Alice in wonderland Syndrome
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- benfal99
How funny. I discovered yesterday that I was suffering from this when I was a kid. And you? Does it ring a bell?
Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (AIWS or AWS) describes a set of symptoms, the most famous of which are:
* Alteration of body image: the sizes of parts of the body are perceived incorrectly.
* Alteration of visual perception: the sizes of external objects are perceived incorrectly.Symptoms in detail
The most prominent and often most disturbing symptom is that of altered body image: the sufferer will find that they are confused as to the size and shape of parts of (or all of) their body. The parts usually mentioned are the head and hands; growth seems more usual than shrinkage. This phenomenon seems to have the medical term 'metamorphosis'.
The second major symptom is the distortion of visual perception. The eyes themselves are normal, but the sufferer 'sees' objects with the wrong size or shape and/or finds that perspective is incorrect. This can mean that people, cars, buildings, etc. look smaller or larger than they should be, or that distances look incorrect; for example a corridor may appear to be very long, or the ground may appear too close.
Other symptoms which have been referred to as part of AIWS include:
* Distorted time perception; time moving quickly or slowly.
* Distorted touch perception, e.g. a feeling that the ground is 'spongy' under the feet or that the sensation received from touching something is simply incorrect or unrecognised.
* Distorted sound perception.Possible causes
* Classical migraine
* Temporal Lobe Epilepsy
* The Epstein-Barr virus, which can cause infectious mononucleosis
- 7point340
i've heard on one syndrome where the sufferer feels there is an imaginary line that runs down the length of their body and basically one side looks fine but the other side looks horribly grotesque and out of proportion.
bizarre stuff
- Nairn0
I remember occasionally feeling this as a kid too - a friend of mine from home claimed that he still suffered this well in to adulthood.
Mind you, he has a ginormous head, so perhaps it's a mere question of perspective in his case.
- Nairn0
Back in '99 I would walk down corridors and have this deep urge to do a forward flip and land on my feet. I could feel the want blush from the space between my frontal lobes and seep through my body, deep into the pit of my stomach like a hunger. Having never had such a gymnastic ability, I never fed the craving, suffering its draw for a good 6 months before it faded.
Stupidly, I mentioned this to my boss at the time - the reciprocal look she gave confirmed to me this was an astandard feeling, so I clammed up and never mentioned it again.
- 7point340
this i feel would be more frightening, or possibly a combination of this and the above:
- ********0
nope, didn't had it.
- fiver0
i never experienced the body perception, but definitely the second major symptom of altered perspectives of your physical surroundings. used to fucking freak me out when i was a kid....
- fiver0
how did you find this?
is it that common?
- benfal990
i was on a website talking about rare and weird diseases...
Its not that common
- benfal990
no real statistics because people dont often see a doctor for this. it doesnt hurt or anything.