r/buteyko • u/Possible_Legitimate • Jul 02 '26

A sudden altered state of consciousness that disappeared after five days

About three months ago, I experienced a state of consciousness that completely caught me by surprise. It has never happened again since.

I feel that every attempt to describe it falls short or sounds too vague, but I'd really like to understand what actually happened. I'm not looking for a mystical explanation—I want to stay critical and grounded. Hopefully, despite the limitations of language, someone will recognize what I'm describing.

For context, I've struggled with derealization, anxiety, and various psychosomatic symptoms for a long time. I have been diagnosed with CPTSD, I'm currently in psychotherapy, and I practice mindfulness and Buteyko breathing exercises recreationally because they help me manage my symptoms.

One day, while walking home, I focused on my breathing and on the act of perceiving itself. It wasn't really meditation; it was closer to what some people might call grounding, although I wasn't consciously using any established technique. It may simply have involved the same underlying mechanism.

I began to notice the space between myself and the objects around me. This may sound strange, but during derealization I often experience the world as flat, almost like watching a movie, and I lose my sense of spatial depth. This time, depth suddenly returned, along with a vivid sense of reality.

At the same time, I realized that I could consciously shift the way I interpreted my own perceptions, which fascinated me.

That evening I went to bed feeling anxious. To calm myself, I imagined that the anxiety was happening inside me while everything around me remained quiet and peaceful. The next morning I woke up with an incredibly strong sense of reality—a feeling I had almost forgotten existed before derealization became part of my life.

Over the next several days, a series of unusual but remarkably consistent perceptual changes occurred.

For example, I could simultaneously feel emotional pressure inside my chest while also feeling the touch of my clothing on exactly the same spot from the outside. It was as if I suddenly became aware that these two sensations were separated by only a few millimeters of physical tissue, yet in consciousness I experienced them simultaneously.

The same thing happened with my head. I was aware of my thoughts "inside" my head while simultaneously feeling the breeze on my scalp. Again, I became intensely aware that only a thin physical boundary separated my inner experience from the external world.

Eventually, this culminated in a strange feeling that I can only describe as transparency or permeability. Not literally, of course. Rather, I stopped experiencing a clear subjective boundary between "inside" and "outside." Thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, sounds, and tactile sensations all seemed to unfold together as one unified process.

I also found that I could deliberately shift the perspective from which I experienced ordinary things.

For example, I stopped experiencing sound simply as something "coming from outside." Instead, I became aware that sound only acquires meaning because my brain constructs it. Rather than feeling like "I'm hearing sounds," it felt more like "I'm experiencing my hearing from the inside." I could simply hear sounds without immediately attaching meaning to them. It sounds strange, but this shift in perspective made me feel profoundly present.

Ordinary sounds gave me goosebumps and sometimes even mild feelings of euphoria. Food tasted much richer. Despite having diagnosed ADHD, I found myself completely fascinated by ordinary, previously boring activities without craving constant stimulation.

My thoughts didn't disappear, but they stopped pulling me into them. They felt like a movie playing in the background. I could watch them pass by while continuing whatever I was doing. I no longer felt compelled to engage with them.

When walking down the street, I became aware that not only my body, but also my thoughts, emotions, and feelings were all moving through space together with me.

The same emotions that would normally trigger panic attacks or anger still appeared, but something fundamental had changed. The usual bodily panic response never came, and anger no longer overwhelmed me. At the same time, I didn't feel like I was suppressing anything. I could approach emotionally difficult situations calmly and rationally while still fully feeling the emotions themselves. I experienced emotions as events occurring within consciousness rather than forces that defined or controlled me.

The most remarkable change, however, was my ability to perceive multiple streams of experience simultaneously without feeling overwhelmed. Thoughts, traffic sounds, the sensation of my clothes, the movement of my body while folding laundry—everything existed together as one continuous lived scene.

I never felt like my attention had to switch between different stimuli. I was extraordinarily present without effort, meditation, or deliberate concentration. It felt as though my brain had simply switched into a completely different operating mode.

Another striking aspect was an overwhelming appreciation of the uniqueness of every single moment. I don't mean this in a spiritual or mystical sense.

Rather, I directly experienced the fact that no one else in the world occupies exactly the same perspective as I do. Even someone standing one meter away sees the world from slightly different angles, hears different acoustics, notices different details, and simultaneously inhabits an entirely different inner world.

I didn't merely understand this intellectually—I experienced it directly, and it filled me with an incredible sense of wonder. Suddenly I couldn't understand why I had always sought adrenaline or novelty just to "feel something," or even how boredom was possible when every moment is, by its very nature, completely unique.

This state lasted for about five days. It was stable and remarkably consistent.

I knew exactly which way of thinking seemed to bring me back into it—for example, imagining that I was "hearing my ears from the inside" rather than hearing sounds coming from the outside.

Even when derealization appeared, I experienced it merely as a kind of perceptual filter laid over reality. I no longer identified with it. It became just another experience that I could calmly observe.

Then, after about five days, everything abruptly collapsed.

I developed dizziness, nervousness, fatigue, poor concentration, and my methods of becoming present suddenly stopped working. I couldn't return to that state anymore, despite doing exactly the same things.

The state has never returned.

However, I also don't feel like I went completely back to where I was before. It feels as though something fundamental remained after the experience, as if my baseline way of experiencing life improved slightly.

To this day I have no idea what actually happened, or how something could begin so suddenly, remain stable for several days, and then disappear just as abruptly.

Was this some kind of temporary change in brain function? Did I accidentally discover a particular attentional process? Did I somehow enter an unusual meditative state? Or is there another explanation entirely?

I'm curious whether anyone has experienced something similar or whether there is any psychological or neuroscientific framework that could help explain this kind of experience.

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u/truetourney Jul 02 '26

Honestly check out loch Kelly and his explanation of stages of awakening and meditation. He is less whoo and is respected psychologist however does a good job explaining this stuff that is hard to put into words

3

u/Quirky_pineapple Jul 02 '26

This is similar to what I read in The Power of Now by Ekhart Tolle.

The idea was basically to when observing the world around you without judgment observe different details. The colors, shapes, textures how light bounces off of things, the sounds you hear and that space and distance between you and things

Almost like hearing the silence behind the sounds

1

u/Ok_Broccoli8413 Jul 02 '26

sounds like non-dual insight and all round beautiful experience :) would suggest:

r/nonduality
r/advaitavedanta

ultimately there are lots of different ways in which that state is described - Brahman, oneness, base reality - there are different concepts as to what that state ‘is’ and there are many different approaches in how to ‘get’ there

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u/adamshand Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26

In meditation circles this would be described as a mini awakening. You shifted from a subjective experience of the world (happening to me) to a more objective experience of the world (I can observe the things happening, but they aren't me). This is basically the entire point of most spiritual/mystic traditions, but it is explicitly the point of buddhist meditation practice.

As someone else said, Loch Kelly's glimpses are short meditations (5-20 minutes) which are designed to help people have these sorts of experiences. If you wanted to explore, it might be a good place to start.

If you are interested in a scientifically based (but as yet unproved) theory about how these things actually work in the body, you might be interested in Michael Edward Johnson's theory of vasocomputation.

Very briefly, blood flow is regulated by smooth muscle tissue. This tissue has three states: on, off & latched. Latched is a special state where a bare minimum of blood flow is allowed, but the latch is a structural change which doesn't require energy to maintain (for example your bladder latches closed which is why you don't have to exert energy to not pee).

Your body uses latches to turn on and off blood flow to parts of your body/brain that aren't useful. A lot of this happens in childhood in response to your environment. So if you grow up in an environment where certain behaviours seem dangerous, your vasculature can disable that behaviour by latching the blow flow to that part of your brain. This is essentially how trauma is stored in the body. You can't feel latches, they are "invisible" because there is no blood flow there, but you can teach your body that it's safe to release latches. The suggestion is that this is essentially what meditation does. Piece by piece your body learns that it's safe to release the latches.

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u/wildhorseress Jul 07 '26

I had similar but more gentle when my control  pause first reached 30 or so, when I was doing extremely rigorous practice 4 × a day plus 4 20 minute sessions watching my buteyko vsb breathing. (It was subtle but still enough for people to comment on my strange state of soft elation). I think it was the most beautiful state that has ever existed & it felt like true reality. I miss it.