The mystery of Alice in Wonderland syndrome
bbc.com

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33 points

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amichail

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a month ago

18 comments

jameskilton ・ 22 days ago

I dealt with this kind of thing for years growing up, and for the most part grown out of it but it can still strike me out of nowhere.

The feelings of the walls of the room suddenly racing away from you, or the feeling that your hands are suddenly 10x as big and everything you touch is tiny, are terrifying for a growing kid. Heck even talking about it now tingles those fears just a bit, but now I can for the most part logic myself out of it.

I slept with a light on in my room for many years, that was the only thing that helped.

  • Baeocystin ・ 22 days ago

    Interesting. I never knew there was a name for this phenomena. It happened to me every now and then as a kid, too, usually when I was sick and in bed. In my case, it made me feel vertigo, like size scales were shifting around so fast I'd lose my balance and fall over, stuff like that, but I don't remember any particular fear reaction per se, other than feeling kind of gross when it happened. I found that dim light (like a nightlight in a child's bedroom, with long shadows) was the worst trigger, and either bright light or complete darkness helped avoid it.

ACS_Solver ・ 22 days ago

Fascinating, I had no idea that it's a thing.

Also interesting to see people they experienced this when sick as children. I did too, I remember two instances when I had fevers and was seeing such things. Some objects would suddenly have the wrong size, or my parents would appear like they're very far away. It was a scary experience that I think would be much less scary now as an adult, but definitely not something I'd like anyway.

dustractor ・ 21 days ago

Wow. It's nice to finally have a better name for this. I saw several therapists when I was age 12-17 and they would just slap the blanket label "panic attacks" on it which never felt very apt at all. It rarely happened out of a state of panic. For example, I might look out the window at some trees and houses on the horizon and suddenly something would trigger a sensation that was like the awareness that the true scale of things was much, much larger than we usually let on. That line in a Pink Floyd song -- "My hands ... felt like ... two balloons" was like a lifeline for me in my teens to believe that I wasn't the only one dealing with this. (Except I would have sung it "My tongue ... felt like a ... schoolbus")

Sometimes I would be riding in a car, looking out the window and suddenly the "panic attack" would occur and I would beg the driver to slow down. Even when they stopped the car completely I would still be freaking out. "No! Go slower!"

IAmGraydon ・ 22 days ago

I had intense AiW syndrome at times when I was younger. It would involuntarily come on if I was extremely tired, and I eventually learned that I could control it or even induce it with some mental focus. Once I learned to control it, I could push it to the point that my visual perspective was just like looking through a telescope backwards. I was the size of the head of a pin and everything was far, far away. When it got very intense, I would start to have an almost out-of-body sensation like what I was seeing was somehow separate from me - a fisheye movie and I was in a void observing it. My hearing would sometimes start to have a similar effect as well.

I remember asking my parents about it like everyone experienced it when I was maybe 8 years old, and they had no idea what I was talking about. It stopped happening involuntarily a long time ago (maybe late teens - I'm in my 40s now), but I'm sure I could still induce it if I really wanted to, specially if I'm tired and laying down in a dim room.

more_corn ・ 22 days ago

When I had fevers as a child I would experience my perception of space and my place in it wildly growing and shrinking. For me it was a rapid flip-flop (gargantuan then tiny, repeat) and was nausea inducing (or perhaps it was coincident with sickness induced nausea). My memories of it were while in bed since that’s where I was most of the time when sick. Strangely the bed came with me.

frotaur ・ 22 days ago

Funny, when I was less than 12 years old, I remember often (usually when sick) seeing people shrink, feel like they appear to be very far away, and feeling like they were slowed down. It hasn't happened since then, I wonder if it's related to this!

  • gyomu ・ 22 days ago

    I think our brains as kids are very different than as adults, and like it’s a fairly unexplored area because studying kids is much, much harder than 20 somethings or older.

    I have a number of such weird things, the most dramatic being probably that I remember experiencing vivid synesthesia until age 4/5 or so, which kind of faded away has never happened since.

    • gehwartzen ・ 22 days ago

      I remember having similar experiences as a child. What's strange to think about is; what if we lived in a world where we all had this symptom and just considered it normal? The intersection of "reality" and perception is a fascicnating place

      • Nevermark ・ 22 days ago

        After a long walk, I often have the experience of standing still on pavement, and watching the paving continually expand away from me.

        Obviously a simple example of fatigue of neurons encoding one perceptual quality enabling the over expression/perception of its opposite. But it just demonstrates how fragile our conscious perceptions are to every day minor sensory/perception deviations from their nominal correspondence.

        After/during a traumatic experience, my mind disassociated from a basic aspect of reality. I knew what I perceived was completely nonsensical and misleading, but that didn't attenuate the very dramatic and warped perception in the slightest, for months.

ric2z ・ 21 days ago

I experienced severe derealization and depersonalization 8 years ago for about 3 weeks.

It was increasingly disorienting. My wires felt crossed. A scary movie would make me sad instead of scared. My sensation of hot or cold were different, sort of “distant”.

A psychiatrist told me I was simply anxious, and gave me some meds. Eventually I was fine. I don’t know if the meds really helped or if the issue went away on its own.

Just reading about this stuff is scary to me. Being in that state for several weeks felt like I was losing my mind.

nis0s ・ 21 days ago

I could be wrong, but one possible reason may be inflammation of regions of the brain responsible for regulating sleep, and involving connection with vision, like the thalamus. Here’s a recent study which seems to point in that direction https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10520557/

WrongOnInternet ・ 22 days ago

Surprised that the article never mentions psychedelics, because I experience something similar almost every time I am under the influence of one.

  • ranma42 ・ 21 days ago

    It does say "Certain cough medicines and illicit hallucinogenic substances are also known to trigger it"

  • razakel ・ 20 days ago

    I've never had it on psychedelics, but it did happen when I first tried ketamine.