ALTERED STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS I: Introduction
One of my earliest encounters with the power of an altered state of consciousness was when I heard about the incredible skills and capacities of fakirs. Larbig (1982) described a case of a fakir who was able to pierce his body with swords and daggers after about two hours of intense meditation. He not only reported a complete absence of pain, but also did not bleed as he pierced his face, chest, and abdomen. Meditation - and the mind - had a remarkable physical effect on the body - namely it stopped the natural process of pain and bleeding. Now add the neurotransmitters that repeated impact (pain) naturally triggers, and imagine the capacities that a impact-triggered deep altered state of consciousness has on the body.
Charles Tart, a foundational figure in the psychology of consciousness, defined altered states as
“a qualitative alteration in the overall pattern of mental functioning […] that is radically different from the ordinary” (1972).
What makes a state "altered" is not simply that it's unusual, but that it reorganizes how sensory input, memory, identity, emotion, and self-awareness are processed and experienced.
The same category includes things people already recognize: the “tunnel-focus” of a runner's flow state, the way grief can make a Tuesday afternoon feel unreal, or a two-hour session feel like a good half-an-hour. What ties them together isn't the trigger — it's that something in the perception of reality has shifted.
Duration stops being tracked the way it normally does. I'm a perfect example for that: even as top, via the mirror neuron phenomena, I get high too. I can’t process and calculate numbers on a digital watch; it's part of why I keep an analogue clock in the studio or wear an analogue watch during sessions: so I don’t need to compute anything. Counting strokes runs into the same wall — which is one of the reasons I have guests count them aloud themselves, out loud. This isn't confusion, and it isn't "being bad at math" in the moment. It's a specific, well-documented feature of altered states: numeric processing is a relatively high-level cognitive task, and it's often one of the first things to go offline when the brain shifts into this mode.
For people who reach this through impact play, that shift tends to show up in a few specific ways:
Time gets slippery. Duration stops being tracked the way it normally is. Scenes that lasted 2 hours can feel like half an hour; scenes that lasted five can feel endless.
The edges of the body blur. Where skin ends and the outside world begins can stop feeling fixed. Some people describe warmth spreading past where they were actually struck, or losing precise track of the location: it feels as if the entire limb or body region was hit all of a sudden.
Words land differently. A simple instruction — breathe, count, look at me — can carry a weight it wouldn't carry in ordinary conversation. This is heightened suggestibility, a well-documented feature of altered states generally, not unique to this context.
Control feels optional. The sense of being the one steering the moment — deciding, evaluating, narrating — can fade. This is often described as surrender, but it's more precisely a measurable dip in the felt sense of agency.
Read the second part on Altered State of Consciousness II: The Cornerstones.