Imagine this, one night you’re just sitting alone watching sports on TV.
Suddenly that TV screen seems really far away, as if the room has expanded right in front
of your very eyes.
You panic, and so look down to see where your phone is, only the device is massive and your
hand has shrunk to the size of a baby’s hand.
Oh God, you think, did someone spike my Kool-Aid with the world’s strongest drug?
You get up to move, only now you are tiny and the ceiling seems 20 feet away.
You can hear voices in the distance; you look through the window and there’s a giant dog
in the garden.
It’s got a purple face and orange ears.
Your head hurts, and then suddenly you lose control of your limbs and just fall to the
floor.
Now time has stopped for you.
What’s going on?
What you have just heard is how some sufferers of Alice in Wonderland syndrome have described
one of their trips.
It gets the name Alice in Wonderland syndrome from the famous 19th century novel called,
“Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.”
If you haven’t read it or seen any of the countless movies based on it, the protagonist,
Alice, experiences a lot of trippy things.
One of those things is seeing things bigger or smaller than they are.
Respectively the scientific terms for that are macropsia and micropsia.
Macro meaning big and micro meaning small.
We’ve seen some descriptions of what can happen and oh boy, having an attack must be
one of the scariest things in the world.
Before we get into why it happens, let’s have a look at how some folks described a
stint in wonderland.
We should say that most people that suffer from this are teenagers, so that means it
might have happened to one of our millions of viewers.
We can’t wait to hear from you if you have had one of these crazy bouts.
One 17-year old said this is what happens to him:
“Quite suddenly objects appear small and distant or large and close.
I feel as if I am getting shorter and smaller, 'shrinking', and also the size of persons
are not longer than my index.
Sometimes I see the blind in the window or the television getting up and down, or my
leg or arm is swinging.
I may hear the voices of people quite loud and close or faint and far.”
Hmm, seeing mini people the size of your finger.
That must be a bit frightening if you’re sitting in class.
We looked at another case, and this time the guy was not a teen but 68.
He said he was going about his normal day and then things started speeding up, like
everything around him was in fast-forward mode.
If that wasn’t discombobulating enough, things started moving in slow motion.
He then said everything just stopped, like a freeze frame.
He described it as being in a Charlie Chaplin movie.
So, time was not working for this man, but then some other stuff started happening.
When he looked around at things and people they kept changing color, and then those things
just started getting bigger or smaller and either zooming in or zooming out.
He described it like this.
It was like “looking into a funhouse mirror.”
Doesn’t sound like fun to us.
We’ll give you another case, this time a story we found in the New York Times.
The writer of the story said she had had it, but so too had her ten year old daughter.
One day she said her daughter turned to her and said, “Everything in the room looks
really small.”
She’d had the same thing, and as a kid said sometimes she’d be doing something then
every object around her looked like it could fit inside a doll’s house.
A 21-year old student in the UK told the Guardian this is what happened to him while he was
writing his dissertation, “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.”
He said on other occasions this happened, “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.”
We looked at other things that might happen and won’t list them all as they are many,
and they all involve basically tripping out in the weirdest of ways.
It seems every sense can be affected, so you might see a swarm of ants that are not there,
or you might hear them talking to you.
You might feel five minutes takes about one hour to pass, or you might feel like someone
is grabbing hold of you.
Basically, the world gets distorted and people get very, very frightened as they hallucinate
to the extreme.
So, why does it happen and can it be stopped?
While it sounds like the strongest LSD trip ever taken – maybe a bit like when the first
guy to synthesize LSD, Albert Hoffman, took a massive dose and went for a ride on his
bicycle – the vast majority of cases have nothing to do with drug use.
We did find one case of a man in the USA that liked to take LSD and the tripping then started
when he didn’t take the drug, but that is very rare.
In fact, his clinician told the media, “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first
reported case of AIWS which persists after LSD interruption.”
He was alright in the end, he just had to trip like that on and off for a year.
One researcher we found examined 48 patients who had experienced Alice in Wonderland syndrome
and she came to the conclusion that in around half of the cases no cause could be found.
The people were normal, in spite of their world getting all out of whack now and again.
Six percent of the people had suffered considerable head injuries and the doctor said that was
to blame.
Another six percent suffered from migraines and that was the problem, and in thirty-six
percent of the cases a past infection was the source of the normality disruption.
That same doctor said that some people will have a bout and never tell anyone.
They experience a kind of temporary madness and keep quiet.
She told the media, “They were almost too embarrassed.
People want to be told that they’re crazy.”
The good news is that if you suddenly see your mother as 6 inches tall and your father
becomes a multicolored giant those actual symptoms shouldn’t cause you any harm other
than a lot of anxiety.
Time might stop, but your heart won’t.
The bad news is that in some cases the syndrome was part of neurological disease and things
got worse for the patient, such as was the case of the 68-year old we talked about.
He had a rapid onset of dementia after his visual hallucinations and he died two months
after he saw the doctor.
Another problem is some people keep it all to themselves and just get very depressed
about pretty much going crazy now and again.
A teenager might think they’ve lost the plot and just keep quiet, but if that’s
you, don’t worry and tell someone.
The vast majority of people that get it, get it when they are young, and the sessions in
the other world might last anything from 10 seconds to ten minutes.
It might happen occasionally for a period of weeks or months, but it usually goes away
by itself.
Unfortunately, some folks might have it for longer.
That university student in the UK we talked about had these trippy experiences all through
his twenties.
He said he just learned to live with it and got a job and stuff, although he wouldn’t
try driving.
He talked to The Guardian when he was 31 and said he had the attacks only about once a
month.
We’ll leave you with something positive.
That guy told the Guardian, “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.”
How would you deal with something like this?
Tell us in the comments.
Now go watch our other video “Weirdest Brain Disorders” Thanks for watching, and as always,
don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.