You asked, "Are we talking 'singularities' here?"
Looks like we could be, cliff. I've read that the singularity, "hanging out in the Planck era," would have had the form of an ordinary point. Dean Overman writes (in A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization, 1997, p. 109),
"An expanding universe implies that the universe was previously smaller. If the rate of expansion were reversed, all of the matter in the universe would be compressed to an infinitely dense singular point smaller than a proton. The Big Bang emerged from such a singularity where spacetime is subject to an infinite curvature and does not exist in any terms which can be described by the known laws of physics. Past, future, and present are meaningless terms in this singularity. There is no 'before' in this singularity. Only after the Big Bang at Planck time (10^-43) do space and time exist as we understand those terms. From the Big Bang to time (T0 to Tp the known laws of physics are inexplicable and no quantum particles exist."
Not quite true. Were the expansion reversed, the universe would be compressed to a density beyond which current physical theories do not function.