Did anyone else have missing time experiences as a kid before they knew what that meant?

Yes, absolutely this. I had two incidents between ages 7 and 9 where I'd be playing in the back garden or walking home from school and just... lose chunks of the afternoon. Not like falling asleep, nothing like that. More like someone had cut a piece out of the day. My mum would be furious because I'd turn up two or three hours late with no explanation and I genuinely had none to give her.

The weird thing is I didn't even register it as strange at the time. It was only years later when I started reading about abduction accounts that something clicked and I went cold.

What gets me is how many people report that same quality to it - not confusion exactly, more like a seam where the time was just removed cleanly. Does that resonate with anyone else here? Particularly curious if anyone experienced it in Cornwall or the southwest generally because there does seem to be a cluster of these reports from this area and I dont think thats a coincidence.

@Bev43 yeah I had something similar around age 8, out on the moor near where I grew up. Set off walking back to the farm around 3pm, arrived home and it was nearly dark. My mum went absolutely spare at me but I genuinely had no memory of where the time went. Felt like maybe twenty minutes had passed. No tiredness, no hunger, nothing to explain it. What stuck with me more than anything was this odd flat feeling afterwards, like the world had been paused and restarted and I was the only one who noticed. Didnt make sense of it until years later when I started researching this stuff properly.