Douglas Mercer
February 8 2025
Objects in the mirror are always closer than they appear.
Alice In Wonderland Syndrome, aka Todd’s Syndrome, is a neurological disorder that distorts perception. Those suffering from this Syndrome will experience visual misperceptions of objects in their environment, such as objects appearing smaller than they actually are, or larger than they actually are; or alternatively they may perceive objects as being either closer or farther to them than they actually are in reality. Such perceptual distortion may also occur for senses other than vision.
The cause of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is currently not known, but it has often been associated with migraines, head trauma, or abnormal amounts of electrical activity in the brain which results in abnormal blood flow in the parts of the brain that process visual perception and texture.
Although there are cases of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome in both adolescents and adults, it is most commonly seen in children.
The classification of Alice in Wonderland is related to and encompasses a range of symptoms associated with changes in perception of vision, time, hearing, touch, or other external perceptions.
With over 60 associated symptoms Alice In Wonderland Syndrome can affect the sense of vision, sensation, touch, and hearing, as well as the perception of one's body image. Migraines, nausea, dizziness, vertigo are also commonly associated symptoms with Alice in Wonderland syndrome. Less frequent symptoms also include: memory loss, lingering touch and sound sensations, and emotional instability. Alice in Wonderland syndrome is often associated with distortion of sensory perception, which involves visual, somatosensory, and non-visual symptoms.
Individuals with Alice In Wonderland Syndrome often experience illusions of expansion, reduction, or distortion of their body image, such as microsomatognosia (feeling that their own body or body parts are shrinking), or macrosomatognosia (the feeling that their body or body parts are growing taller or larger). These changes in perception are collectively known as metamorphopsias or Lilliputian hallucinations, which refer to objects appearing either smaller or larger than they are in reality. People with certain neurological diseases may also experience similar visual hallucinations.
Within the category of Lilliputian hallucinations (a label named after Swift’s book) people may experience either micropsia or macropsia. Micropsia is an abnormal visual condition, usually occurring in the context of visual hallucination in which the affected person sees objects as being smaller than they are in reality. Macropsia is a condition where the individual sees everything larger than it is.
These visual distortions are sometimes classified as an Alice In Wonderland-Like syndrome instead of true Alice In Wonderland syndrome but are often still classified as Alice in Wonderland syndrome by health professionals and researchers since the distinction is not official. Other distortions include teleopsia (objects are perceived further than they actually are) or pelopsia (objects are perceived closer than they actually are).
Along with size, mass, and shape distortions of the body, those with Alice In Wonderland syndrome often experience a feeling of disconnection from from one's own body, feelings, thoughts, and environment known as depersonalization or derealization disorder. Depersonalization is a term specifically used to express a true detachment from their personal self and identity. It is described as being an observer completely outside of their own actions and behaviors. Derealization is seen as dreamlike, empty, lifeless, or visually distorted.
Individuals experiencing Alice in Wonderland syndrome can also often experience paranoia as a result of disturbances in sound perception. These disturbances can include the amplification of soft sounds or the misinterpretation of common sounds. Other auditory changes include distortion in pitch and tone and hearing indistinguishable and strange voices, noises, or music.
A person affected by Alice In Wonderland Syndrome may also lose a sense of time, a problem similar to the lack of spatial perspective brought on by visual distortion. This condition is known as tachysensia. For those with tachysensia, time may seem to pass very slowly or very quickly and space perspective can also lead to a distorted sense of velocity. For example, an object could be moving extremely slowly in reality, but to a person experiencing time distortions it could seem that the object was sprinting or spinning uncontrollably along a moving walkway, leading to severe, overwhelming disorientation; or vice versa.
The Syndrome is of course named after Lewis Carroll’s golden-haired girl to whom he once said life, what is it but a dream?
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Where the ones ends and the other begins is always mere conjecture.
University of California psychologist Jay Martin has identified the Cather In The Rye Syndrome from case studies culled from the psychiatric literature. This condition affects those with borderline personalities who have engaged in an extreme identification with the narrator of Salinger’s novel. The sufferer is a reader of this book who experiences such an extreme loss of identity and comes to believe that he is in fact the narrator of the book, Holden Caulfield. This syndrome falls under the umbrella term Fictive Personality Disorder in which a person will create an alter ego or a projection of oneself garnered from the world of novels or film and then feels as if they have simply stepped inside this new personality or become it.
Professor’s Martin’s prime example of this syndrome ironically comes from a froma fictive world itself. Don Quixote is so drenched in reading tales of the Knights Of Old that he believes he is one of those chivalric and gallant Knights and so begins to see imaginary windmills against which he perceptually tilts. On one of the early covers of Salinger’s book was a picture of a Knight on a horse, thus alluding to his precursor, for Holden also pictures himself as a defender of innocence, is a sufferer from schizophrenia, and tilts at perceived evils.
The sufferer from this syndrome experiences a loss of identity and identifies so strongly with an imaginary hero that his entire persona becomes submerged in the alternate reality to the extent that he not only cannot determine which is which but does not even perceive the transformation. It is as if a world of fiction has colonized the mind of the sufferer to such an extent that the boundary lines between the fiction and reality have simply disappeared.
Aside from the multiple notorious psychopaths and sociopaths who have adopted the Caulfield persona in the name of assassination and murder Martin says that in his reading and correspondence he has come across hundreds of so-called normal people, usually young folks, who have claimed to be Holden Caulfield. He writes that in times past in psychiatric hospitals it was common for those suffering from schizophrenia to exhibit such megalomania and delusions of grandeur that they would claim that that they were Jesus Christ; but that at least during the novel’s heyday it was at least as likely for them to claim that they were Holden.
These young people have become intoxicated by The Cather’s ink and have emerged in the twisted guise of their hero. Chapman prophetically squared the circle by signing the maroon covered book that he dropped at the murder scene by writing: To Holden Caulfield by Holden Caulfield. Other less well-known persons have written “I am Holden Caulfield’s alter ego.” Or “I am Holden and Holden is me.” Martin speculates that it is the way that Holden possesses an instinctual and true sense of reality and his direct and uninhibited willingness to express this reality in unbridled and flamboyant language which lures in those who are obsessed with life’s falsehoods. This coupled with an underdeveloped and weak sense of identity leads to what Martin calls flooding episodes where the voice of the book becomes so all powerful that the reader in this instance simply succumbs to the stronger and Svengali like nature of the words in a kind of brainwashing or triggering process.
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Notes:
Near the end of his life John Lennon reported that he was an empty temple though which many spirits pass. For six weeks in the summer of 1968 Lennon would tell anyone who would listen that he was in fact Jesus Christ. Lennon himself suffered from schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, megalomania, delusions of grandeur, and multiple personality disorder. In Bermuda in March 1980 in a mechanical voice which seemed not to come from himself he predicted that he would meet a grisly death by an assassin’s bullet.
I am Heathcliff!—from Wuthering Heights
