Alice in Wonderland, is a work dating from 1865 and was written by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who used the pseudonym Lewis Carroll and tells the adventures of a girl gifted with a wide imagination and the adventures she experienced, after falling through a hole in the ground, located next to a tree.
When Alice enters a kind of surreal world, she experiences a series of situations characterized by changes or transformations in the size of her body and the objects that were around her. This work has gained such popularity and acceptance that many editions have been reproduced and the story has been recreated in motion pictures.
About the creator of the story, some suppose that he suffered from the syndrome due to the exhaustive way in which he described the distorted way in which the protagonist perceived some of the objects around him.
In fact the description is so exact and similar to the symptoms that it owes its name.
Alice in Wonderland syndrome
Just as Alicia’s eyes perceived certain objects or their body size, individuals with this syndrome come to perceive reality.
The main symptom of the syndrome referred to here is the distortion of the images that are perceived through the senses, in this case those that enter through the eye and are interpreted by the brain.
The Alice in Wonderland syndrome , therefore, is associated with a neurological disorder characterized by the distortion for short periods of time of the perception of images at the body level, as well as the size and distance in which they are located certain objects.
Many objects or members of those who suffer from it acquire an unreal size. A person can be perceived to be quite small compared to the chair in which he is sitting, a wall or his own bed. Similarly, you may perceive your bedroom window as far away or lose track of time.
Despite being associated with distortion of visual perception, alterations in auditory or tactile appreciation have also been observed in patients with this syndrome. Some, after hearing an almost imperceptible sound, perceive it as a great noise.
With which pathologies is the syndrome associated?
In general, its appearance has been observed in patients who have presented migraines, epilepsy, acute schizophrenic psychoses, in cases of infectious mononucleosis and brain lesions. Few cases are known in which the syndrome has appeared without a history of the aforementioned pathologies.
Who does it affect?
In general, it usually appears in children and adolescents and to a lesser extent in adults, many of them with brain injuries or low drug or drug use.
Presenting symptoms related to hallucinations can be difficult to cope with by many who will become seriously worried by a fear of losing their mind or will struggle to perceive reality as it presents itself.
While some adapt, accept what is happening to them and take it calmly, others fall into uncertainty and suddenly, faced with the terror of perceiving their body size disproportionately to what corresponds, they will run to the mirror to check that everything retains its normal size.
Symptoms of Alice syndrome:
They are characterized by brief periods in which objects, things, individuals or the size of the same person are perceived in a distorted way.
It does not reside in a visual problem, it is rather a dysfunction of brain activity that is responsible for adapting the images that enter through the eye. It is a distortion or a wrong interpretation of the images that are perceived through the senses by the brain.
The individual who has the Alice in Wonderland syndrome is characterized by suffering from Micropsia , which is the decrease in the size of objects that are visually perceived due to neurological disorders or Macropsia that causes the opposite effect, and is when objects acquire large dimensions that do not conform to reality.
Patients suffering from this syndrome may experience several episodes per day or per week and the tendency is for them to increase during hours of the night.
The syndrome is not serious nor does it generate any type of adverse consequences other than fright, the feeling of strangeness, fear or panic that the distortion in the proportion of certain objects causes.
The good news is that it is not evil at all. It can occur for days or months and disappears completely. That is, it is curable in 100% of the cases.
Regarding the origin of the syndrome and the factors that contribute to its appearance, there are still no great certainties, only that in a large percentage it arises in the presence of pathologies such as migraine or epilepsy.
The treatments used to treat the symptoms correspond to the same formulas that are prescribed in cases of migraines, epilepsies and schizophrenic psychoses. However, the most effective is sleep and rest, which becomes a source of relief for those who suffer from this syndrome.
Although it is true that it is not a serious disease and that it is 100% curable, suffering from this syndrome can cause a dent and even a bit of terror in certain individuals before the worrying sensation that the distortion of reality generates in them. The average person may come to the conclusion that they are simply freaking out.
Many accounts extracted from people who suffered from the syndrome refer to episodes in which they suddenly perceived one of their members quite far from themselves, suddenly they noticed how their hands acquired truly absurd and disproportionate gigantic dimensions. Others reported noticing how their parents were suddenly reduced to sizes similar to what you see in a toy.