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.
