Alice in Wonderland Syndrome: A Curious Condition
Alice in Wonderland Syndrome
What happens when your body changes size, time becomes strange, space collapses into something unfamiliar, and the world you know suddenly feels completely different?
There are experiences that ordinary language cannot quite hold.
You can tell someone that your tongue suddenly felt enormous, but that sentence does not really communicate what happened. You can tell them that time and space seemed to collapse into a single, enormous present moment, but that still does not quite capture the experience.
You can tell them that everything seemed brighter and that, strangely, you sometimes felt an extraordinary sense of unconditional love, but now you are asking another person to understand something that happened somewhere beyond the boundaries of ordinary perception.
I know this because I experienced it.
For a long time, I had experiences that were difficult to make sense of. They were not all identical, and they did not always follow the same sequence. One of the recurring experiences began with my tongue.
My tongue would begin to feel too large.
Not actually large. I knew perfectly well that it had not physically swollen. I could look at it and understand that nothing had changed anatomically. But the sensation was completely convincing. My tongue felt disproportionately large, as though my brain had suddenly changed the scale at which I experienced a part of my own body.
Sometimes the sensation would become quite pronounced. And sometimes, if the experience continued, something even stranger would happen.
The ordinary experience of time seemed to disappear. Past, present, and future no longer felt like separate places in a sequence. There was simply now.
Not “now” in the ordinary sense of being present in the moment. Something much more radical than that. It was a sensation of now-ness, as though everything had somehow collapsed into the present and there was nowhere else to be.
Space could feel altered as well. The familiar relationship between myself, my surroundings, distance, and location seemed temporarily different. It is difficult to explain because we normally take these things completely for granted. We assume that our perception of the size of our body, the size of objects around us, the passage of time, and our position within space are stable.
They are not.
They are experiences constructed by the brain.
And sometimes that construction changes.
What is Alice in Wonderland Syndrome?
Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, or AIWS, is the name given to a group of perceptual disturbances in which a person’s experience of their body, the surrounding world, time, or space can become temporarily distorted.
The name comes from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in which Alice experiences dramatic changes in her perception of her own size and the world around her.
The name is almost whimsical, but the experience itself can be anything but whimsical.
A person experiencing AIWS may perceive objects as unusually large or unusually small. Their own hands, feet, head, tongue, or other parts of their body may feel strangely proportioned. Familiar objects may appear distorted. Distance can seem different. A room may feel enormous or strangely compressed. Time may appear to accelerate or slow down.
Some people describe sensations that are difficult to categorize visually at all. The experience can involve the perception of movement, sound, touch, bodily proportions, or the relationship between the self and the surrounding environment.
This is important because AIWS is often reduced to the image of Alice looking at a tiny table or suddenly becoming enormous. The reality can be much more subtle.
The Body
Hands, feet, heads, tongues, or other body parts may feel unusually large, small, distant, close, or otherwise distorted.
The World
Objects, rooms, distances, and familiar surroundings can temporarily seem larger, smaller, closer, farther away, or strangely proportioned.
Time
Time may appear to speed up, slow down, or become profoundly altered in its ordinary relationship to experience.
Self and Space
The relationship between the body, the surrounding environment, and the experience of being a self can become temporarily unfamiliar.
Sometimes the world looks normal while your body feels completely wrong.
Sometimes your body feels normal while the world seems altered.
Sometimes it is the experience of time itself that becomes strange.
And sometimes several of these things happen together.
When your own body becomes strange
One of the most unsettling aspects of perceptual distortion is that the body is normally our most reliable reference point.
We live inside it every moment. We know, without consciously thinking about it, approximately how large our hands are, where our feet are, how large our head feels, where our tongue is inside our mouth, and how our body relates to the surrounding environment.
We rarely question any of this.
Until the perception changes.
For me, the sensation of my tongue becoming too large was particularly strange because it was so specific. There was no visible explanation for it. Nothing had physically happened to my tongue, yet my sensory experience of it had changed.
The experience was real even though the physical change was not.
This distinction matters. A perceptual distortion is not the same thing as consciously deciding to imagine something. When perception changes, the experience can feel completely involuntary.
You can know that your hand is the same size and still experience it as enormous.
You can know that the room has not moved and still experience its dimensions differently.
You can know that only a few minutes have passed and still feel as though time has become something entirely different.
The brain does not simply show us reality like a camera. It constructs our experience of reality.
When time becomes now
The temporal experiences were even harder to describe.
Ordinarily, consciousness gives us an apparently continuous movement through time. There is a moment that has already happened, a moment happening now, and a moment that has not happened yet.
During some of my experiences, that ordinary structure seemed to disappear.
Everything became now.
There was no comfortable sense of moving from one moment to the next. Instead, there was an intense quality of immediacy, a kind of total presentness that is difficult to put into words.
It was not simply mindfulness. It was not merely being very present. It felt as though the normal architecture of time had temporarily changed.
And then there was the brightness.
There was sometimes a sense of brightness accompanying these experiences, along with something even more difficult to explain: a profound feeling of unconditional love.
This was not simply feeling happy or peaceful.
It felt as though love was present in the experience itself.
There was nothing I had to accomplish to receive it. Nothing I had to prove. Nothing I had to become.
It was simply there.
I mention this because descriptions of AIWS tend to focus almost exclusively on the disturbing aspects of perceptual distortion. And understandably so. These experiences can be frightening, especially when they occur without warning.
But my experience was more complicated than that.
There were moments when the alteration in perception was deeply strange and disorienting, but there were also moments that carried a quality of profound beauty.
I don’t need to decide what that experience ultimately meant in order to tell the truth about having experienced it.
It was part of what happened.
The brain is a perception-making system
One of the most fascinating things about AIWS is that it reveals something we normally have very little reason to question: our experience of the world is not the world itself.
The brain is constantly receiving sensory information and constructing a coherent experience from it.
It estimates size. It calculates distance. It integrates information from vision, touch, proprioception, the vestibular system, memory, and other sensory systems.
It gives us a sense of where our body ends and the outside world begins. It gives us continuity. It gives us a sense of time.
Most of the time, all of this happens so seamlessly that we never notice the machinery underneath our experience.
AIWS can make that machinery visible.
Suddenly you discover that the experience of your own body is not as fixed as it seemed.
You discover that the size of your tongue is not simply a fact you perceive. Your experience of its size is being generated by a nervous system.
You discover that the experience of time moving forward is also something your brain constructs.
And when that construction changes, the world you experience changes with it.
What causes Alice in Wonderland Syndrome?
AIWS is not a single disease with one single cause.
It has been associated with several neurological and medical conditions, including migraine, epilepsy, infections, and other disorders affecting the brain and nervous system. It can also occur in children and may sometimes be temporary.
Migraine is one of the more commonly discussed associations. Some people experience perceptual disturbances as part of a migraine aura, sometimes even without the severe headache that most people associate with migraine.
The neurological mechanisms are still being studied.
Researchers have proposed that AIWS may involve temporary disruption in areas and networks responsible for integrating sensory information, spatial perception, body representation, and temporal processing. Depending on which systems are involved, the experience can take very different forms.
This may help explain why there is no single “AIWS experience.”
One person may primarily experience micropsia, in which objects seem smaller than they actually are. Another may experience macropsia, in which objects or body parts seem larger. Another may experience altered distance, distorted body perception, or changes in the experience of time.
The brain is not malfunctioning in one uniform way.
The perceptual experience depends on which aspects of its extraordinarily complicated processing are being altered.
Why it can be frightening
Imagine suddenly feeling that your body is changing size.
Then imagine realizing that the room feels different.
Then imagine that time itself no longer seems to behave normally.
If you have no explanation for what is happening, fear is a completely understandable response.
The frightening part is often not the distortion itself. It is the uncertainty surrounding it.
What is happening to me? Am I losing my mind? Is this going to stop?
Those questions can become more frightening than the original sensation.
And because perceptual experiences are private, it can be difficult to communicate them to other people. Someone can listen to you describe your tongue feeling enormous or time collapsing into now and still have no frame of reference for what you mean.
That isolation can make the experience even more unsettling.
Knowing that other people have experienced similar phenomena can be profoundly reassuring.
There is a name for this.
You are not necessarily imagining that something strange happened.
The brain really can alter the way the body and world are perceived.
The difference between perception and reality
There is an important distinction here that I wish more people understood.
A perceptual distortion is not the same thing as consciously deciding to imagine something.
When perception changes, the experience can feel completely involuntary.
You are not choosing to make your tongue feel enormous.
You are not deciding that time should stop feeling linear.
You are not deliberately creating a strange relationship between your body and the room around you.
The experience arrives.
This is part of what makes neurological perceptual phenomena so fascinating. Consciousness is not simply a passive observer of reality. It is an active process through which the brain constructs the reality we experience.
Usually, that construction is so accurate and so consistent that we forget it is happening.
AIWS can briefly pull back the curtain.
The experience can be strange without being meaningless.
I have also come to appreciate that there is a temptation to divide unusual experiences into two categories: either they are medically explainable, in which case they are meaningless, or they are spiritually significant, in which case they must have a supernatural explanation.
I don’t think we have to make that choice.
An experience can have a neurological explanation and still be deeply meaningful to the person who experienced it.
My experience of unconditional love during some of these episodes does not need to be erased simply because there may be a neurological mechanism behind the perceptual changes.
The experience happened.
The feeling happened.
The brightness happened.
The strange alteration of time and space happened.
What ultimately caused those experiences, and what they meant to me, are separate questions.
Sometimes the most honest thing we can say about an unusual human experience is that we do not completely understand it.
You are more than your perception in a moment.
There is something else worth remembering when strange neurological experiences occur.
The brain can temporarily produce an experience that feels completely convincing without that experience becoming the entirety of who you are.
A sensation is an experience.
A perception is an experience.
A state of consciousness is an experience.
It can be extraordinarily powerful without becoming the definition of the person having it.
This distinction can be comforting when the experience is frightening.
You can experience something bizarre without becoming bizarre.
You can experience a distortion without the world actually becoming distorted.
You can experience a frightening alteration in consciousness without having lost yourself.
Sometimes the brain takes us somewhere very strange and then brings us back.
Sometimes the brain lets us see the machinery.
I have never forgotten these experiences.
Perhaps because they forced me to question something I had previously taken completely for granted: the stability of reality as I experience it.
We tend to move through life believing that what we see, feel, and perceive is simply what is.
AIWS is a reminder that there is another layer beneath that assumption.
There is the world, and there is our experience of the world. There is the body, and there is our experience of the body. There is time, and there is our experience of time.
Most of the time these fit together beautifully.
Sometimes they don’t.
And when they don’t, consciousness can become very strange indeed.
For anyone who has experienced something similar, I hope there is some comfort in knowing that you are not alone in the strangeness of it. The experience may be difficult to describe, but that does not make it imaginary. It may be neurological, but that does not make it insignificant. And it may remain partly mysterious, even after we understand more about the brain.
Sometimes the most extraordinary thing about the brain is not
that it occasionally gets things wrong.
It is that it constructs the entire world we experience in the
first place.
And every once in a while, it lets us see the machinery.
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