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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Hallucinatory experiences are only truly fun when real-life reality doesn’t intrude too much. And there’s nothing fun at all about suddenly suffering a reality-shattering hallucination when you’re drug free, or a small child.

A few minutes of the following kind of ‘Alice In Wonderland Syndrome’-generated hallucinatory experience may sound spectacular, but not when you’re trying to do your shopping, or get to work :

When it first happened, I was a 21-year-old undergraduate…..

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.

Everything was now distorted, all the time. Walking down the road, parked cars appeared the size of Corgi models, while I’d feel disproportionately tall. At work, my chair seemed enormous, while I seemed to have shrunk.

Seeing the world through a fisheye lens made day-to-day life very difficult. Unable to judge distances accurately, I would often move clumsily or overcompensate. Soon I found it a struggle to leave the house; I had difficulty correctly perceiving the ground, so walking was tricky. If I didn’t think about it I was OK, but as soon as I did, I found myself slumping and struggling to walk in a straight line. Crossing the road began to feel dangerous; when I saw a car coming, I had no idea what size it was, or how far away.

Suffering from ‘Alice In Wonderland Syndrome‘ wasn’t all bad news, however :

….but 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. That particular side-effect seems to have stopped now, and I almost miss it.

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