Alice in Wonderland Syndrome
Last year, I stumbled upon an article about something called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, a temporary neurological condition during which the brain incorrectly interprets signals coming from the eyes and delivers a time-, size-, or shape-distorted view of the world. I was stunned as I read more, as I periodically experience this effect!
Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (AIWS) is named after Lewis Carroll’s novel Through the Looking Glass. In one scene, Alice eats cookies that change the size of her body, causing her to alternately be too small and too large for her environment. AIWS is temporary, and many report that it is more common after waking or when exhausted. Some experience their body changing shape (uniformly or just certain parts), and others feel that the objects or the world around them have changed size. Some even experience temporal disturbances, like feeling like they’re moving really quickly or really slowly.
Here is how I experience it.
It almost always happens to me when I’ve just woken up or when I’m very tired. Darkness can increase the chances of its onset. Reading can also be a factor. The most common scenario, by far, is that I’m tired, it’s dark, and I’m reading something up close for a long time. It’s as if my brain becomes uncalibrated for the 3-D world. This happens maybe four times a year, and each episode lasts between 15 minutes and two hours. Except for when I wake up with it, I can always feel it starting to come on. It is a variable effect, both in its onset and in its disappearance. Its severity varies.
My disturbances are of micropsia — I feel that the world around me has shrunk. The effect varies with distance away from my eyes. Standing in a large room, I feel as though I could reach out and touch all four of the walls without moving my body. If I try, my arm seems to stretch out for many feet and almost reach the wall (in reality, it may be 10 feet away). If I look down, it’s as if I’m looking off the top of a skyscraper. My feet look small and far away. My legs converge like two railroad tracks stretching off to the horizon. These two effects (the walls looking close, but my limbs feeling long) are hard to reconcile. Everything is distorted, like I’m viewing it through a wide angle lens.
This still from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland film is a fairly close representation of what it looks like when I look down.
Normally I have excellent distance vision, and can read things very far away. When I’m experiencing this syndrome, I have to bring things in very close to read. At close distances, things appear almost normal. I can read text if it’s within two feet, and it looks almost normal-sized about 8 inches from my face. I’ve attempted to trick my brain out of the syndrome by focusing on an object close up, where it appears almost normal, and slowing moving it backwards. It doesn’t work.
Moving around is a bizarre experience. It seems as if I can span any distance in a step or two, so when I try (and it takes more steps) it seems as if I’m moving in slow motion. In fact, due to my distorted view of my body, the entire experience almost feels out-of-body. There’s a sense of haziness or blurriness. Despite the strangeness of it, I don’t have much trouble walking around. I’m not dizzy or clumsy.
The surest way to make it go away is to sleep. Otherwise it’s just a waiting game. The effect wears off more slowly than it comes on. At the end of it, things just feel a little distorted. Sometimes it’s hard for me to know when it’s gone, since I’ve spent a while in this distorted world that even a diminished distortion seems like a massive improvement.
It’s not frightening or all that inconvenient. It’s just strange.
