Alice in Wonderland Syndrome

by Adéla Horáčková

We all know the beautiful story of a girl called Alice and her fantastic world full of fantastic creatures and places. It is hard enough to imagine a dream world like this, let alone write a book about it, however it looks like Lewis Carroll suffered from this weird condition, that was helpful to write the story, but at the same time made his life very hard.

Alice in Wonderland (AiW) syndrome is a rare condition (3,1 / 1 000 000), that is defined by temporary episodes of distorted perception and disorientation. It can present itself in many different forms, for example perceiving flow of time differently. For the affected time goes slower or faster than usual. Things can seem larger or smaller, sometimes furniture can seem to move. The syndrome isn´t just limited to vision or time, it basically affects all the nine senses, touch, smell, thermoception, equilibrioception etc. Every person experiences this syndrome differently, even each episode can vary. Episodes are not long, they usually last between few minutes to two hours.

From what we know now, AiW syndrome is not some sort of hallucination, neither it is problem with eyes. There are a few mental illnesses linked to it, such as depression, but it seems like the answer is buried somewhere deep down in the brain. This corresponds with the fact that most of the suffering people are children or teenagers, just rarely someone experiences this during adulthood. The likely cause is unusual brain activity, that affects blood flow. Migraines are also linked to abnormal blood flow and some doctors believe that this condition is actually a form of aura (pre-migraine state) since a lot of migraine patients suffer from it. One study also found out that about one third of the patients patients had infections, others suffered from epilepsy or brain tumours. On the other hand about half of the subjects had no visible causes. The only thing we can say for sure is that there is more research needed.

There is one question left... Did really Lewis Carroll suffer from this condition? Honestly, we do not know. Although it is well known fact that he was migraineur, that does not have to mean anything. On the other side, the images were supposedly inspired by his migraine aura. And as I have already mentioned, some people consider AiW syndrome an aura, so there is room to speculate.

This was just a brief overview of AiW syndrome. But if you are interested, I would recommend you read an article about it on healthline.com (https://www.healthline.com/health/alice-in-wonderland-syndrome), psych-neuro.com (https://psych-neuro.com/2015/03/06/did-lewis-carroll-have-alice-in-wonderland-syndrome/) or this very interesting closer medical description (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4302569/).