My world would be a wonder land
A syndrome aptly named after the Carroll novel. When big and small and soft and loud lose their perceived difference
3 Oct 2026
Tonight, right now (30 September 2026 at 23:43 MST) I feel something I
haven't felt in more than ten years: a full-blown onset of Alice in Wonderland
syndrome. It came up and has been ringing through my subjectivity
for the last 10 or so minutes. This is a variant of the experience that I had
forgotten, but is now vividly familiar. The AIWS I feel tonight
is the quiet, slow hyper agression form; every internal thought
proceeds with seething anger and every external voice and sound is dripping in
lethal threat.
It was waning then I sneezed and now it's gone away.
I was probably eight or so when I first felt things "go fast" — that's what I told my mom and dad was going wrong with me. I felt something shift; that was the primary sensation. It wasn't exactly a bodily sensation, more a change in the perception of time passing; like someone had hit a 1.5 fast-forward button in my brain; or rather, on the world.
From age eight to about fourteen, I experienced many dozens of bouts of AIWS. Alice in Wonderland syndrome is a breakdown in the normal functions of perception, especially relative perception. In the normal course of events, you experience things in relation to each other and you experience parts of yourself against each other (or maybe more accurately, in the case of proprioception, you experience the parts of yourself against a pretty stable baseline of core selfhood). You notice when things are or are not right within yourself by this check against a stable background.
I remember one night — I think I was sick with a fever — I felt the room start to grow out from me and time sped and slowed in waves. I was older, so I knew what was happening. I placed my hand on my chest as a gesture to pin myself to a place in my bed, and I had the literal sensation that my chest was enormously broad, and my hand was tiny. The felt sensation in my hand and, correspondingly on the skin of my chest was that my chest and belly were at least as wide as the queen bed I was laying on, and my hand was no more than a couple inches from wrist to fingertip. I literally felt in my skin and in my deep tissue senses that my body was larger than a walrus's and at the end of my arm was a doll's hand.
Over the years, I experienced visual hallucinations (usually involving the overlay of glowing numeric symbols on different objects like TVs and mirrors), body dismorphic experiences (like the doll hand), visual distance distortions, and sound confusion ("Was that noise a small click in an expanding joint or a cannon going off right outside my window?"). These distorted senses usually didn't overlap, but they were always accompanied by being untethered in time: small moments seemed to never end or whole instances of the syndrome would seem to be over before I could clock that it had started.
All my siblings experienced AIWS. When I first told my dad that things were "going fast" he instantly knew what was happening because he had experienced the exact same things as a teen. He helped put the experience in perspective and gave me a sense of calm that these would be passing episodes with no other ill effects, and something I'd likely grow out of.
I thought I had grown out of it, until now! I was up late and was a little hungry. I first noticed a change in the sensation in the feeling of my own hands. They felt larger than they are. Then I noticed the weird movement of time: seemingly faster and slower than normal, simultaneously. And, though I had forgotten, or perhaps had never been acutely aware enough to notice, I "heard" my own internal voice. The thoughts I had were as inane as they usually are: "Let's clear out the Spam folder. Pause the video. What's this feeling?" but the voice of the thoughts was not mine. It was like hearing someone else inside my head. The voice of a devil.
10 minutes and it was over. Hopefully back into the inky black for at least another decade!
It was waning then I sneezed and now it's gone away.
I was probably eight or so when I first felt things "go fast" — that's what I told my mom and dad was going wrong with me. I felt something shift; that was the primary sensation. It wasn't exactly a bodily sensation, more a change in the perception of time passing; like someone had hit a 1.5 fast-forward button in my brain; or rather, on the world.
From age eight to about fourteen, I experienced many dozens of bouts of AIWS. Alice in Wonderland syndrome is a breakdown in the normal functions of perception, especially relative perception. In the normal course of events, you experience things in relation to each other and you experience parts of yourself against each other (or maybe more accurately, in the case of proprioception, you experience the parts of yourself against a pretty stable baseline of core selfhood). You notice when things are or are not right within yourself by this check against a stable background.
I remember one night — I think I was sick with a fever — I felt the room start to grow out from me and time sped and slowed in waves. I was older, so I knew what was happening. I placed my hand on my chest as a gesture to pin myself to a place in my bed, and I had the literal sensation that my chest was enormously broad, and my hand was tiny. The felt sensation in my hand and, correspondingly on the skin of my chest was that my chest and belly were at least as wide as the queen bed I was laying on, and my hand was no more than a couple inches from wrist to fingertip. I literally felt in my skin and in my deep tissue senses that my body was larger than a walrus's and at the end of my arm was a doll's hand.
Over the years, I experienced visual hallucinations (usually involving the overlay of glowing numeric symbols on different objects like TVs and mirrors), body dismorphic experiences (like the doll hand), visual distance distortions, and sound confusion ("Was that noise a small click in an expanding joint or a cannon going off right outside my window?"). These distorted senses usually didn't overlap, but they were always accompanied by being untethered in time: small moments seemed to never end or whole instances of the syndrome would seem to be over before I could clock that it had started.
All my siblings experienced AIWS. When I first told my dad that things were "going fast" he instantly knew what was happening because he had experienced the exact same things as a teen. He helped put the experience in perspective and gave me a sense of calm that these would be passing episodes with no other ill effects, and something I'd likely grow out of.
I thought I had grown out of it, until now! I was up late and was a little hungry. I first noticed a change in the sensation in the feeling of my own hands. They felt larger than they are. Then I noticed the weird movement of time: seemingly faster and slower than normal, simultaneously. And, though I had forgotten, or perhaps had never been acutely aware enough to notice, I "heard" my own internal voice. The thoughts I had were as inane as they usually are: "Let's clear out the Spam folder. Pause the video. What's this feeling?" but the voice of the thoughts was not mine. It was like hearing someone else inside my head. The voice of a devil.
10 minutes and it was over. Hopefully back into the inky black for at least another decade!