Star Trek and Alice in Wonderland Syndrome

I've never heard of this before, but Alice in Wonderland syndrome (AIWS), or micropsia, is a neurological disorder that causes distorted visual perceptions. Sufferers see things as being much smaller than their true size. 



Here, Boing Boing reports of a true life "sufferer."

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.

Link to story in The Guardian.

 

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