Alice In Wonderland Syndrome (AIWS) is an unusual neurological disorder that causes the person with the condition objects to sometimes perceive certain things as much smaller than they are. It’s also referred to as “Lilliputian hallucinations,” after the tiny folks in Gulliver’s Travels. In The Guardian, Rik Hemsley describes life with the spatial distortions of Alice In Wonderland Syndrome. From his essay:
When it first happened, I was a 21-year-old undergraduate. I had been up late the night before writing my dissertation and drinking a lot of coffee, but on that particular morning I was stone cold sober and hangover-free. 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. It was a disturbing sensation, but it lasted only a few seconds, so I put it down to over-tiredness and forgot all about it.
It wasn’t long, however, before I started experiencing more extreme spatial distortions. 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.