Rik Hemsley
When it first happened, I was a 21-year-old undergraduate. I had been up late the night before writing my dissertation and drinking a lot of coffee, but on that particular morning I was stone cold sober and hangover-free. I stood up, reached down to pick up the TV remote control from the floor and felt my foot sink into the ground. Glancing down, I saw that my leg was plunging into the carpet. It was a disturbing sensation, but it lasted only a few seconds, so I put it down to over-tiredness and forgot all about it.
It wasn't long, however, before I started experiencing more extreme spatial distortions. Floors either curved or dipped, and when I tried walking on them, it felt as though I was staggering on sponges. When I lay in bed and looked at my hands, my fingers stretched off half a mile into the distance. These bizarre episodes were starting to happen more often, but because I was under pressure to finish my degree and get a job, I continued to put them to one side, figuring they must be stress-related or indicative of poor sleeping or diet.
When it first happened, I was a 21-year-old undergraduate. I had been up late the night before writing my dissertation and drinking a lot of coffee, but on that particular morning I was stone cold sober and hangover-free. I stood up, reached down to pick up the TV remote control from the floor and felt my foot sink into the ground. Glancing down, I saw that my leg was plunging into the carpet. It was a disturbing sensation, but it lasted only a few seconds, so I put it down to over-tiredness and forgot all about it.
It wasn't long, however, before I started experiencing more extreme spatial distortions. Floors either curved or dipped, and when I tried walking on them, it felt as though I was staggering on sponges. When I lay in bed and looked at my hands, my fingers stretched off half a mile into the distance. These bizarre episodes were starting to happen more often, but because I was under pressure to finish my degree and get a job, I continued to put them to one side, figuring they must be stress-related or indicative of poor sleeping or diet.
I graduated and took a job as a system administrator in a new town, but instead of going away, my symptoms just got worse. Everything was now distorted, all the time. Walking down the road, parked cars appeared the size of Corgi models, while I'd feel disproportionately tall. At work, my chair seemed enormous, while I seemed to have shrunk.
Seeing the world through a fisheye lens made day-to-day life very difficult. Unable to judge distances accurately, I would often move clumsily or overcompensate. Soon I found it a struggle to leave the house; I had difficulty correctly perceiving the ground, so walking was tricky. If I didn't think about it I was OK, but as soon as I did, I found myself slumping and struggling to walk in a straight line. Crossing the road began to feel dangerous; when I saw a car coming, I had no idea what size it was, or how far away.
By now I was wondering what on earth was wrong with me. My GP reassured me that there wasn't anything the matter psychologically, suggesting instead that I was suffering from migraines. But painkillers proved ineffective and an MRI scan revealed nothing. Unable to cope with a job any more, I moved back in with my parents. It was there that I caught the tail-end of a TV documentary in which a woman complained of exactly my symptoms. It was the first I'd heard of Alice In Wonderland Syndrome. Identifying my problem gave me some hope of a cure, but neither my doctor nor neurologist could find any medical record of the condition. The prevailing message was that I'd just have to learn to live with it.
For a while I sat around at home, living off my savings, but after a couple of years I started working again from home. This gave me an income, but for the best part of a decade I was unable to enjoy the kind of personal life I wanted. I like going out at least once a week to socialise and relax, but my symptoms made these nights out more painful than enjoyable. In conversation, I would become terrified that an overload of odd perceptions would make me seize up or stop talking altogether.I'm 31 now and, thankfully, experience spatial distortions only about once a month. I haven't driven a car for a long time, but I've got a job and a girlfriend, and we've bought a house, so I'm not yearning for an explanation or a miracle cure in the way that I was. I'm still no wiser about what the catalyst was for me - perhaps too much coffee, perhaps too long in a darkened room programming computers - or maybe it was to do with my age: a lot of people get AIWS when they're six or seven and grow out of it.
Whatever the reason, my AIWS is now at a level that enables me to lead a relatively normal life, so I've learned to accept it. Undoubtedly the syndrome has made my life infinitely more challenging, but there is one part of it that I really enjoyed: sometimes, especially shortly after waking up, I would experience a kind of binocular vision. Lying in bed, I would find myself staring out of the window, watching crows flying over trees 100m away, but able to see the details on each bird and treetop as if they were at arm's length. That particular side-effect seems to have stopped now, and I almost miss it.
Found HERE
Alice In Wonderland syndrome
"Have you ever gone to bed, perhaps feeling a little under the weather, and, just as you start to fall asleep, had the sensation that you were growing taller, or shrinking? Or that your body was floating away, or sinking down into your bed? If so, you have experienced a mild 'Alice in Wonderland' symptom...."
images by Andre Kertesz
The similarity of the phenomena of macro- and microsomatognosia to the bodily transformations described by Lewis Carroll in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) doesn't escape notice, as has first been pointed out by Lippman (1952) and Todd (1955), the latter suggesting the medical term Alice in Wonderland syndrome to account for the body image disturbances in question.
"Did you know that the scene where Alice (in Wonderland) drinks the potions and gets bigger and smaller is supposed to be because the author suffered from migraines and was just describing his own sensations?"
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