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In my previous post, I shared several accounts where people perceived themselves as being outside their bodies or merging in some way with someone or something else. What I want to suggest is that these kinds of experiences, as offbeat as they might seem, harken back to the way human beings are fundamentally "wired"—the way all of us come into the world.
Someone who charted these waters was the late Donna Williams. Raised in Australia, she was autistic but didn’t know it until diagnosed at age 26. Growing up, Donna was encased in her own world. She constantly dealt with a barrage of sensation, finding high-pitched sounds, bright lights, and even the most basic touch intolerable. Instead, she would focus on discrete sensory impressions… the scraping sound of a comb, the smoothness of a patent leather shoe, the way a chandelier breaks the light into many prismatic colors.
This fascination with sensation is characteristic of people with autism. They tend to perceive objects and even other people not as unique wholes but as particular elements: shapes, sounds, textures, movements, or patterns. It’s quite different from what most people do. We recognize the "gestalt" of a face—its overall impression—versus the elements that comprise it.
It might be helpful here to recall the droning sound of a teacher that the kids in that Peanuts cartoon show on TV heard. The human being making that sound was never shown, nor were the words that teacher might be saying; from the perspective of a bored student sitting in class, the droning sound was all that mattered.
As recounted in my new book, Sensitive Soul, Williams cultivated her style of perceiving. She termed it “peripheral perception” and her “shadow sense.” It was indirect, fragmentary, attuned to feel, pattern, and movement. Her way of being, especially as a child, was to effectively lose herself in her surroundings.
For those of us who are not autistic, it would seem like daydreaming versus paying close attention. But amazingly, through her shadow sense, Williams said she could “sense the boundaries of a room… purely on sonics” and gather “the surface, texture, and density of material without looking at it with physical eyes or touching it with physical hands.” It was, she says, “as though some part of me, of my be-ing,” could see, hear, touch, and feel “without my body making direct physical contact.”
Williams would direct this shadow sense via what she called her “will.” By this, she didn’t mean a last will and testament. She meant a personal agency, a sense of self somehow independent of the body. By engaging her will, she claimed to be able to do things that were easy and ordinary for her but exceedingly strange and extraordinary for the rest of us. For example, she relates that she could "merge" with people she knew:
"I didn’t do this with imagination. I didn’t fantasize… I simply found myself feeling physically in these places or with these people. I could not see myself there, and I did not interact with the people I’d been drawn to. Yet I did feel myself moving up the stairs to my friend’s flat, through the front door, and into the kitchen. I could sense the smell of the room and the noises in the room. I could ‘hear’ and ‘see’ as my friends moved about and went on with things.
"What I’d seen and heard was generally quite trivial; someone doing the dishes, getting something to eat, going to bed. What… surprised me was that, upon checking with these friends without prompting them about what I’d experienced, the events had apparently happened in the same order in which I’d seen them at the time I’d ‘been there.’
"[One] of the strangest experiences among these [was] one when I ‘visited’ my friend but found myself in a different house. I moved from room to room and found what felt like her room. When I saw her again, she told me she’d moved house, and I told her I knew. She was surprised at this and asked how. I described the house and the layout of the rooms, and my description has been precisely in accordance with where her family had moved.
"The other experience was after leaving a house I’d lived in for two years. In the two months before I’d left, I’d moved bedrooms and had stayed in one with a sliding door. After having left, I continued to dream that I was living in that house. About a year later, I saw the person who remained living there who proclaimed I’d 'never left.' I asked what this meant and was told that for some time afterward, every morning, around the time I’d usually get up, the door would slide itself open. It occurred to me then that what others call 'ghosts' were possibly sometimes merely unintentional out-of-body experiences."
When these perceptual shifts would end, Williams was typically surprised to find herself back in her own body. The out-of-body nature of her mental and emotional perambulations reminds me of another noteworthy autistic person, Daniel Tammet. He, like Donna, grew up to be high-functioning, writing books that explain to the rest of us what it’s like to be autistic—and, in his case, a synesthete besides.16 (Synesthesia is the conjoining of senses; people born with it smell sounds, taste shapes, see colored words and numbers, etc.)
But instead of directing a “shadow sense” outside of him, Tammet focused entirely inward. When bullied by other children, for example, “I would put my fingers in my ears… and I would count to myself, very, very quickly in powers of two… on and on into the millions and the numbers would form patterns in my mind… colors, patterns, shapes, and textures. It would just be a beautiful experience…and the [other] children… were kind of perplexed and just walked away. How could they bully someone who didn't know how to be bullied?”
As an alternative to engaging with other people (which he’s since become quite good at), Tammet reveled in solace. Silence, for him, “was a beautiful thing; it was a kind of silvery texture around my head like condensation running down a windowpane. And when someone made a noise, a knock on the door, a car horn blaring on the street below, it would be a shattering of that experience… physically painful.”
In my next post, we'll see how Tammet's experience translates to other types of highly sensitive people - and their particular mode of sensing when very young.
References
Williams, Donna. (1992). Nobody Nowhere. New York: Times Books.
Williams, Donna. (1998). Autism and Sensing: The Unlost Instinct. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Grandin, Temple and Johnson, Catherine. (2005). Animals in Translation. New York: Scribner, 2005.
Jawer, Michael A. (2020). Sensitive Soul. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press.
Tammet. Daniel. (2006). Born on a Blue Day. New York: The Free Press.
“Savant Life.” Interview with Daniel Tammet. To the Best of Our Knowledge. Nov. 6, 2012. Wisconsin Public Radio. www.ttbook.org/book/daniel-tammet-savant-life.
