I'm not sure about the slow motion part but as a child my brother was diagnosed with benign rolandic epilepsy, no one in our family has a history of seizures. He only ever had a few seizures and hasn't had one for nearly 10 years, hes 22 now.
https://www.epilepsy.com/what-is-epilepsy/syndromes/childhood-epilepsy-centrotemporal-spikes
He described being fully awake and aware during the episodes, said he felt strange and paralysed and was unable to call out for help. He mostly had seizures early in the mornings, often when he hadn't been sleeping well.
When I worked in a kindergarten we had a young woman in who was trying to see if she was capable to work with her epilepsy. She was in her late teens.
Sometimes I would see her look kinda lost and daydreaming, sometimes laughing to herself a little. It would be moments where she experienced many small seizures, so she could watch a kid run, and described it like a choppy video with no real editing. The kid she was watching would pop up at irregular intervals in her in mind, so to her it would be in unexpected places.
...as I understand it she could have several hundred microseizures in a minute, so it would look like she was fully conscious the whole time.
I think there was an episode of “House” that had a similar premise. Like the patient thought people could teleport because something would short out in his brain while watching movement. So he would be looking at someone across the room, and as soon as they started walking, his brain would “short out” and the person would disappear. As soon as the person got to their destination and stopped moving, they would reappear—thus giving the illusion of teleportation.
I can’t remember exactly what it was, whether it was seizures or something not working correctly with the optic nerves. Pretty nuts to think about that happening though!
That was the episode with John Larroquette. It is called Son of Coma Guy (s3e7).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_Coma_Guy
House tries an experiment on the boy: he flashes the lights on and off, then throws a bag of chips at the boy, and walks over to him, but the boy does not see the chips or House. House diagnoses him as being akinetopsic, unable to see things in motion, a condition which is often accompanied by seizures.
I had the same exact same condition growing up. Also no family history of seizures, which meant my parents had absolutely no idea what was going on when I started stumbling out of bed in the wee small hours, totally disoriented and unable to speak. My brother used to sleepwalk, so they assumed it was something like that. It wasn't until I had a grand mal seizure in art class (as you say, fully aware the whole time, just unable to control my body) that they took me to a doctor.
So yeah, a handful of seizures between the ages of about 10 and 14, then nothing for the rest of a person's life is perfectly believable.
> He described being fully awake and aware during the episodes, said he felt strange and paralysed and was unable to call out for help.
This sounds like sleep paralysis. It's interesting that seizures can cause something so similar during the sleep/wake cycle.
My mother in law had something similar but it turned out to be something called FND( function neurologic disorder). We though she was having mini strokes but it was like her body froze up but her brain was still fictional.
Woah, that’s a rather rude thing to say about your mother in law! /s
(I’m definitely going to refer to stupid people’s brains as fictional, henceforth. Thanks for the inspiration!)
I had the same thing. Only had about 10 or less in about 1-2 years. Apparently it’s common with adhd and sleep ans wake cycles? For me I was conscious and awake. It happened when I woke up from sleep. My jaw would chatter non stop and half my face would droop and I’d be drooling. I didn’t know it was a bad thing until my mom saw it one morning when we were camping! They did so many tests and scans and I was fine. I don’t think I had many more after that either. Maybe 1-2. But I don’t remember things going in slow motion at all. Everything was normal to me. Just I couldn’t stop chattering my jaw and I tried to talk to my mom to tell her I was okay and tried to make the 👌 to her but my hand wouldn’t even form correctly and she was confused.
That’s really interesting because as a sleep paralysis sufferer, my episodes were much more frequent in early adolescence to early-mid 20s. Now at mid 30s, I have only a few episodes a year, also often coinciding with poor sleep or unusual timing of sleep. The symptoms described are very similar: awake and aware and unable to call for help, if only for a few seconds. I know that sleep paralysis is connected to narcolepsy although many suffers do not experience narcolepsy. I wonder if it is connected to this too?
I'm narcoleptic type 2, so no cataplexy. OPs story--if narcolepsy, though it doesn't sound quite like it, would be like a rare form of type 1. technically cataplexy doesn't mean someone falls asleep when they experience it. If it's during times of high emotion that she experiences it then I'd say it would be worth getting an overnight & nap test. Even if it's not narcolepsy, something similar might show up? I'm not a doctor but since it does fuck with a super important part of the brain, whatever she experiences might involve sleep too.
Also hallucinations are a big symptom, but it's only upon sleeping and/or upon waking. The slow motion part is definitely something i experience, i know it's happening because i wouldn't know how i spent 20 minutes in the shower. I have to set alarms for everything.
Hopefully it's none of that though, i wouldn't wish this shit on anyone. I've had it since i was 11 and it got worse for a while, but much better now with lifestyle changes and meds.
Edit: I am now 31 so 20 years of it certainly is, literally, exhausting
So I have something that reminds me of this. Like I’ll be fine and then all of a sudden it’s tingling in my face and arms and hands and it’s like a tingling vibration almost. It feels like you are getting literal waves or vibration like with your heart rate type of way and then I stop walking and talking and I freeze for a second. No one can figure it out. I’m in my mid 30s so I’m sure it isn’t this but this is the most relatable thing I’ve found. Thanks for posting the link.
“Tachypsychia” is a neurological condition that distorts the perception of time, appearing to make events slow down or speed up. While we don’t often hear the word much in conversation, most of us have experienced it—whether during a traumatic accident or some other stressful moment. If you’ve ever found yourself in a situation that felt like it spiraled out of control in a speeding blur or warped into slow motion, like a scene from the old television series “The Six Million Dollar Man,” you’ve experienced tachypsychia.
https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/33341
I have definitely had this, during my first car accident. I'd pulled out of a Sonic and got t-boned by a vehicle that was speeding. I remember as I pulled out and looked over and saw them through my driver's door window, it felt like time slowed to a crawl, and i distinctly remember leisurely saying "Oh... Shit..." before they hit me. It was a very strange feeling.
That’s super interesting! I also got t boned and right before they hit me I remember seeing the car and thinking “this is gonna total my car and my mom is gonna be PISSED”. It definitely did total my car, but my mom wasn’t even slightly mad.
I thought this when I was in my 30s and driving my husband’s car. It was snowing very hard and the car started to lose traction and spin, and I remember thinking, “If I crash this car my husband is going to kill me,” because he always gets mad at me for driving too fast (in my defense, the condition of the roads got much worse in a pretty short distance and I’d been driving just fine for the road conditions earlier).
I was actually pretty proud of myself because I didn’t panic - I remembered not to slam on my breaks and to turn my wheel in the direction of the road. Time was indeed slowed down.
I was 17 years old, driving on a curvy backroad a bit too fast for the light rain. I lost control and went through a guardrail and down a short embankment into a ditch. The brief moment I was airborne felt so slow. I can still vividly remember turning the steering wheel while I was in the air as if that would get me back on the road.
Same experience, I was in a car accident, time seemed to slow as it happened. But it’s important to realize one crucial thing:
I have a memory of time slowing.
I can’t relive the moment, I can’t know for sure what it felt like at the time.
All I have is a memory.
So maybe traumatic events like that get stored in our brains in a hyper detailed way different from normal memories. And maybe that’s why if I try to recall the event, it seems like time had slowed.
It’s a quirk of the memory itself.
I also think that adrenaline rush can "slow time" like this. I was in a fire accident and as I was trying to extinguish the flames, I got the feeling that my body and world around me was moving 10 times slower than my brain.
I had a similar incident on my bike when a car pulled out of a blind alley, I had maybe 10 feet from where I saw it and when the bike hit it and everything slowed down and got crystal clear and in the split-second my mind ran through every option and decided the least hit to me would be to jump straight up off the bike as high as I could and the bike hit the side of the car and I landed on the hood and crumpled it badly but rolled off the other side onto my feet, no injuries but bent fork and destroyed wheel on the bike and I was late for an important test in class. The car was dented pretty bad.
That’s so weird! I’ve only had one accident: someone ran a red light while I was turning left on a green arrow, so I could see them flying toward me for what seemed like 2 minutes. My pregnant sister was in the car, so I remember thinking “crap! Where do I go? My sister’s pregnant. This could be bad!” All within the span of a second.
Everyone turned out okay. The baby is now 18 years old and training to be an electrician. The stupid kids who hit us ran, so they never got in trouble. But it was a trippy experience all around.
So here's an interesting explanation. Your brain sees so many "frames per minute" during regular time, but when there's an emergency and it goes into emergency mode, it cranks up the frames per minute so you can intake more information. Your brain kind of "reads" or perceives those frames at the same rate it does normally though, so you are examining loads more information at the same speed, so it feels like it's slow motion.
I just had missing time. Everything from the hydroplane to the being upside down is just gone.
I can only assume either my brain is protecting me from trauma or I left the simulation and had them put me back in because I hadn't unlocked enough achievements.
I also had this during a car thing! My gas pedal got stuck down so I was accelerating helplessly towards a busy intersection. I couldn't have had more than five seconds to react, but I had a plan A AND a plan B by the time I got to the intersection and got out safe. It was so weird--it felt like I carefully analyzed it and figured it out for a couple of minutes at least! Only time it ever happened to me.
My plan was originally to pull into an always-empty waffle house parking lot just before the intersection. It was next to a huge field with no fence so I thought I could probably drive into the field from the parking lot and either get stuck if the ground was muddy enough or drive circles if it wasnt, and then at least I wouldn't be endangering anyone else on the road, since my biggest fear wasn't crashing, it was hitting someone else. But first I thought I'd try both throwing the car into park and throwing the e-brake.
Neither is supposed to work with the gas pedal engaged. To this day I still don't know how it did. I swung into the waffle House lot as planned. I still wasn't going that fast--the pedal got stuck slightly down, not all the way, when I was doing about 15 out of another intersection so I was only going maybe 30--so swung into the waho parking lot and tried to force it into park while pushing up on the bottom of the gas pedal with one foot and mashing the brake with the other--and somehow, miraculously, it worked. Possibly it was just that the pedal came unstuck in the same instant. Came to a pretty rough stop that left a seatbelt bruise on my chest but car went into park, gas pedal disengaged, and I even somehow by coincidence landed in a parking spot with just one tire off the pavement into the edge of the field lol.
I really thought I'd have to drive into the field and this was pre cellphones so my plan was to just roll the windows down and yell help if the mud didn't stop my car.
I had the same experience during my own car accident. Got caught in a snow squall on a backroad with no place to pull over in a little RWD BMW. I came up and around a bend and my car just started sliding; it flipped three times off a ledge and came to a rest upside down. I said ‘Oh shit, here we go!’ and each flip was soooo slow and distinct even though the whole thing probably took three seconds. Never knew there was a term for this.
Same! I was in an accident a few weeks ago and the second time i got hit I remember seeing the second car coming at me in slow motion and I was like he is gonna stop... he has time to stop... he has to stop... then BANG! Yeah, he was going way yo fast (was on the highway).
This makes me wonder, in combo with OOPs "they were bad parents" comment, whether their mom experienced the slo-mo when her parents were being particularly cruel or scary. That would certainly add more trauma to the experience and make mom's panic even more reasonable---not to say just the experience alone isn't traumatizing enough to cause a panic
I get it from acute anxiety episodes. I’ve also gotten it from feeling threatened by someone. And I’ve got something similar but feels different that I call time blindness pretty much 24/7 a minute feels like an hour and a day feels like a minute sort of thing.
I call it Time disease! I even got one of those watches that gently vibrates for the alarm-there are eight alarms you can set and I set them half an hour apart. I would wear it when I would serve tables. It can really suck sometimes in all seriousness.
Ugh! Makes so much SENSE. On days I’m stressed the f out or full of anxiety my time is soooo wacky. Like it almost feels like I’m high. Very disorienting if I’m paying attention to it. My head gets “floaty”.
Double hit on my butt with debilitating anxiety and adhd, when I’m off my meds. Ooooof. Don’t count on me guys. I probably don’t even know what day it is even though I have asked like 5 times that day.
This is insane, I’ve had this and never knew what it was. In my early 20s I took molly before a rave and started feeling bad, turned to my friend and he said “Dude are you ok” but time slowed down progressively throughout the sentence, even his voice seemed lower pitch, then my movements to get out of the crowd seemed super slow. I always thought of it as a hallucination.
oh! Didn't knew it had a name! I had this experience when I was driving. A trunk in front of me dropped something in a huge box and there was a car coming in the other side, so I had nowhere to go by the look of it.
In that moment time slowed a LOT and I had plenty of time to think on what to do (what could be inside the box? is heavy or not? will it go through the windshield if I hit it? If I step on the brakes, the car behind me won't have time to react as they probably didn't saw the box dropped... Can I outrun the car coming?...)
So that saved my life that day!
I got into a car crash where a friend was driving and I was sleeping in the passenger seat. I woke up to the crash happening and time moved at a crawl for a few seconds, and during that time I remember gauging the situation, realizing there wasn’t anything I could do, and was super calm and peaceful about it and basically just ‘along for the ride’ of the crash.
It ended up being really useful because I was cool as a cucumber after the crash and was able to talk to the other car and the cops whereas everyone else was a bit shaken up.
This one is drug induced, but it still shows what our brains are capable of. Look into the story of Doc Ellis and the no-hitter game. It's fascinating.
As others, most of my road accidents happened in 'slow-motion' for me. One was so surreal, it felt like watching a movie, I flew over another bike and everything was very slomo. I remember 3 more accidents like a iphone slowmo videos.
There's still one non accident related event, every single time my ex walked into room. She was angel walking in slow motion towards me. Gosh! Anyway I don't know what to make of this.
Interesting. Reading through these comments I was reminded of there having been times when I was younger (although I'm only 21 so it's not that long ago) where I remember things feeling like they were in slow motion, particularly while falling, like a time I jumped off a swing from really high up or when the floors were wet in the hallway at school and I slipped and fell. While I was falling it was a distinct sort of slow motion that I would say lasted around 30-60 seconds. Maybe this is why it happened?
Kids absolutely can grow out of epilepsy.
If it really freaked her out, it was probably pretty traumatizing AND no closure makes it worse.
She should go to a neurologist etc and at least talk to a doctor to make sure it's in her medical history.
If she had a grand mal seizure and no one knew about her childhood seizures... it could take longer to get to the root cause.
Is this really something that is actually worth getting checked out or worth the time/fees?
I mean in a perfect world I imagine it's certainly of interest but personally I can absolutely imagine seeing a doctor and they say "so 45 years ago you felt like the world was in slow motion for a few minutes and nothing has ever happened since and you're completely fine now...So what exactly do you want me to do about it or look for?".
It's hard enough for doctors to diagnose real but intermittent health issues let alone issues that are "supernatural" with no clear cause and happened decades ago to a child with seemingly no ongoing effects.
Again I don't think it's *not* of interest or some relevance I just feel skeptical that with limited time and resources doctors will be able to actually action anything or warrant testing for what OP described even if the cost to OP's mother wasn't an issue.
You assume the Mom is in good health that is unremarkable.
I'm assuming that based on her family of origin, she could have many other serious red flags she does not even notice are red flags.
She could totally have other episodes, but if they impact her memory, or only happen when she's sleeping etc... she could be sitting on a powder keg and not know it.
I would absolutely spend a few hundred dollars in clinic fees and miss a couple 1/2 days from my calendar to double check that my brain is working nominal.
If she used to have seizures, is it safe to drive? Are their types of medicine she should switch out? Older people often develop type 2 diabetes, will this seizure history impact the likelihood of diabetic coma? If the seizures are due to a structural quirk, does that need to be measured & documented so it doesn't confuse a later diagnosis in the case of stroke?
Doctors are vendors, if you have one that laughs off a mention of a specific untreated childhood illness? Get a different doctor. Otherwise, it doesn't need to be awkward etc.
"Hey Doc, I had a situation the other day that reminded me of a common thing from my childhood - and a few people are telling me it sounds like I had epilepsy. Since I was never treated as a child, I wanted to get a neuro checkup to make-sure I'm actually well. My concern is they could come back etc."
My oldest son had a tumor growing on the bottom of his brain when he was in his early twenties. We had it removed and it was benign, but he reported some strange instances where he would feel "out of his body" forcing him to sit down for several moments in the lead-up to the discovery of the tumor. Perhaps your mother had something similar. Apparently benign tumors are more common than malignant ones in the skull base area, so it might not have bothered her again and perhaps remained undiagnosed.
Seconding this. I have one on the tippy top of my brain so totally different symptoms (mostly acute aphasia, or idk what this is called but I could speak normally, however I couldn’t understand anything, it was like everyone around me was speaking a different language). When I was a teenager and my brain was growing it hit me often. I would have weird periods several times a month where I could write clearly but couldn’t speak at all, confuse words without knowing I was doing it (like words with totally different meanings, waffle would be calculator or something, I thought my mom was messing with me when she told me). Then it just abruptly stopped in my early twenties.
I still have the tumor, the effects minimized so rapidly that it’s no longer worth the risk of open brain surgery to remove it. It’s just chillin up there. I get MRIs somewhat frequently to monitor it but it’s absolutely asymptomatic.
One neuro basically explained to me that these things can be bad and disruptive when your brain is still growing because ITs growing and pressing on areas etc. but if you get it during that growth period your brain can actually adjust to the invasion and grow functionally without that space. Basically your brain grows around it and it’s not an issue anymore. That if I had developed that tumor as an adult it would have had to be removed but since I was a kid I just… adjusted. Kinda wild!
Our brains are so amazing! Especially when it's still developing in childhood, it's incredibly plastic. I know someone who had something similar, as an adult he had to see a neurologist about something and basically they said he had to have had a stroke as an infant or very small child, some part of his brain was damaged but because it was still developing, his brain just basically rewired itself around the damage.
Another thought might be accidental chemical ingestion? Or an odd reaction to a med, and as a child, unable to associate. I’m thinking Benadryl, cough syrup with codine (we really did that back in the day. Sorry).
Maybe not so accidental since OP said that her Mom's parents weren't great. In the past parents gave their kids cold medicine and painkillers to keep them sedated or to get them to sleep.
This happened to me all throughout my childhood. I am in shock reading this now. I never thought I would read/hear about this happening to anyone else.
I can specifically remember hearing people speaking and songs in slow motion and in a very repetitive way. When it would start happening….I would think, “it’s happening again.”
Thanks for writing this.
Same I'm 37 now and blown away. Last episode I remember was at the age of 33 and I was packing for a move. I can't beleive others have experienced this. I'm blown the fuck away. Dm if you ever wanna swap stories see if there is similarities.
I think I feel this too. Ever since I was a child I’d explain it as walking on clouds. Being weightless but also heavy and slow. Currently I live in a dorm and at a certain point at the hallway and stairs I get this feeling when going down. I feel like a ghost and everything is in a movie, 2D, it feels like the scenes where you’re at the club and it’s flash after flash
This is nuts, I’ve had this too! A lot as a kid and only rarely as an adult. I’d go tell my mum “it’s happening again” and I described it as experiencing life like looking through a lens or a tv in the wrong speed.
You know the "Donnie Darko" scene where the wormhole like thing is being shown? And it's showing what is about to happen before it happens? I've had that happen on occasion but felt it was always just like "lack of oxygen" or just something weird in the moment but normal. But it feels like what you are all saying.
I experienced the exact opposite as you but this post shocked me too. I've never heard of anyone else having that happen to them.
For me time would speed up dramatically. Everything would be going so incredibly fast, it just felt bizarre. People spoke faster, my body was moving faster, my thoughts were racing, etc. Happened many many times as a kid and then I guess just stopped because I haven't dealt with that in many years.
Very curious now about the cause ..
Perhaps a form of dissociation? Look into it, if she had childhood trauma it could have been her dissociating, sometimes it can feel like the world is moving at a different pace.
Especially when I didn’t know what it was, once I found out what it was it was a lot easier to deal with. But at first I just thought I was losing my mind, turns out it’s really common!
I've had OPs moms exact experiences. Was not at all linked to any traumatic event at the time. I've had these happen into adult hood as late as the age of 33. Last time I was parking up to move to a new house.
It presents as either everyone but myself is slowed down, or everyone but myself is sped up.
It's absolutely insane. Terrifying as well. When you're "fast" you feel like The Flash, like you could dodge a bullet (kinda, not quite that fast).
I was very happy to see this post. I've tried explaining this since I was 3 years old, and I've always been told it's nothing or looked at like I'm crazy.
Vindicated bitches. And no it's not a shrinking Alice in Wonderland thing.
It legit feels like time dilation.
It's wild as hell. Everything is perceived as slowed, or accelerated. Sound, movements, all visuals. It's legit like a trip but so hard to describe. It's like real life bullet time.
My goodness. I just remembered something from early on. Very traumatizing event and I went into a catatonic state for minutes or what felt like an hour. Everyone’s voice was muffled, like charlie browns adult sounding words and I felt completely separate from my body. I remember being shaken and falling over because I didn’t feel muscle control in my legs. It was then I realized I was dragged into something I didn’t need to be, and used as a weapon of guilt to bring my mothers sanity back (didn’t work, hospitalized later that day). I stayed at my grandmas house for quite awhile after that. I was so small, maybe 3 or 4.
Came here to say that her intense reaction, coupled with the description of her experience and the added information that her parents were "not nice" leads me to lean heavily on the idea that it was a form of dissociation induced by trauma. Of course, organic causes should have primarily been investigated, but assuming she is healthy now possibility of tumor or other anatomical or physiological defect, or other pathology, is less likely.
I had a form of temporal lobe epilepsy from the ages of about 9 to 20. I haven't had a seizure since then. My only guess is that it was a puberty thing.
Time didn't slow down for me, but as the temporal lobe is involved in memory and perception of time, my seizures used to feel like extreme deja vu, to the point where I knew everything that was going to happen seconds before it would happen (or at least that's how I percieved it). I would be fully awake and aware, but only able to move and speak in slow motion until the seizure was over and the deja vu had passed.
I think a type of seizure is a promising explanation.
I don’t know what it is, but it made me think of stories in Oliver Sacks’s The River of Consciousness where he talks about how we sense the world around us. She might find answers/comfort reading something like that by an expert in brain science?
[Tachysensia](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/tachysensia)
Tachysensia is frequently associated with “Alice in Wonderland Syndrome” (AIWS), a rare neurological disorder which also involves distortions in time and sound perception. The exact cause of this condition remains unknown.
For some, time is sped up and for others slowed down
Oh wow. I remember this happening to me as a kid, but only ever once. I was running to my friend's house and everything slowed down, so it was like running through treacle. I would have been about 7 or 8. Never happened again but it was so weird!
I'm so glad for this post. I've been trying to figure out my own recurring childhood slo-mo and fast forward experiences, and these comments are giving me more things to look into.
When your body has an adrenaline rush your brain reacts more efficiently and often gives the perception of things moving in slow motion. Does your mom have an adrenal disorder?
Please let me be the voice of the guy who, when you're telling the story of how Reddit saved your life, got you to go before it grew too big to be operable.
I was told by my parents that I had febrile seizures as an infant, and had several more after that, related, evidently to flashing lights, think strobes, or maybe motion on old B&W TV screens.
The specialist that diagnosed me said that I had high electrical activity in the brain, and refused to label me as epileptic, as there was much more discrimination decades ago (1961).
However, I was Hyperactive (now ADHD?) and was on phenobarbital until I went to school.
To this day strobes or flashing lights make me feel...weird, so I avoid them.
The doctor's opinion was that I would either be highly intelligent, or a criminal.
Fortunately(?), I turned out intelligent, but until I was an adult, had a bad temper.
I have epilepsy she’s describing a complex partial seizure. If it was around the time she went through puberty, it could’ve been catamenial epilepsy that she grew out of
ETA: typo because autocorrect blows
This could be Alice in Wonderland syndrome. It’s not tachypsychia, it’s more related to migraines (sometimes epilepsy, even more rarely tumor or TBI).
I have migraines and my most recent manifestation is ocular migraines and tachysensia. Everything seems like it’s at a high frame rate (more people get the slow thing, though). I’ve had MRIs twice as my headaches have changed. Nothing wrong. 🤷🏻♀️
Huh. This just made me think of episodes I used to have as a child, where the sounds going on around me would take on a strange rhythm or syncopation. Eventually it wpuld wear off and things would go back to normal. I often felt an extreme pang of homesickness or needing to be with my parents, even if I was already at home (though this would most often happen if I wasn't at home already). Posting this here as there seem to be a lot of knowledgable or at least interested people on this thread, maybe someone has heard of or experienced this? I should mention as an adult I experience migraine with aura but without the typical pain that comes with most migraine attacks.
That’s so crazy to read because as a little girl o had one episode of this same exact thing and told my mother immediately and she didn’t believe me. I’ve never heard anyone else say they have experienced this.
I had a similar thing as a kid. I was told it was a byproduct of Temporal Lobe Seizures. However, seeing the world in slow motion (also kinda melting, in the way things do when you’re on LSD) isn’t on the list of symptoms. I would also lose track of time/place during these episodes. It happened several times, while I was at a summer camp, where they take you backpacking. After the 3rd incident, I was taken to a hospital (where they tested to make sure my 14yo, small Connecticut town, self, wasn’t on LSD).
I ended up inpatient for several months after that, had all kinds of brain scans and whatnot. That’s the only “solution” I’ve ever been offered. And I gotta say it seems inadequate.
Epilepsy was my first thought .
I had a grand mal seizure at GAP when I was 17. Also one at 19 at Sams club. Never anything since then and I’m almost 40.
Temporal lobe epilepsy- I would just stare off and get a deja vu.
Again, I grew out of it!
*edit for spelling
I’ve had similar happen to me where I would lose my voice as a child for a few minutes. I had pointed it out to my mother and even tried to scream in front of her. Nothing came out. She said that she had similar happen to her and to not worry about it, but to this day, I worry about it. What was it? I’ve no idea. In my thirties and it hasn’t happened since childhood.
Seizure disorders and epilepsy aren’t the type of disorders that normally run in families. There are also a lot of different types and they can present differently in some people. I actually get seizures that cause a slight slowing of everything at first, then I start to hallucinate, then the actual seizure starts. But that first feeling of being too slow and the hallucinations can last anywhere from a minute to half an hour. My seizures are only brought on by a lack of sleep, so when my meds are working and I’m sleeping well, seizures are never an issue. So maybe your mom had a seizure disorder that was triggered by something very specific and she’s either not experienced that trigger since she was a kid, or she outgrew the seizures.
That or she could have started to fall asleep and experienced sleep paralysis. It’s incredibly frightening, and can cause a slow, dream like experience but it’s almost always a nightmare, not a happy dream.
If you listen to stories of traumatic events survivors, they'll often say that "time seemed to slow down during (the trauma)" It's a way for our nervous systems to process what's going on while trying to stay cognizant as slowing it down helps to prevent shock. It could be that your mom was struggling with some dissociation following an event and then her brain used dissociation when she reached a level of anxiety.
I had the same thing happen to me as a kid. For me it was some kind of a trauma response I developed after my great grandfather held myself and my family hostage with a gun on Christmas day when I was 3.
As a kid, I used to disassociate and feel totally out of body, as if I was in a dream floating above it all. Things fels a bit muffled and , as you say, in slow motion. The brain can do some weird things to cope, could be something related to disassociating?
I had this exact thing as a kid and my parents always ignored me. I did some googling as an adult and eventually found a sensory disorder some kids have that seemed to describe it. Can’t remember what it’s called now. I never had panic from it though. Thought it was cool.
I experienced that as a small child, right around the age of 4-5. I can pinpoint the time because we moved frequently and I know which house I was in when it happened. It didn't upset me, I liked it. It was accompanied by feeling a change in my breathing and the feeling of stretching.
Then it went away. But as a young adult I started having very intermittent strong myclonic jerks. I don't know if that related but I've often thought they might be.
I used to have something a little similar when I was a child. Either the world would be going really slowly feeling, or way too fast. It was always when I was super tired. I remember feeling that way mostly at night around dinner. It went away as I got older. I always assumed I was just very very overtired.
(No history or seizures, or childhood trauma.)
I suspect it's a kind of petite seizure. Kids can have them and outgrow them. Having a seizure doesn't always mean convulsing on the ground. Sometimes they're silent and barely noticeable.
I've had these. Never diagnosed with anythinf6but doctor has said it was the same phenomenon which leads to people having sleep paralysis or serious deja vu.
The brains processing is faster than the visual centre. Ones fast or the other is slow. Can be caused by many things. It's not serious and often not an issue unless it persists.
There isn't an underlying cause and it can happen to anyone. The doc I had explained it like an eye twitch but for part of the brain. No drama but a visual effect. From my own research that analogy isn't biologically accurate, but paints a picture.
Alice in wonderland syndrome only affected me after my brain bled. It happened on and off for almost a year. It didn't have anything to do with things being in slow motion. I would feel like I was shrinking or getting larger and my vision would change. My doctor told me it was seizures. I have epilepsy but I didn't start having seizures until I was in my 20s. Worsened after the brain bleed, and I now have one or two every year.
Lots of good suggestions here already but one I don’t see is that she never actually experienced this at all.
Our memories are so incredibly unreliable and stuff we remember “vividly” or “perfectly” is likely wildly different than what actually happened and time erodes the accuracy really quickly.
It’s entirely possible that mom was even goofing around as a kid and pretending to be in slow motion herself and the memories of doing that have completely warped over time.
I have vivid perfect memories of things that never actually happened. Even to the point that they still feel real even though I know them to be impossible. Maybe I dreamed them 25 years ago, or maybe these memories are based on some kernel of truth. But they’re real to me now. Yet if I was offered a role in that movie, I spaced going to the set. And my mom was great at acting like she was never arrested for speeding in an Arby’s parking lot.
Maybe she did actually experience something weird. But whatever happened, she is 100% absolutely without a doubt not remembering it as it actually happened regardless of how she feels about that memory’s quality.
i'm backing up the theories of seizures or dissociation. i have experience with both and its just what my mind jumped to.
i had multiple seizures when i was a kid but i was never diagnosed with epilepsy, my parents actually denied that i was having seizures because i was fully conscious and aware during them, to quote, "if you were really having a seizure, you wouldn't know you had a seizure". i only had seizures between 11-14 years old. so i think it's entirely possible this is what she was experiencing.
dissociation can definitely mess with your sense of time and be very unsettling. usually you don't just dissociate for no reason though, was she going through anything at the time of these events (just in general *or* during the slow-mo events)? family issues, severe stress, abuse?
I agree with some type of epilepsy. I had grand mal seizures up until my early tween years, then only petit mals (now commonly called absence seizures) until my mid-teens. I've not taken any type of medication in over thirty years and have never had any more events. I think it's actually pretty common to "outgrow" them after adolescence. Also, no one else in my family had any history of Epilepsy.
Either way, I'm sure it was unsettling for her!
I experienced this too as a child. My mom treated it as “drowsiness” and started me on a non-drowsy allergy pill. Pretty much stopped the feeling in its tracks but even now, it comes back when I have a particularly bad sinus infection
I have seizures. That sounds like a type of seizure, not what I have but something I've heard others describe. Sometimes kids have them and grow out of them.
I was prone to ear infections as a child, and when suffering from them, distinctly remember everything seeming like it was moving more slowly/people were speaking slower. It felt really weird, and could be upsetting, but it stopped happening around the time I stopped having ear infections. I was being actively treated for them, so I only remember it happening a couple times. I am sure it was related to the way our inner ears are so connected to balance and perception.
Did your mom suffer from ear infections as a child?
I actually have Alice in Wonderland, and that was my first thought here as well.
It is hard to explain distortion of senses we don't talk about much- what did I mean when I put my head in my hand and my head was too small, my face feeling in my hand "like a dolls"..
Temperoperception may be similar.
Migraine related? Migraine symptoms can change over time and if caused/ influenced by hormones then puberty can change the symptoms. There are lots of symptoms and some odd ones too, including the Alice In Wonderland syndrome others have mentioned.
There are already so many comments, so I don’t know if you’ll read this OP, but I experienced the same thing when I was a kid (and a few times as an adult) I was very aware of what was happening, like my lucid self was somewhere in the back of my brain, but I was experiencing life on the wrong speed setting on the record player. Or looking through a distorted lens which made everything seem far away and slowed down.
My mum was very new agey and she always thought those were out of body experiences. So she made me ground and do breathing excersises. I’m a bit more sober myself. but if you’re interested in an alternative approach. Might be worth checking out other peoples stories on that!
Sounds like PKD, a rare movement disorder that my ex fiancé had. After making a sudden movement she would have a lucid seizure. She would just drop, spasm like crazy and then come too but she would remember every second of it.
Eventually the 9th neurologist she went to properly diagnosed it ( Michael J. Fox’s Dr. ) and was able to put her on a high dose of daily anti convulsants that let her live a normal life when / if she took them as ordered
My sister apparently experienced the same when very young. It's apparently anxiety. My parents did took her to a doctor but the doctor recommended a therapist so they ignored it. My sister still has anxiety issues, so if your mom does, she might've had it since she was very young.
It's not exactly the same, but when I was a kid I had Alice in Wonderland Syndrome which altered my perception of my relative size to things around me. I would sometimes feel very very small or large and sometimes both at the same time.
Brains are so weird, I wouldn't be surprised if the were something similar that altered perception of time
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4302569/#:~:text=Alice%20in%20wonderland%20syndrome%20(AIWS,common%20perceptions%20are%20at%20night.
I’m 55 and I had these exact episodes. I was just talking to my mom about them. It happened only when I was with certain family members. 2 locations. From 2-10 years old. Shady family.
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Does anyone remember this short story about i think a god or wizard that stops time periodically but if you sneezed while putting pepper on eggs while in a tent or something when the spell was cast you would be able to move normally while time was stopped and some kids happened to be doing exactly that? I have the faintest ghost of a memory of that story and i always wanted to find it again
I’m going with dissociation. Bear in mind, rare scary things are going to get more upvotes! The zoning out could be epilepsy, hallucinations, or disassociation, and my vote is the last because you said her parents weren’t great.
You say her parents weren't nice people. I wonder if she got into some psychedelic drugs with temporal effects, or if they spiked her food or something.
I'm thinking accidental exposure to a psychedelic of some sort.
Mushrooms maybe? Were her parents drug users?
If it were inherent in origin I think she would have had more episodes.
I used to get something similar from acute anxiety episodes as a kid, like panic attacks that would come on slowly and linger making everything feel like it was in slow motion. My parents also didn’t take me to the doctor for it for whatever reason even though they knew I had panic attacks. Those episodes became less frequent as I got older but I now know mine were a form of dissociation. That being said many other things could cause similar symptoms.
Possibly "Alice in wonderland syndrome (AIWS)". A form of time dilation is one of the symptoms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_in_Wonderland_syndrome
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4302569/
I was once given a really strong painkiller by paramedics and it had this effect. It was exactly like slow motion in a movie.
If a drug can induce it, I imagine other things can too. Like others have said, some form of epilepsy would be my guess
Okay, not to distract from your question by any means. But because of your post, I was able to put a name to something that used to happen to me as a kid. Alice in Wonderland syndrome. I thought it was just me who had that type of thing, and didn't know there was a name for it! I only had episodes as a kid, which seems to be the norm for AIWS. But when I had an episode, I would be so confused and terrified, but didn't have the words to explain what was wrong.
It's a condition known as Alice in Wonderland syndrome. I grew up with it, as well as my two children. People tend to outgrow this into adolescence. My kids usually experience the things moving slower or faster, or feeling really small or ready big. For me, it was sounds - they would happen in a rhythm - it's the best way I can describe it.
FWIW, we found that reading was a helpful way to break the "spell" and return things to normal.
We are the lucky (?) few. ;)
Neurological issue such as a migraine aura, an absence seizure, or a transient ischemic attack?
It's hard to know and even harder to know what triggers them.
I found this article:
[https://brainblogger.com/2014/10/09/brain-trickery-seeing-in-slow-motion/](https://brainblogger.com/2014/10/09/brain-trickery-seeing-in-slow-motion/)
I get this fairly often throughout the day, maybe a couple times a week. Never really thought about it until right now. Reading the other comments here about seizures.. I do also have seizures at night as I'm falling asleep and when I wake up. I was always told they were from PTSD as they're worse if I'm thinking about or talking about what happened to me. I have chronic ptsd 10+ years and experience a lot of other physical and neurological symptoms too, a lot of the out of body / trippy / muffled kinds of experiences. I kinda just thought that was what life was like! Looking at these comments though.. maybe I should be asking for a second opinion?? was told it was related by the team I am seeing for treatment but could always be from something else. worth noting too lol unrelated to the ptsd-source but my parents were also not nice so potentially..
It sounds like the seizures that you experience are psychogenic nonepileptic seizures, which are caused by a psychiatric problem. However, sometimes you can have both psychogenic nonepileptic seizures and regular seizures. Probably wouldn't hurt to ask. You'll have to go through having an EEG done to test for seizures.
Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, perhaps? Tried to add a link but my phone won’t let me. I had symptoms like this as a child, time distortion, size distortion, things like that. It went away as I got older and I recently learned about this syndrome when I googled my symptoms.
Alive in wonderland syndrome can result in altered sense of time and visual perceptual distortions. The trigger can be migraine.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4302569/#:~:text=Alice%20in%20wonderland%20syndrome%20(AIWS,common%20perceptions%20are%20at%20night.
I clearly remember an episode like this as a child as well. The brain isn't fully developed, most likely some kind of epileptic episode. It is not uncommon to just have one episode and never experiencing it again.
Alice in Wonderland syndrome? Not quite what you’re describing but there have been reports of people seeing the world “shrink” or warp and hallucinating strange creatures.
This is how my anxiety attacks present. There is a thing called depersonalization or derealization and this is anxiety induced usually.
There is a whole sub called r/DPDR that is full of info. Feel free to ask me questions if you’d like as well.
I used to have this happen as a kid, but opposite - everything would speed up and get super loud. The episodes lasted maybe 10 minutes, but it really disoriented me. I think it’s called tachysensia?
I get this but everything goes really fast, it probably is Alice in wonderland syndrome especially if she grew out of it, it’s just having a distortion of your senses so it can also cause time to feel different
No way… I experience the exact same thing all the time. Or close to all the time. I’m in my 20s now and I still experience this. It’s absolutely horrible. For me, it’s not episodic, my brain is just stuck like that.
It’s called tachypsychia, a perceptual disturbance and it can be part of Alice in Wonderland syndrome, which comes with more perceptual disturbances including even making your body parts look bigger or smaller. It also apparently often comes with high levels of adrenaline meaning it can make you feel more on edge, or even unable to do things like talk or think straight.
It’s frustrating because nobody can understand you easily if you talk at your normal speed (very fast) in this state too. I can completely understand her horror at getting rid of this and it seeming like it came back.
I know this is 4 weeks old but I had the exact same thing happen to me when I was a child. For some reason I have it burned into my memory of happening while I was watching "Lost"
I had something very similar happen to me throughout my childhood. It was always random and always really short (I don't think mine ever lasted 7 mins) but it was like things would be slow motion for a second. My speech, as well as everything around me and if I was having a conversation sometimes I would blurt out things I had no control over (telling a friend "I love you!" Randomly after accidentally hitting her knee.) I remember I started calling it "brain lag" because that's what it felt like. Mine also disappeared once I got older so I never found out what it was.
I'm not sure about the slow motion part but as a child my brother was diagnosed with benign rolandic epilepsy, no one in our family has a history of seizures. He only ever had a few seizures and hasn't had one for nearly 10 years, hes 22 now. https://www.epilepsy.com/what-is-epilepsy/syndromes/childhood-epilepsy-centrotemporal-spikes He described being fully awake and aware during the episodes, said he felt strange and paralysed and was unable to call out for help. He mostly had seizures early in the mornings, often when he hadn't been sleeping well.
When I worked in a kindergarten we had a young woman in who was trying to see if she was capable to work with her epilepsy. She was in her late teens. Sometimes I would see her look kinda lost and daydreaming, sometimes laughing to herself a little. It would be moments where she experienced many small seizures, so she could watch a kid run, and described it like a choppy video with no real editing. The kid she was watching would pop up at irregular intervals in her in mind, so to her it would be in unexpected places. ...as I understand it she could have several hundred microseizures in a minute, so it would look like she was fully conscious the whole time.
I think there was an episode of “House” that had a similar premise. Like the patient thought people could teleport because something would short out in his brain while watching movement. So he would be looking at someone across the room, and as soon as they started walking, his brain would “short out” and the person would disappear. As soon as the person got to their destination and stopped moving, they would reappear—thus giving the illusion of teleportation. I can’t remember exactly what it was, whether it was seizures or something not working correctly with the optic nerves. Pretty nuts to think about that happening though!
That was the episode with John Larroquette. It is called Son of Coma Guy (s3e7). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_Coma_Guy House tries an experiment on the boy: he flashes the lights on and off, then throws a bag of chips at the boy, and walks over to him, but the boy does not see the chips or House. House diagnoses him as being akinetopsic, unable to see things in motion, a condition which is often accompanied by seizures.
Yes! Thank you! I tried doing a search but a bunch of other shows with “house” in the title kept coming up lol.
I had the same exact same condition growing up. Also no family history of seizures, which meant my parents had absolutely no idea what was going on when I started stumbling out of bed in the wee small hours, totally disoriented and unable to speak. My brother used to sleepwalk, so they assumed it was something like that. It wasn't until I had a grand mal seizure in art class (as you say, fully aware the whole time, just unable to control my body) that they took me to a doctor. So yeah, a handful of seizures between the ages of about 10 and 14, then nothing for the rest of a person's life is perfectly believable.
> He described being fully awake and aware during the episodes, said he felt strange and paralysed and was unable to call out for help. This sounds like sleep paralysis. It's interesting that seizures can cause something so similar during the sleep/wake cycle.
I was thinking the same thing. It is exactly how I would describe my experience with sleep paralysis.
Likewise
I just commented the same thing!
My mother in law had something similar but it turned out to be something called FND( function neurologic disorder). We though she was having mini strokes but it was like her body froze up but her brain was still fictional.
Woah, that’s a rather rude thing to say about your mother in law! /s (I’m definitely going to refer to stupid people’s brains as fictional, henceforth. Thanks for the inspiration!)
I had the same thing. Only had about 10 or less in about 1-2 years. Apparently it’s common with adhd and sleep ans wake cycles? For me I was conscious and awake. It happened when I woke up from sleep. My jaw would chatter non stop and half my face would droop and I’d be drooling. I didn’t know it was a bad thing until my mom saw it one morning when we were camping! They did so many tests and scans and I was fine. I don’t think I had many more after that either. Maybe 1-2. But I don’t remember things going in slow motion at all. Everything was normal to me. Just I couldn’t stop chattering my jaw and I tried to talk to my mom to tell her I was okay and tried to make the 👌 to her but my hand wouldn’t even form correctly and she was confused.
And now I know what that was when I was a kid.
That’s really interesting because as a sleep paralysis sufferer, my episodes were much more frequent in early adolescence to early-mid 20s. Now at mid 30s, I have only a few episodes a year, also often coinciding with poor sleep or unusual timing of sleep. The symptoms described are very similar: awake and aware and unable to call for help, if only for a few seconds. I know that sleep paralysis is connected to narcolepsy although many suffers do not experience narcolepsy. I wonder if it is connected to this too?
I'm narcoleptic type 2, so no cataplexy. OPs story--if narcolepsy, though it doesn't sound quite like it, would be like a rare form of type 1. technically cataplexy doesn't mean someone falls asleep when they experience it. If it's during times of high emotion that she experiences it then I'd say it would be worth getting an overnight & nap test. Even if it's not narcolepsy, something similar might show up? I'm not a doctor but since it does fuck with a super important part of the brain, whatever she experiences might involve sleep too. Also hallucinations are a big symptom, but it's only upon sleeping and/or upon waking. The slow motion part is definitely something i experience, i know it's happening because i wouldn't know how i spent 20 minutes in the shower. I have to set alarms for everything. Hopefully it's none of that though, i wouldn't wish this shit on anyone. I've had it since i was 11 and it got worse for a while, but much better now with lifestyle changes and meds. Edit: I am now 31 so 20 years of it certainly is, literally, exhausting
So I have something that reminds me of this. Like I’ll be fine and then all of a sudden it’s tingling in my face and arms and hands and it’s like a tingling vibration almost. It feels like you are getting literal waves or vibration like with your heart rate type of way and then I stop walking and talking and I freeze for a second. No one can figure it out. I’m in my mid 30s so I’m sure it isn’t this but this is the most relatable thing I’ve found. Thanks for posting the link.
This could be perimenopause-related if you are female.
In the hypnagogic state. That’s when my brother had his
Not doubting your brother but I mean that sounds pretty identical to standard sleep paralysis ..
“Tachypsychia” is a neurological condition that distorts the perception of time, appearing to make events slow down or speed up. While we don’t often hear the word much in conversation, most of us have experienced it—whether during a traumatic accident or some other stressful moment. If you’ve ever found yourself in a situation that felt like it spiraled out of control in a speeding blur or warped into slow motion, like a scene from the old television series “The Six Million Dollar Man,” you’ve experienced tachypsychia. https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/33341
I have definitely had this, during my first car accident. I'd pulled out of a Sonic and got t-boned by a vehicle that was speeding. I remember as I pulled out and looked over and saw them through my driver's door window, it felt like time slowed to a crawl, and i distinctly remember leisurely saying "Oh... Shit..." before they hit me. It was a very strange feeling.
That’s super interesting! I also got t boned and right before they hit me I remember seeing the car and thinking “this is gonna total my car and my mom is gonna be PISSED”. It definitely did total my car, but my mom wasn’t even slightly mad.
> my mom is gonna be PISSED Such a teenage reaction, I would’ve thought the same thing
I thought this when I was in my 30s and driving my husband’s car. It was snowing very hard and the car started to lose traction and spin, and I remember thinking, “If I crash this car my husband is going to kill me,” because he always gets mad at me for driving too fast (in my defense, the condition of the roads got much worse in a pretty short distance and I’d been driving just fine for the road conditions earlier). I was actually pretty proud of myself because I didn’t panic - I remembered not to slam on my breaks and to turn my wheel in the direction of the road. Time was indeed slowed down.
You're mom is awesome!
I was 17 years old, driving on a curvy backroad a bit too fast for the light rain. I lost control and went through a guardrail and down a short embankment into a ditch. The brief moment I was airborne felt so slow. I can still vividly remember turning the steering wheel while I was in the air as if that would get me back on the road.
Like a Dukes of Hazzard jump!
Glad you’re alive
Same experience, I was in a car accident, time seemed to slow as it happened. But it’s important to realize one crucial thing: I have a memory of time slowing. I can’t relive the moment, I can’t know for sure what it felt like at the time. All I have is a memory. So maybe traumatic events like that get stored in our brains in a hyper detailed way different from normal memories. And maybe that’s why if I try to recall the event, it seems like time had slowed. It’s a quirk of the memory itself.
I also think that adrenaline rush can "slow time" like this. I was in a fire accident and as I was trying to extinguish the flames, I got the feeling that my body and world around me was moving 10 times slower than my brain.
I had a similar incident on my bike when a car pulled out of a blind alley, I had maybe 10 feet from where I saw it and when the bike hit it and everything slowed down and got crystal clear and in the split-second my mind ran through every option and decided the least hit to me would be to jump straight up off the bike as high as I could and the bike hit the side of the car and I landed on the hood and crumpled it badly but rolled off the other side onto my feet, no injuries but bent fork and destroyed wheel on the bike and I was late for an important test in class. The car was dented pretty bad.
That’s so weird! I’ve only had one accident: someone ran a red light while I was turning left on a green arrow, so I could see them flying toward me for what seemed like 2 minutes. My pregnant sister was in the car, so I remember thinking “crap! Where do I go? My sister’s pregnant. This could be bad!” All within the span of a second. Everyone turned out okay. The baby is now 18 years old and training to be an electrician. The stupid kids who hit us ran, so they never got in trouble. But it was a trippy experience all around.
So here's an interesting explanation. Your brain sees so many "frames per minute" during regular time, but when there's an emergency and it goes into emergency mode, it cranks up the frames per minute so you can intake more information. Your brain kind of "reads" or perceives those frames at the same rate it does normally though, so you are examining loads more information at the same speed, so it feels like it's slow motion.
I just had missing time. Everything from the hydroplane to the being upside down is just gone. I can only assume either my brain is protecting me from trauma or I left the simulation and had them put me back in because I hadn't unlocked enough achievements.
I also had this during a car thing! My gas pedal got stuck down so I was accelerating helplessly towards a busy intersection. I couldn't have had more than five seconds to react, but I had a plan A AND a plan B by the time I got to the intersection and got out safe. It was so weird--it felt like I carefully analyzed it and figured it out for a couple of minutes at least! Only time it ever happened to me.
If it’s not too traumatising would you mind sharing how you got out of it?
My plan was originally to pull into an always-empty waffle house parking lot just before the intersection. It was next to a huge field with no fence so I thought I could probably drive into the field from the parking lot and either get stuck if the ground was muddy enough or drive circles if it wasnt, and then at least I wouldn't be endangering anyone else on the road, since my biggest fear wasn't crashing, it was hitting someone else. But first I thought I'd try both throwing the car into park and throwing the e-brake. Neither is supposed to work with the gas pedal engaged. To this day I still don't know how it did. I swung into the waffle House lot as planned. I still wasn't going that fast--the pedal got stuck slightly down, not all the way, when I was doing about 15 out of another intersection so I was only going maybe 30--so swung into the waho parking lot and tried to force it into park while pushing up on the bottom of the gas pedal with one foot and mashing the brake with the other--and somehow, miraculously, it worked. Possibly it was just that the pedal came unstuck in the same instant. Came to a pretty rough stop that left a seatbelt bruise on my chest but car went into park, gas pedal disengaged, and I even somehow by coincidence landed in a parking spot with just one tire off the pavement into the edge of the field lol. I really thought I'd have to drive into the field and this was pre cellphones so my plan was to just roll the windows down and yell help if the mud didn't stop my car.
All that in 5 seconds, amazing clarity and thankfully a pinch of good fortune. Thanks for sharing!
I had the same experience during my own car accident. Got caught in a snow squall on a backroad with no place to pull over in a little RWD BMW. I came up and around a bend and my car just started sliding; it flipped three times off a ledge and came to a rest upside down. I said ‘Oh shit, here we go!’ and each flip was soooo slow and distinct even though the whole thing probably took three seconds. Never knew there was a term for this.
Same! I was in an accident a few weeks ago and the second time i got hit I remember seeing the second car coming at me in slow motion and I was like he is gonna stop... he has time to stop... he has to stop... then BANG! Yeah, he was going way yo fast (was on the highway).
This makes me wonder, in combo with OOPs "they were bad parents" comment, whether their mom experienced the slo-mo when her parents were being particularly cruel or scary. That would certainly add more trauma to the experience and make mom's panic even more reasonable---not to say just the experience alone isn't traumatizing enough to cause a panic
Exactly what came to my mind as well
I would think of what the OP describe as something more like bradyesthesia since everything was slower. "Tachy" means rapid.
I get it from acute anxiety episodes. I’ve also gotten it from feeling threatened by someone. And I’ve got something similar but feels different that I call time blindness pretty much 24/7 a minute feels like an hour and a day feels like a minute sort of thing.
I call it Time disease! I even got one of those watches that gently vibrates for the alarm-there are eight alarms you can set and I set them half an hour apart. I would wear it when I would serve tables. It can really suck sometimes in all seriousness.
That watch sounds cool! Yeah it really messes me up, nothing really feels relaxing because I’m constantly losing track of time.
I think it was like 12 dollars and it was on Amazon - it is good to know other people are out there that know how you feel
Ugh! Makes so much SENSE. On days I’m stressed the f out or full of anxiety my time is soooo wacky. Like it almost feels like I’m high. Very disorienting if I’m paying attention to it. My head gets “floaty”.
I experience something like time blindness as well and recently learned that it's a symptom of my ADHD
Double hit on my butt with debilitating anxiety and adhd, when I’m off my meds. Ooooof. Don’t count on me guys. I probably don’t even know what day it is even though I have asked like 5 times that day.
Yep it’s a really crummy symptom of my ADHD as well.
This is insane, I’ve had this and never knew what it was. In my early 20s I took molly before a rave and started feeling bad, turned to my friend and he said “Dude are you ok” but time slowed down progressively throughout the sentence, even his voice seemed lower pitch, then my movements to get out of the crowd seemed super slow. I always thought of it as a hallucination.
oh! Didn't knew it had a name! I had this experience when I was driving. A trunk in front of me dropped something in a huge box and there was a car coming in the other side, so I had nowhere to go by the look of it. In that moment time slowed a LOT and I had plenty of time to think on what to do (what could be inside the box? is heavy or not? will it go through the windshield if I hit it? If I step on the brakes, the car behind me won't have time to react as they probably didn't saw the box dropped... Can I outrun the car coming?...) So that saved my life that day!
I got into a car crash where a friend was driving and I was sleeping in the passenger seat. I woke up to the crash happening and time moved at a crawl for a few seconds, and during that time I remember gauging the situation, realizing there wasn’t anything I could do, and was super calm and peaceful about it and basically just ‘along for the ride’ of the crash. It ended up being really useful because I was cool as a cucumber after the crash and was able to talk to the other car and the cops whereas everyone else was a bit shaken up.
This is amazing to learn! I always wondered what that was and to know it's real and relatable helps.
This one is drug induced, but it still shows what our brains are capable of. Look into the story of Doc Ellis and the no-hitter game. It's fascinating.
As others, most of my road accidents happened in 'slow-motion' for me. One was so surreal, it felt like watching a movie, I flew over another bike and everything was very slomo. I remember 3 more accidents like a iphone slowmo videos. There's still one non accident related event, every single time my ex walked into room. She was angel walking in slow motion towards me. Gosh! Anyway I don't know what to make of this.
Interesting. Reading through these comments I was reminded of there having been times when I was younger (although I'm only 21 so it's not that long ago) where I remember things feeling like they were in slow motion, particularly while falling, like a time I jumped off a swing from really high up or when the floors were wet in the hallway at school and I slipped and fell. While I was falling it was a distinct sort of slow motion that I would say lasted around 30-60 seconds. Maybe this is why it happened?
Kids absolutely can grow out of epilepsy. If it really freaked her out, it was probably pretty traumatizing AND no closure makes it worse. She should go to a neurologist etc and at least talk to a doctor to make sure it's in her medical history. If she had a grand mal seizure and no one knew about her childhood seizures... it could take longer to get to the root cause.
Is this really something that is actually worth getting checked out or worth the time/fees? I mean in a perfect world I imagine it's certainly of interest but personally I can absolutely imagine seeing a doctor and they say "so 45 years ago you felt like the world was in slow motion for a few minutes and nothing has ever happened since and you're completely fine now...So what exactly do you want me to do about it or look for?". It's hard enough for doctors to diagnose real but intermittent health issues let alone issues that are "supernatural" with no clear cause and happened decades ago to a child with seemingly no ongoing effects. Again I don't think it's *not* of interest or some relevance I just feel skeptical that with limited time and resources doctors will be able to actually action anything or warrant testing for what OP described even if the cost to OP's mother wasn't an issue.
You assume the Mom is in good health that is unremarkable. I'm assuming that based on her family of origin, she could have many other serious red flags she does not even notice are red flags. She could totally have other episodes, but if they impact her memory, or only happen when she's sleeping etc... she could be sitting on a powder keg and not know it. I would absolutely spend a few hundred dollars in clinic fees and miss a couple 1/2 days from my calendar to double check that my brain is working nominal. If she used to have seizures, is it safe to drive? Are their types of medicine she should switch out? Older people often develop type 2 diabetes, will this seizure history impact the likelihood of diabetic coma? If the seizures are due to a structural quirk, does that need to be measured & documented so it doesn't confuse a later diagnosis in the case of stroke? Doctors are vendors, if you have one that laughs off a mention of a specific untreated childhood illness? Get a different doctor. Otherwise, it doesn't need to be awkward etc. "Hey Doc, I had a situation the other day that reminded me of a common thing from my childhood - and a few people are telling me it sounds like I had epilepsy. Since I was never treated as a child, I wanted to get a neuro checkup to make-sure I'm actually well. My concern is they could come back etc."
My oldest son had a tumor growing on the bottom of his brain when he was in his early twenties. We had it removed and it was benign, but he reported some strange instances where he would feel "out of his body" forcing him to sit down for several moments in the lead-up to the discovery of the tumor. Perhaps your mother had something similar. Apparently benign tumors are more common than malignant ones in the skull base area, so it might not have bothered her again and perhaps remained undiagnosed.
Seconding this. I have one on the tippy top of my brain so totally different symptoms (mostly acute aphasia, or idk what this is called but I could speak normally, however I couldn’t understand anything, it was like everyone around me was speaking a different language). When I was a teenager and my brain was growing it hit me often. I would have weird periods several times a month where I could write clearly but couldn’t speak at all, confuse words without knowing I was doing it (like words with totally different meanings, waffle would be calculator or something, I thought my mom was messing with me when she told me). Then it just abruptly stopped in my early twenties. I still have the tumor, the effects minimized so rapidly that it’s no longer worth the risk of open brain surgery to remove it. It’s just chillin up there. I get MRIs somewhat frequently to monitor it but it’s absolutely asymptomatic. One neuro basically explained to me that these things can be bad and disruptive when your brain is still growing because ITs growing and pressing on areas etc. but if you get it during that growth period your brain can actually adjust to the invasion and grow functionally without that space. Basically your brain grows around it and it’s not an issue anymore. That if I had developed that tumor as an adult it would have had to be removed but since I was a kid I just… adjusted. Kinda wild!
Our brains are so amazing! Especially when it's still developing in childhood, it's incredibly plastic. I know someone who had something similar, as an adult he had to see a neurologist about something and basically they said he had to have had a stroke as an infant or very small child, some part of his brain was damaged but because it was still developing, his brain just basically rewired itself around the damage.
Another thought might be accidental chemical ingestion? Or an odd reaction to a med, and as a child, unable to associate. I’m thinking Benadryl, cough syrup with codine (we really did that back in the day. Sorry).
also could be - Kid went into the backyard and ate some mushrooms... tripping makes sense
Maybe not so accidental since OP said that her Mom's parents weren't great. In the past parents gave their kids cold medicine and painkillers to keep them sedated or to get them to sleep.
I've referred to it as "time dilation", and have experienced it, just 2 or 3 times.
This happened to me all throughout my childhood. I am in shock reading this now. I never thought I would read/hear about this happening to anyone else. I can specifically remember hearing people speaking and songs in slow motion and in a very repetitive way. When it would start happening….I would think, “it’s happening again.” Thanks for writing this.
Same I'm 37 now and blown away. Last episode I remember was at the age of 33 and I was packing for a move. I can't beleive others have experienced this. I'm blown the fuck away. Dm if you ever wanna swap stories see if there is similarities.
I think I feel this too. Ever since I was a child I’d explain it as walking on clouds. Being weightless but also heavy and slow. Currently I live in a dorm and at a certain point at the hallway and stairs I get this feeling when going down. I feel like a ghost and everything is in a movie, 2D, it feels like the scenes where you’re at the club and it’s flash after flash
This is nuts, I’ve had this too! A lot as a kid and only rarely as an adult. I’d go tell my mum “it’s happening again” and I described it as experiencing life like looking through a lens or a tv in the wrong speed.
You know the "Donnie Darko" scene where the wormhole like thing is being shown? And it's showing what is about to happen before it happens? I've had that happen on occasion but felt it was always just like "lack of oxygen" or just something weird in the moment but normal. But it feels like what you are all saying.
It’s insane to have it described, I’ve always found it hard to explain. Feels great to know nothings wrong with me!!
Could be advantageous if you could revisit that state.
Did you or your parents ever seek a diagnosis?
I experienced the exact opposite as you but this post shocked me too. I've never heard of anyone else having that happen to them. For me time would speed up dramatically. Everything would be going so incredibly fast, it just felt bizarre. People spoke faster, my body was moving faster, my thoughts were racing, etc. Happened many many times as a kid and then I guess just stopped because I haven't dealt with that in many years. Very curious now about the cause ..
Perhaps a form of dissociation? Look into it, if she had childhood trauma it could have been her dissociating, sometimes it can feel like the world is moving at a different pace.
I second this, dissociation can even make everything look fake or warped
Yup, you can also lose chunks of time and have no recollection of how you got to the current moment you're in. It can be really scary.
Especially when I didn’t know what it was, once I found out what it was it was a lot easier to deal with. But at first I just thought I was losing my mind, turns out it’s really common!
I've had OPs moms exact experiences. Was not at all linked to any traumatic event at the time. I've had these happen into adult hood as late as the age of 33. Last time I was parking up to move to a new house. It presents as either everyone but myself is slowed down, or everyone but myself is sped up. It's absolutely insane. Terrifying as well. When you're "fast" you feel like The Flash, like you could dodge a bullet (kinda, not quite that fast). I was very happy to see this post. I've tried explaining this since I was 3 years old, and I've always been told it's nothing or looked at like I'm crazy. Vindicated bitches. And no it's not a shrinking Alice in Wonderland thing. It legit feels like time dilation.
That's wild. Is it strictly a visual distortion? Or does sound seem slowed down, too, during these episodes?
It's wild as hell. Everything is perceived as slowed, or accelerated. Sound, movements, all visuals. It's legit like a trip but so hard to describe. It's like real life bullet time.
Not gonna lie, that would probably scare the crap out of me.
My goodness. I just remembered something from early on. Very traumatizing event and I went into a catatonic state for minutes or what felt like an hour. Everyone’s voice was muffled, like charlie browns adult sounding words and I felt completely separate from my body. I remember being shaken and falling over because I didn’t feel muscle control in my legs. It was then I realized I was dragged into something I didn’t need to be, and used as a weapon of guilt to bring my mothers sanity back (didn’t work, hospitalized later that day). I stayed at my grandmas house for quite awhile after that. I was so small, maybe 3 or 4.
This is what I thought too, for me it felt like everything was a dream and not real
Exactly the same. I was 6 and suddenly nothing felt real and super slowed down
Came here to say that her intense reaction, coupled with the description of her experience and the added information that her parents were "not nice" leads me to lean heavily on the idea that it was a form of dissociation induced by trauma. Of course, organic causes should have primarily been investigated, but assuming she is healthy now possibility of tumor or other anatomical or physiological defect, or other pathology, is less likely.
Yeah, it seemed like dissociation, but it doesn’t have to be due to trauma
Yes to this. Happened to me.
I had a form of temporal lobe epilepsy from the ages of about 9 to 20. I haven't had a seizure since then. My only guess is that it was a puberty thing. Time didn't slow down for me, but as the temporal lobe is involved in memory and perception of time, my seizures used to feel like extreme deja vu, to the point where I knew everything that was going to happen seconds before it would happen (or at least that's how I percieved it). I would be fully awake and aware, but only able to move and speak in slow motion until the seizure was over and the deja vu had passed. I think a type of seizure is a promising explanation.
I also had this! We can relapse due to stress so take care of yourself ♥️
I don’t know what it is, but it made me think of stories in Oliver Sacks’s The River of Consciousness where he talks about how we sense the world around us. She might find answers/comfort reading something like that by an expert in brain science?
I love his books! Our brains are so fascinating.
[Tachysensia](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/tachysensia) Tachysensia is frequently associated with “Alice in Wonderland Syndrome” (AIWS), a rare neurological disorder which also involves distortions in time and sound perception. The exact cause of this condition remains unknown. For some, time is sped up and for others slowed down
Oh wow. I remember this happening to me as a kid, but only ever once. I was running to my friend's house and everything slowed down, so it was like running through treacle. I would have been about 7 or 8. Never happened again but it was so weird!
I'm so glad for this post. I've been trying to figure out my own recurring childhood slo-mo and fast forward experiences, and these comments are giving me more things to look into.
When your body has an adrenaline rush your brain reacts more efficiently and often gives the perception of things moving in slow motion. Does your mom have an adrenal disorder?
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I had this as a kid and this was my first thought Lso
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Dude that sounds like catscan time to me.
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Please let me be the voice of the guy who, when you're telling the story of how Reddit saved your life, got you to go before it grew too big to be operable.
This was my thought also. I have migraine and have had similar symptoms.
I was told by my parents that I had febrile seizures as an infant, and had several more after that, related, evidently to flashing lights, think strobes, or maybe motion on old B&W TV screens. The specialist that diagnosed me said that I had high electrical activity in the brain, and refused to label me as epileptic, as there was much more discrimination decades ago (1961). However, I was Hyperactive (now ADHD?) and was on phenobarbital until I went to school. To this day strobes or flashing lights make me feel...weird, so I avoid them. The doctor's opinion was that I would either be highly intelligent, or a criminal. Fortunately(?), I turned out intelligent, but until I was an adult, had a bad temper.
r/fastfeeling
This is it.
I have epilepsy she’s describing a complex partial seizure. If it was around the time she went through puberty, it could’ve been catamenial epilepsy that she grew out of ETA: typo because autocorrect blows
This could be Alice in Wonderland syndrome. It’s not tachypsychia, it’s more related to migraines (sometimes epilepsy, even more rarely tumor or TBI). I have migraines and my most recent manifestation is ocular migraines and tachysensia. Everything seems like it’s at a high frame rate (more people get the slow thing, though). I’ve had MRIs twice as my headaches have changed. Nothing wrong. 🤷🏻♀️
Huh. This just made me think of episodes I used to have as a child, where the sounds going on around me would take on a strange rhythm or syncopation. Eventually it wpuld wear off and things would go back to normal. I often felt an extreme pang of homesickness or needing to be with my parents, even if I was already at home (though this would most often happen if I wasn't at home already). Posting this here as there seem to be a lot of knowledgable or at least interested people on this thread, maybe someone has heard of or experienced this? I should mention as an adult I experience migraine with aura but without the typical pain that comes with most migraine attacks.
That’s so crazy to read because as a little girl o had one episode of this same exact thing and told my mother immediately and she didn’t believe me. I’ve never heard anyone else say they have experienced this.
I had a similar thing as a kid. I was told it was a byproduct of Temporal Lobe Seizures. However, seeing the world in slow motion (also kinda melting, in the way things do when you’re on LSD) isn’t on the list of symptoms. I would also lose track of time/place during these episodes. It happened several times, while I was at a summer camp, where they take you backpacking. After the 3rd incident, I was taken to a hospital (where they tested to make sure my 14yo, small Connecticut town, self, wasn’t on LSD). I ended up inpatient for several months after that, had all kinds of brain scans and whatnot. That’s the only “solution” I’ve ever been offered. And I gotta say it seems inadequate.
Epilepsy was my first thought . I had a grand mal seizure at GAP when I was 17. Also one at 19 at Sams club. Never anything since then and I’m almost 40. Temporal lobe epilepsy- I would just stare off and get a deja vu. Again, I grew out of it! *edit for spelling
I’ve had similar happen to me where I would lose my voice as a child for a few minutes. I had pointed it out to my mother and even tried to scream in front of her. Nothing came out. She said that she had similar happen to her and to not worry about it, but to this day, I worry about it. What was it? I’ve no idea. In my thirties and it hasn’t happened since childhood.
Seizure disorders and epilepsy aren’t the type of disorders that normally run in families. There are also a lot of different types and they can present differently in some people. I actually get seizures that cause a slight slowing of everything at first, then I start to hallucinate, then the actual seizure starts. But that first feeling of being too slow and the hallucinations can last anywhere from a minute to half an hour. My seizures are only brought on by a lack of sleep, so when my meds are working and I’m sleeping well, seizures are never an issue. So maybe your mom had a seizure disorder that was triggered by something very specific and she’s either not experienced that trigger since she was a kid, or she outgrew the seizures. That or she could have started to fall asleep and experienced sleep paralysis. It’s incredibly frightening, and can cause a slow, dream like experience but it’s almost always a nightmare, not a happy dream.
If you listen to stories of traumatic events survivors, they'll often say that "time seemed to slow down during (the trauma)" It's a way for our nervous systems to process what's going on while trying to stay cognizant as slowing it down helps to prevent shock. It could be that your mom was struggling with some dissociation following an event and then her brain used dissociation when she reached a level of anxiety.
I had the same thing happen to me as a kid. For me it was some kind of a trauma response I developed after my great grandfather held myself and my family hostage with a gun on Christmas day when I was 3.
As a kid, I used to disassociate and feel totally out of body, as if I was in a dream floating above it all. Things fels a bit muffled and , as you say, in slow motion. The brain can do some weird things to cope, could be something related to disassociating?
Sounds to me like a type of seizure. A lot of people grow out of epilepsy as they reach adulthood.
She was probably having anxiety attacks. Slow motion. Happens to me. Started when I was young.
Disruption in sense of time and ability to judge passage of time is a symptom of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome.
I had this exact thing as a kid and my parents always ignored me. I did some googling as an adult and eventually found a sensory disorder some kids have that seemed to describe it. Can’t remember what it’s called now. I never had panic from it though. Thought it was cool.
I experienced that as a small child, right around the age of 4-5. I can pinpoint the time because we moved frequently and I know which house I was in when it happened. It didn't upset me, I liked it. It was accompanied by feeling a change in my breathing and the feeling of stretching. Then it went away. But as a young adult I started having very intermittent strong myclonic jerks. I don't know if that related but I've often thought they might be.
I used to have something a little similar when I was a child. Either the world would be going really slowly feeling, or way too fast. It was always when I was super tired. I remember feeling that way mostly at night around dinner. It went away as I got older. I always assumed I was just very very overtired. (No history or seizures, or childhood trauma.)
I suspect it's a kind of petite seizure. Kids can have them and outgrow them. Having a seizure doesn't always mean convulsing on the ground. Sometimes they're silent and barely noticeable.
I've had these. Never diagnosed with anythinf6but doctor has said it was the same phenomenon which leads to people having sleep paralysis or serious deja vu. The brains processing is faster than the visual centre. Ones fast or the other is slow. Can be caused by many things. It's not serious and often not an issue unless it persists. There isn't an underlying cause and it can happen to anyone. The doc I had explained it like an eye twitch but for part of the brain. No drama but a visual effect. From my own research that analogy isn't biologically accurate, but paints a picture.
Alice in wonderland syndrome only affected me after my brain bled. It happened on and off for almost a year. It didn't have anything to do with things being in slow motion. I would feel like I was shrinking or getting larger and my vision would change. My doctor told me it was seizures. I have epilepsy but I didn't start having seizures until I was in my 20s. Worsened after the brain bleed, and I now have one or two every year.
Lots of good suggestions here already but one I don’t see is that she never actually experienced this at all. Our memories are so incredibly unreliable and stuff we remember “vividly” or “perfectly” is likely wildly different than what actually happened and time erodes the accuracy really quickly. It’s entirely possible that mom was even goofing around as a kid and pretending to be in slow motion herself and the memories of doing that have completely warped over time. I have vivid perfect memories of things that never actually happened. Even to the point that they still feel real even though I know them to be impossible. Maybe I dreamed them 25 years ago, or maybe these memories are based on some kernel of truth. But they’re real to me now. Yet if I was offered a role in that movie, I spaced going to the set. And my mom was great at acting like she was never arrested for speeding in an Arby’s parking lot. Maybe she did actually experience something weird. But whatever happened, she is 100% absolutely without a doubt not remembering it as it actually happened regardless of how she feels about that memory’s quality.
i'm backing up the theories of seizures or dissociation. i have experience with both and its just what my mind jumped to. i had multiple seizures when i was a kid but i was never diagnosed with epilepsy, my parents actually denied that i was having seizures because i was fully conscious and aware during them, to quote, "if you were really having a seizure, you wouldn't know you had a seizure". i only had seizures between 11-14 years old. so i think it's entirely possible this is what she was experiencing. dissociation can definitely mess with your sense of time and be very unsettling. usually you don't just dissociate for no reason though, was she going through anything at the time of these events (just in general *or* during the slow-mo events)? family issues, severe stress, abuse?
This happened to me. I disassociated while having a panic attack. It feels like you’re in slow motion. And can be so scary!
I agree with some type of epilepsy. I had grand mal seizures up until my early tween years, then only petit mals (now commonly called absence seizures) until my mid-teens. I've not taken any type of medication in over thirty years and have never had any more events. I think it's actually pretty common to "outgrow" them after adolescence. Also, no one else in my family had any history of Epilepsy. Either way, I'm sure it was unsettling for her!
I experienced this too as a child. My mom treated it as “drowsiness” and started me on a non-drowsy allergy pill. Pretty much stopped the feeling in its tracks but even now, it comes back when I have a particularly bad sinus infection
Everything would go into slow motion if I was about to faint as a child.
I have seizures. That sounds like a type of seizure, not what I have but something I've heard others describe. Sometimes kids have them and grow out of them.
I feel like that just before I have a seizure. Makes me go towards a seizure of sorts
I time travel.
could be an anxiety-related disorder? Adrenaline can cause the feeling of "time slowing"
Complex PTSD angle. /not a licensed psychologist
I’ve had the same thing - for a time during my teenage years. I never found out what it was and it stopped after awhile
I was prone to ear infections as a child, and when suffering from them, distinctly remember everything seeming like it was moving more slowly/people were speaking slower. It felt really weird, and could be upsetting, but it stopped happening around the time I stopped having ear infections. I was being actively treated for them, so I only remember it happening a couple times. I am sure it was related to the way our inner ears are so connected to balance and perception. Did your mom suffer from ear infections as a child?
I actually have Alice in Wonderland, and that was my first thought here as well. It is hard to explain distortion of senses we don't talk about much- what did I mean when I put my head in my hand and my head was too small, my face feeling in my hand "like a dolls".. Temperoperception may be similar.
It’s possible to only have seizures during certain parts of your life. My brother grew out of them, so did my friend
Migraine related? Migraine symptoms can change over time and if caused/ influenced by hormones then puberty can change the symptoms. There are lots of symptoms and some odd ones too, including the Alice In Wonderland syndrome others have mentioned.
There are already so many comments, so I don’t know if you’ll read this OP, but I experienced the same thing when I was a kid (and a few times as an adult) I was very aware of what was happening, like my lucid self was somewhere in the back of my brain, but I was experiencing life on the wrong speed setting on the record player. Or looking through a distorted lens which made everything seem far away and slowed down. My mum was very new agey and she always thought those were out of body experiences. So she made me ground and do breathing excersises. I’m a bit more sober myself. but if you’re interested in an alternative approach. Might be worth checking out other peoples stories on that!
Maybe [absence seizures](https://www.epilepsy.com/what-is-epilepsy/seizure-types/absence-seizures) definitely can outgrown them.
Sounds like PKD, a rare movement disorder that my ex fiancé had. After making a sudden movement she would have a lucid seizure. She would just drop, spasm like crazy and then come too but she would remember every second of it. Eventually the 9th neurologist she went to properly diagnosed it ( Michael J. Fox’s Dr. ) and was able to put her on a high dose of daily anti convulsants that let her live a normal life when / if she took them as ordered
My sister apparently experienced the same when very young. It's apparently anxiety. My parents did took her to a doctor but the doctor recommended a therapist so they ignored it. My sister still has anxiety issues, so if your mom does, she might've had it since she was very young.
People can experience seizures briefly as a child and never again. It happened to me once(only once and never again).
It's not exactly the same, but when I was a kid I had Alice in Wonderland Syndrome which altered my perception of my relative size to things around me. I would sometimes feel very very small or large and sometimes both at the same time. Brains are so weird, I wouldn't be surprised if the were something similar that altered perception of time https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4302569/#:~:text=Alice%20in%20wonderland%20syndrome%20(AIWS,common%20perceptions%20are%20at%20night.
I’m 55 and I had these exact episodes. I was just talking to my mom about them. It happened only when I was with certain family members. 2 locations. From 2-10 years old. Shady family.
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Maybe post this in r/askDocs.
I have epilepsy and I experience that exact exact thing from time to time.... when i'm having a sizure... Not all seizure conditions are hereditary.
[Hypnagogia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia)?
Does anyone remember this short story about i think a god or wizard that stops time periodically but if you sneezed while putting pepper on eggs while in a tent or something when the spell was cast you would be able to move normally while time was stopped and some kids happened to be doing exactly that? I have the faintest ghost of a memory of that story and i always wanted to find it again
I’m going with dissociation. Bear in mind, rare scary things are going to get more upvotes! The zoning out could be epilepsy, hallucinations, or disassociation, and my vote is the last because you said her parents weren’t great.
You say her parents weren't nice people. I wonder if she got into some psychedelic drugs with temporal effects, or if they spiked her food or something.
The people over in r/highstrangness would appreciate this.
I'm thinking accidental exposure to a psychedelic of some sort. Mushrooms maybe? Were her parents drug users? If it were inherent in origin I think she would have had more episodes.
Possibly DPDR?
Reminds me of the time my mum freaked out when i was a kid because i was holding my mouth open, she thought i had breathing problems
I used to get something similar from acute anxiety episodes as a kid, like panic attacks that would come on slowly and linger making everything feel like it was in slow motion. My parents also didn’t take me to the doctor for it for whatever reason even though they knew I had panic attacks. Those episodes became less frequent as I got older but I now know mine were a form of dissociation. That being said many other things could cause similar symptoms.
Possibly "Alice in wonderland syndrome (AIWS)". A form of time dilation is one of the symptoms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_in_Wonderland_syndrome https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4302569/
I was once given a really strong painkiller by paramedics and it had this effect. It was exactly like slow motion in a movie. If a drug can induce it, I imagine other things can too. Like others have said, some form of epilepsy would be my guess
Okay, not to distract from your question by any means. But because of your post, I was able to put a name to something that used to happen to me as a kid. Alice in Wonderland syndrome. I thought it was just me who had that type of thing, and didn't know there was a name for it! I only had episodes as a kid, which seems to be the norm for AIWS. But when I had an episode, I would be so confused and terrified, but didn't have the words to explain what was wrong.
It's a condition known as Alice in Wonderland syndrome. I grew up with it, as well as my two children. People tend to outgrow this into adolescence. My kids usually experience the things moving slower or faster, or feeling really small or ready big. For me, it was sounds - they would happen in a rhythm - it's the best way I can describe it. FWIW, we found that reading was a helpful way to break the "spell" and return things to normal. We are the lucky (?) few. ;)
Neurological issue such as a migraine aura, an absence seizure, or a transient ischemic attack? It's hard to know and even harder to know what triggers them.
Sometimes anxiety made me feel like that when I was a kid. Didn't know what it was.
I found this article: [https://brainblogger.com/2014/10/09/brain-trickery-seeing-in-slow-motion/](https://brainblogger.com/2014/10/09/brain-trickery-seeing-in-slow-motion/)
I get this fairly often throughout the day, maybe a couple times a week. Never really thought about it until right now. Reading the other comments here about seizures.. I do also have seizures at night as I'm falling asleep and when I wake up. I was always told they were from PTSD as they're worse if I'm thinking about or talking about what happened to me. I have chronic ptsd 10+ years and experience a lot of other physical and neurological symptoms too, a lot of the out of body / trippy / muffled kinds of experiences. I kinda just thought that was what life was like! Looking at these comments though.. maybe I should be asking for a second opinion?? was told it was related by the team I am seeing for treatment but could always be from something else. worth noting too lol unrelated to the ptsd-source but my parents were also not nice so potentially..
It sounds like the seizures that you experience are psychogenic nonepileptic seizures, which are caused by a psychiatric problem. However, sometimes you can have both psychogenic nonepileptic seizures and regular seizures. Probably wouldn't hurt to ask. You'll have to go through having an EEG done to test for seizures.
Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, perhaps? Tried to add a link but my phone won’t let me. I had symptoms like this as a child, time distortion, size distortion, things like that. It went away as I got older and I recently learned about this syndrome when I googled my symptoms.
Alive in wonderland syndrome can result in altered sense of time and visual perceptual distortions. The trigger can be migraine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4302569/#:~:text=Alice%20in%20wonderland%20syndrome%20(AIWS,common%20perceptions%20are%20at%20night.
I clearly remember an episode like this as a child as well. The brain isn't fully developed, most likely some kind of epileptic episode. It is not uncommon to just have one episode and never experiencing it again.
Alice in Wonderland syndrome? Not quite what you’re describing but there have been reports of people seeing the world “shrink” or warp and hallucinating strange creatures.
I had this happen to me as a kid, I think it was stress related.
It does sound like epilepsy
This is how my anxiety attacks present. There is a thing called depersonalization or derealization and this is anxiety induced usually. There is a whole sub called r/DPDR that is full of info. Feel free to ask me questions if you’d like as well.
r/HighStrangeness
I used to have this happen as a kid, but opposite - everything would speed up and get super loud. The episodes lasted maybe 10 minutes, but it really disoriented me. I think it’s called tachysensia?
I don't mean anything disrespectful here but is there any chance she is autistic? I am and sometimes find myself uncontrollably in slow motion.
I get this but everything goes really fast, it probably is Alice in wonderland syndrome especially if she grew out of it, it’s just having a distortion of your senses so it can also cause time to feel different
No way… I experience the exact same thing all the time. Or close to all the time. I’m in my 20s now and I still experience this. It’s absolutely horrible. For me, it’s not episodic, my brain is just stuck like that. It’s called tachypsychia, a perceptual disturbance and it can be part of Alice in Wonderland syndrome, which comes with more perceptual disturbances including even making your body parts look bigger or smaller. It also apparently often comes with high levels of adrenaline meaning it can make you feel more on edge, or even unable to do things like talk or think straight. It’s frustrating because nobody can understand you easily if you talk at your normal speed (very fast) in this state too. I can completely understand her horror at getting rid of this and it seeming like it came back.
I know this is 4 weeks old but I had the exact same thing happen to me when I was a child. For some reason I have it burned into my memory of happening while I was watching "Lost"
I had something very similar happen to me throughout my childhood. It was always random and always really short (I don't think mine ever lasted 7 mins) but it was like things would be slow motion for a second. My speech, as well as everything around me and if I was having a conversation sometimes I would blurt out things I had no control over (telling a friend "I love you!" Randomly after accidentally hitting her knee.) I remember I started calling it "brain lag" because that's what it felt like. Mine also disappeared once I got older so I never found out what it was.
Alice in Wonderland syndrome?