter insufficiency.

I also experienced these feelings later on psychedelics and in some other circumstances of adult duress.

I really do wonder what to make of the similarities.

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There’s a very reassuring feeling I’m having right now seeing so many people write about the same kinds of sensation.

Insufficiency. Futility. Infinitesimally unlikely. HAD to. Indifferent, malicious. Having to move things in a way that conflicted with the established physics of the situation.

Count me in the camp of people experiencing this, I associate it with childhood fever dreams. And much later, I encountered the exact same feeling through psychedelic experimenting. Never knew it was such a common experience either, and as you say it's very reassuring.

Also count me in. Excited to see others with the same experience.

I got to the point of rationalizing this as actually being some kind of memory of being born / memory of that trauma. The lack of all proportion to the sensation, along with the incredible stakes, feeling of pressure (literal and figurative) etc…

I've also wondered before if it was somehow related to the trauma of childbirth...not a memory per se, but a trauma imprint. But who knows...

So interesting reading all these reports of the same type of thing!

I’m incredibly skeptical of psychology nutty stuff like this but I’ll add that my brain immediately considered some sort of common trauma like being born.

I wonder if this is a universal feeling that everyone experiences at some point. I feel like it's most common as a child (from reading other's experiences) and may have something to do with the developing brain.

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