Kin-adjacent Experiences

One interesting thing about being kin is a lot of us have experiences that are vaguely related to being kin, but decidedly outside of the kin ‘box’, and can also be experienced by people who are not actually kin. There’s really a whole constellation of these types of weirdnesses that can go along with or be adjacent to experiencing yourself as non-human and/or from a ‘fictional’ universe and  fall under the general umbrella of ‘kinnish’ experiences.

Some interesting ‘kin-adjacent’ experiences I’ve had personally, or have spoken to people who have had are:

soulbonding/character channelling/multiplicity: probably the most common kin-adjacent experince is the phenomena of sharing your body with the mind/spirit of someone else for however long or short a time. Sometimes , but not nearly always, these are entities that come from the same worlds and lives that the kin has experienced. (I share headspace the Black Queen from Homestuck, which is one of my kin lives, but also with characters from Phoenix Wright and Doctor Who which I’ve never directly experienced).

dream travelling/Alice syndrome: some kin travel to other worlds through their dreams and experience periods of time or even whole lives in them. This can vary between being ‘born’ in these worlds as a natural inhabitant, or being pulled into them from our world by circumstance. If the person in question vanishes from the world for a while, when they return the inhabitants will note the time has passed.The crux of this experience is that it’s generally not a single dream (or if it is, it’s a very long one), but a series of dreams that are in continuity between one another, and are experienced lucidly and aware as if one were awake.  (This is something I experienced when I was younger, but haven’t had an experience with in a while.)

‘reverse’ soulbonding/mindjacking: a little bit like dream travelling, but not quite. This is an experience where instead of a fictional character sharing your mind, you somehow experience being in the mind of a fictional character alongside them, while they experience their own life. For one example, sharing Legolas’ mind, and going with him in his body while he’s with the nine walkers, having discussions with him mentally. Or for another example, waking up to find that you are yourself, in the body of Legolas temporarily. Both are generally, but not always experienced as a dream.

cameo shifts/random shifts: A temporary shift/transformation into another entity/person that has no relation to your kintypes/kinselves. For example, a snake otherkin who randomly wakes up one day to find that they’ve shifted into a tiger somehow. Or a Cloud fictionkin experiences being Ash Ketchum for 3 hours for no reason. These experiences are generally vivid, sudden, and without explanation. Note that as always, these are NONPHYSICAL shifts. Physical/P-shifting is impossible and this refers to mental/astral/aura/dream/etc shifting.

soulbond sharing: when a specific instance of a character/person moves from the mind of one person, to the mind of another person they known, while retaining their usual self and any information/experiences gained while they were bonded to the first person.

I know there are other experiences like this, but these are the ones I’ve had, and the most common ones others have mentioned to me (off the top of my head).