Tricking your senses.

Hello, I wanted to post something I have seen little about, but seeing as we are all about sharing experiences I thought I'd give it a go. Essentially I placed a large balloon against my abdomen and "tricked" my mind into thinking it was my belly, it was a very real sensation, albeit not for very long. Hopefully it doesn't sound too nutty and perhaps you could even give it a go to see if you have a similar response. I will lay out the steps of what I did to see if you might be able to replicate the results.

Find a large inflated balloon. Lay on your back on a comfortable surface. Usually around bedtime might be better as your fatigued state might aid the suspension of belief, as well as being in the dark.

Place the balloon against your skin of your belly, cover yourself with a sheet and relax.

Place your hands so they rest comfortably over the top of the balloon, palms facing down. If they slide off, the balloon might be too big, if they are too close it may be too small. Just let the weight of your hands rest on the balloon, and relax. You might find you can feel your heartbeat, or your breathing through the surface of the balloon. This is good.

Now it might just be a matter of how relaxed you are, or thinking certain thoughts might help. I find thinking to myself that my hands are in fact on my belly helps. Others I've found that work are the idea that there is nothing in between the balloon and my belly, or if the balloon were to burst my hands would instantly fall to my belly.

For me, this produced a very real sensation of my hands resting against a vastly inflated tummy. It didn't last for too long but hey, maybe it will last longer for someone else or they might have an interesting thought pattern to help get into that state.

This link http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21283823 in which an experiment is carried out to see if there is a correlation between visual and tactile sensation provides some more interesting information on the subject. This is getting into wacky realms, but perhaps science and some sort of meditative technique could be combined to produce some interesting results.