Seeing the World (and Writing It) with Alice in Wonderland Syndrome | Hacker News Reader

Seeing the World (and Writing It) with Alice in Wonderland Syndrome

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I've thought about trying to portray my TLE auras artistically, but they're difficult to describe and probably won't make much sense to anyone. They're also not visual or wacky like that

The small ones are brief periods of receptive and expressive aphasia. I imagine the only other people that have felt similarly are brain damaged stroke victims.

The more intense ones feel like being in a crowded bar, but my auditory filter turns off and I'm suddenly having a hundred conversations at the same time (but with my inner monologue, there's no auditory hallucination). It's like an overwhelming vortex or swirl of words and understanding. It's also pretty terrifying because it means I might slip off the edge into unconsciousness. Fortunately, they're rare. Also unfortunately, they're random.

It's an incredibly weird thing to describe. Especially when externally, you can act exactly the same but your internal perception of things is haywire. I've often gotten AiWS when doing job interviews or other intensive face to face conversations. It's not something you can easily just explain away: "Hey, I'm going into an AiWS phase right now and when we shook hands your hand was literally the only thing I was visually perceiving and I was overwhelmingly aware of every minute detail about it. I could stare at it for the next five minutes and find it fascinating. But just disregard all of that!"

Had auras associated with migraines. Especially when I was younger.

For myself I found that things in my periphery would disappear — like a kind of tunnel vision. As the condition progressed this region that I could not perceive would grow, the tunnel narrow.

I feel like at times it was as though to my mind I simply could not focus or resolve the areas in my periphery. At other times the areas in my periphery seemed to be occluded by arbitrary shapes of light — often flickering or pulsing in a fast cyclic way.

Often the condition could instead be that the place I was looking directly at would suffer the same degradation. Out of focus, not resolvable, maybe overlaid with some sort of light region.

Looking elsewhere showed that the distortion was relative to where my eyes were looking. So if the thing I was looking straight at would not resolve, I could look slightly askance and see it clearly.

When I was younger the condition would soon progress to nausea. Throwing up (even dry heaves) meant the condition was passing and I would be fine in a few minutes.

As I have gotten older the nausea has never returned and the frequency of the auras has become more infrequent.

This is a cool article. I've definitely experienced similar things when I was younger, particularly during a fever, but grew out of it. Experiences included waking up and seeing my bed was elongated out hundreds of feet in front of me, or the sizes of my limbs were somewhat randomized, e.g. small arms and stretched, rubbery fingers.

But one thing about this article that bothers me is how it says "many have speculated that Lewis Carroll took some kind of mind-altering drug ... the truth is that he too suffered from the condition"

Is that actually proven true or are they speculating?

> This is a cool article. I've definitely experienced similar things when I was younger, particularly during a fever, but grew out of it. Experiences included waking up and seeing my bed was elongated out hundreds of feet in front of me,

Hah, I had some similar experiences as a kid. In particular I imagined my bed was suddenly stretched into "outer space" and I was looking to earth through a tunnel or hole of some kind. Only happened a few times when I was <12 probably.

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