SciShow Psych your podcast is the bomb! I really love to listen to your podcast since august this year. I hope to listen to more of those podcasts next week. 👋🏼👊🏼❤️🤭
DMSteeley yeah same I used to feel like my limbs were changing size, and I’d get it several times per week as a kid. Last time I got it was last year, the first time in several years
@@lasphynge8001 im exactly the same, 90% of the time it's when im tired or in bed. Hands, feet feel massive and body small then it may change to the opposite but it's more of a dull feeling Unless you have had it it's very hard to explain and I feel most of these videos don't do it justice to what is actually happening
I have this. Sometimes I think there's policemen at my door yelling at me about being wanted for "tax evasion". But it usually goes away after I skip town and change my name.
Oh, alright. Turns out I had this as a kid, then. Sometimes when I laid in bed it would seem like the room was super big and I was super tiny, and the walls were very far away. It was super scary and I always hated it. It helped to lay flush with the wall, to remind myself that I could still reach a wall to begin with, but it didn't make it any less frightening. It happened most often when I had a fever, but also sometimes when I didn't have a fever at all.
every child literally had high imagination and watched cartoons, that's why this happened to you and almost all the children , don't disagree that's the truth, your not special in any type of way, be happy that you were born a healthy human.
Thank god this showed on my rec feed. This is a forgotten childhood memory and im kinda just glad that it's not just me who experienced this. Never thought it had a name.
Yo this used to scare me so much when i was really young I'd feel like my hands were huge and that my bed would rise and fall Stuff on the walls would grow and shrink And it was like someone in my head was whispering and screaming at the same time Im so glad that I eventually grew up and out of that
But It Was Me, Dio Christ man this is the exact same thing that used to happen to me! Hit the nail on the head, a loud man screaming abuse but couldn’t make out what the words are
@@averageitguy Your brain being able to do something different, always doesn't mean you have a serious bad problem. It's just that your brain acts differently and has kinda a small problem but chances of something serious is less
@@be7th I'm one of those annoying people to whom all of life is a song cue.I used to work in radio, and my brain is full of thousands of songs, some of which are older than I am.
I'm mindblown. I experienced this as a child, quite commonly. Horrible feeling. So glad it wore off. I will send this to my mother so she finally knows what was up with that. Thank you!
I dated a girl who was diagnosed with this condition because she was seeing objects on the wall distort in size and distance (of course no illegal drugs invoved) My mom secretly made fun of her for it because there is little external explanation for it except she claimed her vision would go crazy for a time and things would distort....(not the best explanation but that’s what I got from it) not much to go off of when you appear completely healthy though I’m sure what she was experiencing was quite real The doctors pretty much sent her home- I don’t remember hearing about any medication or anything....was just kinda like the end of Napoleon dynamite.....now what? 12 years later this is kind of some closure as there was little info on the topic then and very vague at that
It happened to me when I was younger. From the age of 3 to 10 . I called it “Fear”. I didn’t know what it was but I was really scared. It lasted like 5-20 minutes. I still remember crying so hard from that. Because everything was going bigger and smaller than what it actually was. Even when you close your eyes, it went on. I saw that thing a lot before going to sleep or before catching cold. Like 13 times in general. I knew that I couldn’t do anything about it but I’m thankful for my parents who were there with me and supported me. Now I’m 20 but I haven’t experienced anything of that since 10 years old. Looks like I grew out of it.
Did you ever imagine noises and they'd get louder inside your head? I had this along with what you explained. I'm actually the same age as you too, trippy we experienced these episodes around the same times
@@JKahu-ue9mm yes!! I’ve been tryna find someone who felt that too. To me it was this feeling of intensity getting stronger and louder like that old movie sound that used to scare kids because it would get so loud, it was like that but not exactly. It was just pure intense emotion pounding louder and louder and it scared the living hell outta me
As a child when lying in bed, sometimes it would seem like all my senses were enhanced or something. The ceiling and walls seemed farther away, everything sounded louder and my blanket/anything I touched felt twice as thick is it normally is.
@@erichughes3987 Yea, i experienced the same thing, it was only while I was laying in bed with my eyes closed. My tongue feels thick, my head felt really really really small. Everything felt really weird and out of proportion.
Me too it was really scary, when i opened my eyes everything seemed really far away and small when i held my hand before my eyes it seemed 20 meters away
I would inflate and fill the room, wondered why I never hit the walls or anything. It would go awasy. Moving helped. I never, ever mentioned it to my mother.
I also had these as a kid -- from what I remember, mostly between the ages of 4 and (around) 12 (??). I'm in my 50's now, so it's been a while. I don't think it was associated with colds, but they always happened just as I was falling asleep at night, or waking up in the morning. … So maybe I was half-smothering myself with my blankets or pillow? I also started getting migraines as a teenager. So maybe it has multiple causes (which wouldn't surprise me, given how complex our wetware is)
@Benghazi gaming I had something like as a kid. Never mentioned it. You enjoy trolling people, publicly dismissing them makes you feel good, doesn't it?
Benghazi gaming It was not a self diagnosis. I was nine years old. My parents took me to doctors. Coincidentally, about 14 years later, my nephew was also diagnosed with AIWS.
I've noticed that sometimes when I'm in that state where you're really relaxed and almost asleep I get something like this. I can feel like I'm floating, and sometimes I get the sensations of my whole body or parts of my body are growing/shrinking quickly.
We had the same experience. I would also hide in a nail hole and from there could see everyone in 120 · and at few times could tell whose coming to visit that very same time.
@Christopher White Have you watched ms. nanci in ted talk, she describe almost the same experienced with us. Do you think you have had one experienced, sir Christopher White.
For me, it was when I was going to bed. I would be on the brink of falling asleep, and then I would always feel like my mind would shrink and the room/area around me would become so unimaginably large that I would float around in it. I never experienced any pain during these events, however.
This used to happen to me all the time when I was a kid. My hands would feel huge and heads on the TV looked really small. I never understood what was going on at the time.
Me too, it usually is things like feeling my legs as really short or my arms as way bigger that they are and then as skinny as a pencil, or just feeling that I am shrinking and everything else is too big... Also feeling like time goes too fast but not as losing track of time, more as why we going so FASST (it happens with songs)
As a kid I got this every time I got the flu. Remember once when I was thirsty but I didn’t want to get water, because it was at the other side of the room, miles away. When I walked there I moved at super speed. My arms and head also felt swollen and enormous. Sometimes it felt like I filled the whole room.
Incredible the number of people (including me) who have had (and often still have) this and never knew it. I knew I had something going on but I was hard put to describe it and since it wasn’t a huge problem, I never mentioned it to anyone.
Had this since childhood , most common on falling asleep but on very rare occasion happens waking, it’s always a distortion of scale and distance of surroundings, things look bigger but further away ... It’s odd but I’ve become so used to it I do think about it anymore , incidents have become rarer I have gotten older , approaching my 50’s the last time it happened was a couple of years ago.
I do have a history of migraines, and I used to experience some stuff like this, especially in my adolescence. Walls/floors/ceilings might look like they were “breathing”, furniture and things with obvious 90° corners seemed very crooked, the color of everything appeared very washed out, I would feel way extra tall sometimes, and things near me would seem really far away. I also had a history of auditory hallucinations. These things usually came alongside feelings of elevated anxiety. But, I do feel like I’ve mostly grown out of this. I always attributed it to anxiety or side effects of certain medications.
i was actually afraid of telling anyone about what i experienced once in a while, about my hands ballooning and in the first 10 to 20 seconds of the episode i would go crazy about the feeling before realizing that my mind is making these up. even today when im 21 years old, i suddenly experience them sometimes when i stare into the computer screens for long periods along with the migraine aura symptom. now that i know that it might be related, i guess i have to go check a doctor, its really annoying for 10 to 15 minutes straight to look at my hands to check every second that they arent big. and the things around me are small.
I dated a girl who was “diagnosed” with this when I was about 16 She was overall a very normal girl But occasionally would see things get larger and smaller suddenly like objects on the wall Very odd as she would have them in random spouts without much explanation or connection And not often at all But the doctor called it Alice in Wonderland syndrome Which I hardly took seriously until today when I saw this video
I get stuff like this when I go to sleep. I start to feel both as big as a house and small as a mouse. Like I could reach out from my bed and close the door without getting up, but at the same time, I was so small that I was smaller than my pillow. Or that my bed was a mile wide and my arm was just as long. Almost all of them are the "big and small at the same time" type. Honestly, it kinda helps me sleep by putting me in an imaginative mood.
Ive had ive had this before, when i was around 10 or 11 ive felt my fingers like fat sausages and seconds later they would become as thin as a toothpick and 1 time my dad had the tv on with a guy playing a guitar and his voice sounded weird, it would alternate volume, i just assumed i felt sick or that i was too tired, that was i think when It was really strong but it kept happening over the course of 4 years ,yesterday is when i had my most recent “episode” and thats when i realized this probably isnt normal and its not just happening to me so i went online and researched for hours and encountered other people that had it, i researched if it was dangerous but I still havent gotten a straight answer
When I was a kid I used to lie in my bed and my room was dimly lit by a nightlight. Sometimes my room would seem to start to shrink and the walls and windows would begin to come towards me and I'd start to get slight anxiety. Only lasted a few seconds.
When I was a child I had some pretty bad trauma. After that when ever I was feeling highly stressed the room would distort and stretch, my fussing father would grow a giant head and hands, i would panic and his anger would grow. It happens rarely now, but still happens. It’s terrifying. I also have dissociative/derealization along with my anxiety and panic.
Since I was a kid, I sometimes get the feeling that I’m shrinking small enough to fit in my own mouth as I fall asleep. It’s a weird feeling that I’ve learned to embrace and enjoy.
I’m really glad these people are helping others understand AWS and the symptoms I was diagnosed with this when I was 4 or 5 and mostly I Experience everything going fast, and things look small, my hands also fell numb and heavy I had a different type of this last night, and it scared me SO bad that I ran into my mom’s room crying :(
I used to get this frequently as a child, sometimes the auditory affects were so dramatic I'd experience a bit of a panic attack. I still occasionally get the "things getting small and far away even though they're close" thing. Sometimes correlated with stress, sometimes not. Do you also experience ASMR?
Sometimes when I get super stressed or tired I get a mix of second long migraines and start feeling like I have super powers with everything passing by faster, feeling more sensitive, and everything getting louder.
I’m 19 and I regularly have this. It’s almost always when I’m trying to fall asleep and I’ve found the only way to get myself out of it is to get back on my phone and distract my brain for a bit. Even then sometimes the screen itself freaks me out and any time this has ever happened I get in an extremely panicked state and when I was very young I would cry ALLLL THE TIMMEEEEE bc it was so frightening and confusing. Now it just really makes me panic. I’m so glad there’s a lot of other people with it tho bc I fully felt alone bc I had no way of describing this to anyone without them thinking I was insane.
I’ve also found a video that has triggered it. I watch UA-cam regularly and I was watching some people play golf it or golf with friends whatever. And there’s a thing in some maps where the ur ball becomes really big and 80% of the time that triggers it and I start to freak out and have to skip that part of the video or watch something else. absolutely crazy phenomenon tho lol
I woke up with this today for the first time since I was around 10. Now I'm 30. When I experienced this as a kid, I felt very isolated and scared, so It's always lingered in my mind that I hope it doesn't happen again. I've never shared this, but today I found an article and it relieved me I'm not alone. I'll try to explain it in detail since I just experienced it: 1. I feel a tingeling in my body, my mind races fast and I'm very confused of what is going on. 2. I stare into the void, but I'm not processing what I see, instead I get scared and fascinated at the same time. I feel my fingers with my hand, they feel very big or very small, but I'm not sure which. I feel all my fingers again and again, they feel thin as chopsticks, but at the same time 1 finger alone fills my entire palm. It's like they alternate in size. There is some additional emotion in play, one I can't explain. 3. My tounge is heavy and moves very slow. As it touches my teeth, I realize they have grown and I't feels like I spend all my processing power trying to understand it. I feel the teeth in great detail, and travelling from far left tooth to far right tooth with my tounge seems to take a long time. I do it again, again, again, trying to increase the speed, and get a little more frustrated and puzzeled/scared every time. 4. I'm starting to explore ways to make it stop. I try to sit up, and realize I was in a trance or paralysis. I get my normal thought process back, as if my brain was busy or stuck, and I feel like like I've had a fever, I'm cold, and my arms are numb, stomach hurts a little. Slowly recovering, and after around half an hour, I'm now starting to feel normal.
I called my episodes "The Dream". I experienced the impossibly distant, then close visual illusions, accompanied by a high pitch squeal that would follow the visual illusions, impossibly faint and high pitched to overwhelmingly loud. There was also a sense of body weight and size oscillating from tiny to huge. My "fix" was to watch TV close to the screen. Often without a broadcast signal since it was usually after the broadcast day was done. Last full episode was when I was fifteen in 1975. Had a few less intense episodes through my twenties, and the last time at around thirty five. My sister had them too, and her grandson has them.
@@flbartlett Truly facinating, I hope I can experience it again some day even if it's weird and a bit scary, I feel like we are lucky to tap into something unknown. thanks for sharing!
Im 18 and i still have it happen to me sometimes. Tbh now that im older i really like when it happens. I think the perfect way to describe is if you were ant man and started shrinking rapidly in a room
Get your DNA tested for SYNESTHIA, Miss. If you prove positive; AVOID halloicogenics & intoxicating substances of ANY kind, Rx or not. I can trip on baby aspirin like the Beatles did on LSD.
i had this mildly when i was a kid and had a severe fever, it felt like my fingers where long wooden logs and i could touch anywhere in the room from my bed
Sometimes when a person is talking to me and I'm looking at them and listening for a long period of time, they start to drift away and get smaller. I have to look away and blink a couple of times and then I look back at them and they look normal again. I wonder what this is.
As a kid and even teen, I experienced things ‘seeming very far away” on rare occasions, as if looking through a telescope backwards exactly as she described. Particularly if sick, and even more so if feverish. AS exactly as described, it seems I grew out of it. It has never occurred as a an adult.
I'm 17 currently have it and it happened just 2 hours ago, can't really explain it beside somehow my hands became smaller and the walls is closing in, very trippy but I'm not really scared about it, fascination instead...what a weird brain we have.
I used to get this so much as a kid. Not all the same on the video. It would sometimes happen when I’m just sat around and instantly everything was 2x as far away. It was like someone edited my FOV. Also, while this was happening people’s voices and noises sounded sarcastic and aggressive to me (this is very hard to explain). This used to last a while and I would always rub my eyes to make it go away but it was like I was trapped until it went away naturally. This hasn’t happened to me for a very long time but I used to be able to activate it, all I had to do was stare at somebody’s face for a very long time and not blink but once I activated it I couldn’t really get out (this was at the worst times)
My neurologist said I had Alice in Wonderland syndrome but no brain scan or anyting and I don't have the same exact symptoms. What happens though when I'm in my room it looks like objects are morphing getting bigger or smaller. When I walk outside sometimes it looks like the road or walkway is stretching when I'm standing still. I do know when I was a kid I was diagnosed with auditory processing disorder so maybe it's possible I have a visual processing disorder as well.
@@officiallolnick My experience was I'm small and next day I'm big, the open space in the room is suddenly wider than normal, and all of it was more curious than creepy. That is, until I experienced depersonalization (not disorder [I hope] ) and it was someone else on the mirror. Really creepy
This happened to me a lot more when I was a kid, it would actually distort my perception of sound, time and feeling which was horrific to experience. Time would often be slightly too fast, the ground would crease up so anywhere I walked felt like a pile of clothes and sounds were too loud and fast, often I would sit down and I would hear things coming towards me, for example one night I experienced it and remember hearing running coming towards the door next to me. I also experienced the walls grow and shrink like many others.
Same with me bro. Time distortion. First time i had 10yrs old with an infection, and now at 30s i feel it with stressfull moments while working. I am with you.... Its so hard to explain to people how time looks to be faster, everything you hear or moving its to damn fast. Just searching about this right now cuz never felt was an issue, but is being quit annoying.
I had this when I was a kid, I called it "Fast thing" mostly because everything seemed faster than it was and sometimes id see things far away or closer to me! I use to cry because of this! But the thing that helped me was distracting me and one thing i did was play the tin whistle and it really helped lmao
Reminds me of some strange sensations I had when I was a kid, I think typically when I was feeling a little under the weather. I've never been able to reproduce those feelings after growing up, and I don't remember it well enough to describe any more.
I love it when it happens. I feel tiny and disconnected from my massive body. Breathing in air feels like a giant gust of wind traveling through a cave.
I guess I had this as a kid. I remember lying down on my parents’ bedroom, staring into space when suddenly the room started expanding, stretching further and further away from me. It honestly scared me a lot and I always kept myself curled up in my bed. Another experience as a kid was when I went to the bathroom and my sink looked like it had shrunken, looking smaller than usual. I actually never knew this disorder even existed, I thought I was crazy when I experienced this as a kid 😅
Most of the time, I hate seeing people talking on my infomercial video, but this is educating and you have amazing way of captivating your audience, ma'am 👍
Sometimes whenever I look at people giving a lecture, they start looking smaller and the room gets bigger. Also, sometimes when drifting off towards sleep, my room starts feeling bigger and I feel smaller and heavier. Both happen very rarely and I’ve been experiencing it since I was young. Glad to see you guys covering this!
I think this would be scarier than drugs. With drugs, you know you took them and that can help keep you from freaking out. But when there's no known reason for you to be hallucinating, that sounds truly scary.
I used to get this when I was a child; whenever I had a fever, I would experience myself getting too big, or everything being too close or too far away. My hands and head would be the wrong size and my wallpaper would move. It's how I knew I was really sick, but I never told my mum. I now realise they were probably febrile hallucinations resulting in Alice in wonderland syndrome, as they resolved within hours. It was absolutely terrifying! And I'm so glad I no longer have them!
I experienced this very often as a kid, and still occasionally do. The type of visual hallucination I got was like the "looking through a telescope" example, and was often paired with a zoned out/spaced out feeling and a low, pulsating hum. Was often triggered by focusing intently on something, like listening and looking at a teacher in class, or when trying to fall asleep. I actually enjoyed it and wish I experienced it more often, I always knew when it happened that if I switched my attention to something else it would go away, so I would sit or lay there and just relax. Hoping that the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon takes effect now :^)
You know, I just tried explaining what I felt like in a comment. This is exactly what I've experienced as well. You just explained it so much better. Feels weird not being alone with this specific kind of trigger.
If by the "looking through a telescope" example you mean in the opposite direction so things would seem small and farther away than they actually are, then I had the same exact thing, with the same triggers. It was sometimes accompanied by auditory hallucinations though, and those were pretty miserable.
@@demon4511 Ah mine was the opposite then, small and far away, sometimes "pulsing" between that and normal. The auditory effects were generally like time slowing down, echoing, loud, very anxiety inducing. Those pretty much went away entirely over time but I still see the visual stuff on the really rare occasion.
I used to get teleposia (like looking through the wrong end of binoculars) every night as a child. Now it only happens to me when I am extremely tired + focused on something. Its occurrence is dropping in frequency as I age, though.
I remember experiencing something like this once when I was small, I woke up at night and was heading to the toilet, but suddenly my wardrobe looked like it stretched and was as tall as a skyscraper... What's interesting is, I was diagnosed with Epilepsy when I was 14 so that may be the reason? idk
I've got this. It usually manifests as a distortion in my perception of time. It happens really infrequently these days, but it makes me feel like the world around me is really slow and I'm really fast. Never had mono before, but I get migraines and migraines run in my family. I've never experienced an episode while having a migraine, though.
What wasn't mentioned here is change in perception of time, which I also had frequently as a child. It would feel like I would tell my body to do something and have to literally wait for it to happen. The inverse, we'd be driving down the road and I felt like we were barreling along around corners at lethal speed, yet we were going 30 MPH. These days it's universally a sense of speeding up perception, like more samples or frames per unit time. Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors or sleep deprivation bring it on. I have seem to have a general, but non-fixed deficit in judging the absolute size of an object and distance. Usually I notice distance by how close the floor seems. Sometimes I'm way off the floor and my body is quite large, sometimes it seems I'm very close and my legs should be in the floor. I also have visual snow, and it may be they have a common underlying basis. Cacao, or anything with methylxanthines, has a profound effect. I'm not sure if this is strictly mechanical, an aspect of altered blood flow, of it has a root in altered calcium flux (esp dumping intracellular stores into the cytoplasm repeatedly, ryanodine receptor action, NO synthesis). Dopaminergic stimulants do the opposite, they improve spatial awareness and reasoning. Dextroamphetamine caused the grain of visual snow to become like rainbow waves on surfaces, which is interesting. Lastly, marijuana brought on the time dilation the most intense it's ever been. I ended up playing paintball and could literally see the paintball whizz passed me. Jumping I would hang in the air for a very long time. Anyway, it appears to me that perception of time and motor output are generally synchronized. In AWS, they are not, and there are errors in the spatial map as well which gives rise to feeling like the floor is made of jelly or some such. Like most cases of migraine I would look to the upper cervical spine, alignment of the atlas, and the position of the jaw. Stimulation of the vagus or trigeminal nerve, tugging on the brainstem, poor CSF circulation, all would cause issues of the temporal and occipital areas. These things are screwed up for me, and perhaps therefore, I am screwed up in turn.
Merto6 me too I have this coincidences too and auditory hallucinations I’m hyper sensitive/vigilant and I have vivid imagination to the point where my dreams are realistic and when I wake up I forget that it was a dream
I had this syndrome since I was 3 and somehow I still have it even now. It used to scare me so much but over the years, I began to learn to cope with it. But to be completely honest, I was so traumatized when this first happened to me that I still remember it 12 years later.
This is interesting. I've had instances where when I am looking at someone they suddenly seem so so far away. Like ten feet suddenly looks as if it is fifty feet. Happened before I ever contracted mono. How interesting.
I had these hallucinations a lot when I was a kid (ages 4-7) and always as I was trying to fall asleep, I only found out years later what was going on with me... and only after browsing Wikipedia in my early adult years. It turns out that the growing brain of a child can sometimes cause these things to occur, at least that's my reasoning. I would see wood patterns start warping into human figures, I would see objects becoming larger and trying to attack me, and one night, I saw paper white fat pot bellied children running around naked behind the living room's foggy window. I screamed at the top of my lung for my parents.
Aye. I've had some pretty intense psychedelic induced hallucinations but am always aware of their true nature. Even as I engage in a conversation with the beings in front of me I know they're not real.
Since I was a teen I've had brief episodes where everything seems to move in the same rhythm. As in, things that are slow will seem to go faster and things that go fast will seem to go slower. This is accompanied with an auditory thing where everything will sound like it's right next to me. I haven't been able to find anything matching the specific symptoms but a year ago I looked up Alice in Wonderland Syndrome and it is the closest thing to my experience.
I’ve had AIWS since I was a child, and honestly it is not that bad (for me.) I have very sporadic episodes that last about 15-20 minutes, in which things move and feel EXTREMELY fast and sounds are EXTREMELY loud - unpleasantly so, as if everything is being done in a rage explosion. I’ve also noticed recently that objects (if I’m holding my phone, for instance) feel heavier than they normally do. Only a couple days ago I decided to look it up and discovered that this weird sensation I had been having since a little kid was an actual condition. I remember many times in high school when I would have it in the middle of an exam - it felt as if all my thoughts were yelling and talking really fast, and I would write with (what for me was) such velocity that it sounded like I would destroy my pen. But somehow I also knew that these things weren’t happening in real life - something inside of me would know that, in spite of feeling movements, thoughts and sounds in an extremely aggressive way (that’s the best word I can find to describe it), that was not how things were actually behaving. So yeah, it’s uncomfortable but, for me, not a very big deal. I’ve never had distortions of size or anything visual, though. Would be interesting to meet more people with the condition!
That is the exact experience I have with my episodes but also experience size distortion. Now 43yrs old I still experience them especially when stressed. And I recently found out that my adult daughter has them also.
My mind has been blown. I stumbled across this by accident after a very severe episode of a headache. I’ve had about 4 similar headaches as a kid, all with visions when I’ve closed my eyes, rocking and one which left me with awful derealisation/ depersonalisation. I genuinely thought it was my ptsd that caused it but now looking at everything relating to vestibular migraines I believe that is what I experienced
Can confirm. At 16, experienced AIWS, but since I was also anorexic and malnourished, they attributed it to poor diet and psychiatric induced body dysmorphia. But I just had another episode today at 28, and I'm defs not malnourished or anorexic or body dysmorphic.
I've had this since i was very young, i'm 18 now, and have learned to live and cope from time to time, for me its mostly that my hands, or limbs feel big or small, or that what i'm holding is very big and very small at the same time. Which is really really uncomfortable. With this said i know this feelings in and out. They are not hallucinations, but rather illusions. It is different from person to person but all research I've done and all the time I've felt it, i know for a fact for me and a lot of people, t is not a hallucination, you can still differentiate it from reality. It is just in your brain. And it is not dangerous, so try to relax, the years I've found small solutions to help you to get rid of it for the moment, or maybe forever, and for me it has always been about just thinking about other things, very simple! Ex: Taking a shower, drawing, playing video games, jump around swinging your arms or legs, watch a movie, etc. Anything that will get you thinking about something else, that makes you happy. And trust me it will go away, i'm 18 now and my father had it too, which also makes sense, because research shows it can be genetically transmitted. For him it went away in his early 20s, which also makes sense because i also read that it mostly shows in late teens to early adults (16-22), but of course also is likely in kids, which was the case for both me and my dad. With this said if you are feeling this. I want you to know that, you are not alone and it will go away if you keep focusing on the things that makes you happy, go talk to your parents and ask them about it, maybe tell them to read this comment, or your friends, or a psychologist. Just remember that it is going to be okay no matter what happens.
I’ve been diagnosed but idk if this is another kind symptom. There are these moments I have where I’m standing or laying still and my head will start spinning backward in a circle. Kinda like I can feel the earth moving as i’m staying still. it happens almost everyday, usually in the afternoon and it goes away in 20 seconds. :( Wondering if anyone else has experienced this.
So, that must be what Roger Waters from Pink Floyd was talking about in Comfortably Numb. "When I was a child I had a fever. My hands felt just like two balloons."
It sounds like something I've experienced as a child a few times, it started by me feeling that my head is like 2-3 times bigger than normal, the weight being to big for me to lift my head from the pillow, like feeling every cell of my skull pressing on me, at the same time every little noise in the room would provoke me pain, or rather discomfort, that was worse than any kind of pain I've experienced till now. I think that rather then being a rare syndrome, it's something that is rarely reported, I never told somebody because while in that state I only wished for it to end and also I was unable to speak properly, after that I would rather not remind myself about the experience and never told my parents or something, nonetheless it was a very rare experience and after a while it never happened again.
I too have this, it’s the strangest thing as the room stretches as your own arms and hands become smaller while also being fully aware nothing in the world has changed, it’s almost like your FOV field of view gets set to 250 and a few minutes or seconds later it’s gone and you won’t have it happen again for months or years...
When I was a child I had a fever, my hands felt just like two balloons. Now I've got that feeling once again, I can't explain you would not understand, this is not how I am. I have become comfortably numb.
curently having this, remember this from when i was a kid. probrably the aura you can get before getting a migraine ( tingling hands and feet as well) the part i hate is the auditory parts. everything is loud, i hear my appearent tinitis (didnt have that as a kid, thanks nightclubs for having music always way too loud) and the most annoying thing is my thoughts will sound super loud and sometimes like my thought is screaming (not hearing random voices but just your "thought voice" i guess i could call it.
I definitely had this or something similar when I was a kid, sometimes I would feel like I was much bigger than I was, and sometimes I would feel like my hands were made of stone. My hands weren't heavy or hard to move they just felt like they had a hard surface. Sporadically, I got the feelings later in life too
Brit you are so talented! I'm taking a science communication course right now and you have everything down so well. I hope I can be as skilled as you one day.
for me this has existed ever since I was born 1st stage : my field of view increases making me see everything is really far or I am really big 2nd stage : i have a kind of ringing in my ears and cant hear anything with distorted voices 3rd stage : time slows and the pain lasts more long 4th stage : spikes come out of my body and it feels like my bones are breaking and coming out of my throat
I used to get this all the time as a kid especially when I was ill. Hands felt huge and room looked tiny. What's strange is that it happens even now as an adult mostly when I'm in a dark room thinking about something profound but can also happen when I'm in a intensely focused conversation. It used to scare me but now I kinda enjoy it because it's so interesting. Moving and looking around the room normally snaps me back to reality!
Holy cow, this may explain the wacky hallucinations I had with an infection I had in my early teen years. It felt like the TV was playing in fast forward mode, my hands felt very large, and any cloth I touched felt like that really dry, uncomfortable wool. I also found out much later that I had had EBV at some point in my life. I wonder if the "rarity" of this condition is more associated with either dismissal of the symptoms as generalized hallucinations caused by dehydration and infection + dismissal of children's imaginations.
I had this a lot myself when I was a kid (everything looks really small like in a doll's House, increased awareness of my peripheral vision and preceded by my vision rapidly seeming to zoom in and out and feeling like I'm spinning around), about the same time as my chronic 24/7, 365 depersonalisation started. Still have the same DP episode like 30 years later with no sign of it ever going away, but the Alice in Wonderland syndrome has subsided a bit, but sometimes comes back mostly when I'm overtired.
I remember that whenever I experienced this, time seemed to be moving faster or slower than it was. Everytime this happened, I tried to focus on the nearest clock to help me keep track of time, by following how fast the seconds hand was moving. Unfortunately from my perspective, the hand just looked like it was moving twice as fast or twice as slow.
I am currently 34, suffering from status epilepticus seizures for the past 10 years and migraines since I was a kid. These symptoms are always a sign a seizure is coming. Most common ones are the distorted perception of my body size and smelling ones. Sometimes I feel my leg is 3m long, sometimes I smell something badly burnt. I had none of these before the seizures started though.
I have these symptoms as part of my depersonalization / derealization disorder. But my brain is otherwise intact, I've had a lot of neurological tests done.
what about time distortion! everything seems faster than it is! and i think it's related to the oxygen in the blood, if you try to take deep breaths it goes away.
I mean given how brief the episodes are and how not that distressing the distortions tend to be along with the fact that it usually happens to children I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of thing is actually quite common and just not very much reported.
@@custos3249 Or, Occam's razor, this many people wouldn't lie about their experiences for attention especially when so many people are commenting meaning that a person saying they have maybe had this syndrome isn't at all guaranteed to get them attention?
@@eoincampbell1584 Interesting. Despite your implication, I never said they were lying or looking for attention. But don't worry. I'm aware of how Hanlon's razor works too.
@@custos3249 Damn it I had to look up what Hanlon's razor was just to find that you're insulting me. Sneaky and stylish I may have to steal that. Anyway soz I misunderstood what your explanation for all the comments was. I'd like to know why you think all these people would describe similar experiences if they aren't lying and also you don't think they've had episodes of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome.
thanks sci show, now I've randomly burst out into choruses of "one pill makes you larger aaaaand one pill makes you small, and the ones that mother gives you don't dooooo anything at all." thanks for that.
SciShow has a spinoff podcast! It's called SciShow Tangents. Check it out at www.scishowtangents.org
SciShow Psych your podcast is the bomb! I really love to listen to your podcast since august this year. I hope to listen to more of those podcasts next week. 👋🏼👊🏼❤️🤭
Already listening- loved the Halloween episodes!
SciShow Psych didn’t know there was a podcast in the first place
There are not enough episodes D': already listen to all of them and looking forward for the next!
this sounds like the visuals of a Dextromethorphan trip
I get these feelings sometimes when I'm trying to fall asleep, happened way more often when I was a kid.
DMSteeley yeah same I used to feel like my limbs were changing size, and I’d get it several times per week as a kid. Last time I got it was last year, the first time in several years
Me too. Plus once I felt like my parents stand meters away when they were really right beside me in bed
Me to ! It happened more frequently when I was a kid but still happens fairly regularly, especially when I'm very tired or about to fall asleep.
@@lasphynge8001 im exactly the same, 90% of the time it's when im tired or in bed.
Hands, feet feel massive and body small then it may change to the opposite but it's more of a dull feeling
Unless you have had it it's very hard to explain and I feel most of these videos don't do it justice to what is actually happening
@@nicherme4775 Exactly the same for me. In every way.
I have this. Sometimes I think there's policemen at my door yelling at me about being wanted for "tax evasion". But it usually goes away after I skip town and change my name.
@ Kali Takumi 🤣
This. Was. Awesome.
thats not alice in wonderland syndrome. that's TAX EVASION
A rare case. Kali Avoiding Taxes Syndrome... Very severe.
*theft evasion
Oh, alright. Turns out I had this as a kid, then. Sometimes when I laid in bed it would seem like the room was super big and I was super tiny, and the walls were very far away. It was super scary and I always hated it. It helped to lay flush with the wall, to remind myself that I could still reach a wall to begin with, but it didn't make it any less frightening. It happened most often when I had a fever, but also sometimes when I didn't have a fever at all.
I have it too
I had the exact same experience
You're not alone bro.
👍 me too
every child literally had high imagination and watched cartoons, that's why this happened to you and almost all the children , don't disagree that's the truth, your not special in any type of way, be happy that you were born a healthy human.
Thank god this showed on my rec feed. This is a forgotten childhood memory and im kinda just glad that it's not just me who experienced this. Never thought it had a name.
Yo this used to scare me so much when i was really young
I'd feel like my hands were huge and that my bed would rise and fall
Stuff on the walls would grow and shrink
And it was like someone in my head was whispering and screaming at the same time
Im so glad that I eventually grew up and out of that
But It Was Me, Dio
Christ man this is the exact same thing that used to happen to me! Hit the nail on the head, a loud man screaming abuse but couldn’t make out what the words are
@@reecemc6214 Holy crap! It's really comforting to know that someone else's been through almost the exact same.
The whispering and screaming used to happen to me too, and has happened in my twenties. It's really unsettling.
Exactly the same happened
Even a small sound sounda so loud...
I was scared that i was having a brain tumor
@@averageitguy Your brain being able to do something different, always doesn't mean you have a serious bad problem. It's just that your brain acts differently and has kinda a small problem but chances of something serious is less
"When I was a child, I had a fever - my hands felt just like two balloons; Now I've got that feeling once again... I have become comfortably numb."
Aaah you caught it before I did ^^"
@@be7th I'm one of those annoying people to whom all of life is a song cue.I used to work in radio, and my brain is full of thousands of songs, some of which are older than I am.
@@purplealice , my mom used to be like that.
You just blew my fuckin mind man
I read “when I was a child”
And then I hoped it was what I thought it was
😂
I'm mindblown. I experienced this as a child, quite commonly. Horrible feeling. So glad it wore off. I will send this to my mother so she finally knows what was up with that. Thank you!
This just blew my mind and actually made me quite emotional. I had this as a kid and it was horrifying, so nice to see I’m not alone
I like that everyone in the comments has this rare condition.
Há
People who have the condition would be more interested in watching it. You don't have a random sample group here.
I dated a girl who was diagnosed with this condition because she was seeing objects on the wall distort in size and distance (of course no illegal drugs invoved)
My mom secretly made fun of her for it because there is little external explanation for it except she claimed her vision would go crazy for a time and things would distort....(not the best explanation but that’s what I got from it)
not much to go off of when you appear completely healthy
though I’m sure what she was experiencing was quite real
The doctors pretty much sent her home- I don’t remember hearing about any medication or anything....was just kinda like the end of Napoleon dynamite.....now what?
12 years later this is kind of some closure as there was little info on the topic then and very vague at that
Rare could mean anything. If rare is 1% of people, then that means 77 million people would have experienced it.
Lmao
It happened to me when I was younger. From the age of 3 to 10 . I called it “Fear”. I didn’t know what it was but I was really scared. It lasted like 5-20 minutes. I still remember crying so hard from that. Because everything was going bigger and smaller than what it actually was. Even when you close your eyes, it went on. I saw that thing a lot before going to sleep or before catching cold. Like 13 times in general. I knew that I couldn’t do anything about it but I’m thankful for my parents who were there with me and supported me. Now I’m 20 but I haven’t experienced anything of that since 10 years old. Looks like I grew out of it.
Did you ever imagine noises and they'd get louder inside your head? I had this along with what you explained. I'm actually the same age as you too, trippy we experienced these episodes around the same times
J. Kahu true and we all are from different countries and cultures. I’m from Kazakhstan. So that’s interesting
No it didn't, you were dizzy.
Or just had a high imagination, or your eyes were creating imaginary things from the heat of the sun (if you were outside mornjng) your not special.
@@JKahu-ue9mm yes!! I’ve been tryna find someone who felt that too. To me it was this feeling of intensity getting stronger and louder like that old movie sound that used to scare kids because it would get so loud, it was like that but not exactly. It was just pure intense emotion pounding louder and louder and it scared the living hell outta me
I frequently had this as a child. Always happened while lying on bed and usually lasted for 5-15 mins
As a child when lying in bed, sometimes it would seem like all my senses were enhanced or something. The ceiling and walls seemed farther away, everything sounded louder and my blanket/anything I touched felt twice as thick is it normally is.
@@erichughes3987 Yea, i experienced the same thing, it was only while I was laying in bed with my eyes closed. My tongue feels thick, my head felt really really really small. Everything felt really weird and out of proportion.
@@MartinodePueblo if I moved too much or got up, it would go away, but I could have my eyes open.
Me too it was really scary, when i opened my eyes everything seemed really far away and small when i held my hand before my eyes it seemed 20 meters away
I would inflate and fill the room, wondered why I never hit the walls or anything. It would go awasy. Moving helped.
I never, ever mentioned it to my mother.
I had this as a child...symptoms persisted periodically into 30s....mostly when coming down with a cold. This leads me to think it’s got viral roots.
I also had these as a kid -- from what I remember, mostly between the ages of 4 and (around) 12 (??). I'm in my 50's now, so it's been a while. I don't think it was associated with colds, but they always happened just as I was falling asleep at night, or waking up in the morning. … So maybe I was half-smothering myself with my blankets or pillow? I also started getting migraines as a teenager.
So maybe it has multiple causes (which wouldn't surprise me, given how complex our wetware is)
@Benghazi gaming I had something like as a kid. Never mentioned it.
You enjoy trolling people, publicly dismissing them makes you feel good, doesn't it?
felt stuff like this when I was sick my hands felt huge or off and also my blankets felt super heavy everything was off
Benghazi gaming It was not a self diagnosis. I was nine years old. My parents took me to doctors. Coincidentally, about 14 years later, my nephew was also diagnosed with AIWS.
Nah man that’s just cause your brain was cooking with a fever lol
I'm seeing a lot of epstein recently.
*looks at **2:00*
Dude......you're looking into a mirror.....
Me too
@Deborah Meltrozo lol, idiots still think he killed himself
@@Lyle-xc9pg Barr investigated him
I think I might have felt these “feelings” before but it’s so close but also so far.. it’s a weird illusion.
Yeah it feels so real. Its like you just teleported into a new world for a few sec or minutes.
YES ITS JUST A FEELING
LIKE i could never explain it
I've noticed that sometimes when I'm in that state where you're really relaxed and almost asleep I get something like this. I can feel like I'm floating, and sometimes I get the sensations of my whole body or parts of my body are growing/shrinking quickly.
We had the same experience. I would also hide in a nail hole and from there could see everyone in 120 · and at few times could tell whose coming to visit that very same time.
@Christopher White Have you watched ms. nanci in ted talk, she describe almost the same experienced with us. Do you think you have had one experienced, sir Christopher White.
For me, it was when I was going to bed. I would be on the brink of falling asleep, and then I would always feel like my mind would shrink and the room/area around me would become so unimaginably large that I would float around in it. I never experienced any pain during these events, however.
No that's just you falling asleep.
This used to happen to me all the time when I was a kid. My hands would feel huge and heads on the TV looked really small. I never understood what was going on at the time.
I've got chronic migraines and experience this.
Things will either seem too big, too small or too far away.
Yas, it's really common with migrainous aura
Not the Aura /:
I’ve had migraines since I was 9 or 10 and during attacks (especially when I was younger) this happens
Me too, it usually is things like feeling my legs as really short or my arms as way bigger that they are and then as skinny as a pencil, or just feeling that I am shrinking and everything else is too big... Also feeling like time goes too fast but not as losing track of time, more as why we going so FASST (it happens with songs)
not as bad as the zigzag flashy blind spit tho
As a kid I got this every time I got the flu. Remember once when I was thirsty but I didn’t want to get water, because it was at the other side of the room, miles away. When I walked there I moved at super speed. My arms and head also felt swollen and enormous. Sometimes it felt like I filled the whole room.
Incredible the number of people (including me) who have had (and often still have) this and never knew it. I knew I had something going on but I was hard put to describe it and since it wasn’t a huge problem, I never mentioned it to anyone.
Had this since childhood , most common on falling asleep but on very rare occasion happens waking, it’s always a distortion of scale and distance of surroundings, things look bigger but further away ...
It’s odd but I’ve become so used to it I do think about it anymore , incidents have become rarer I have gotten older , approaching my 50’s the last time it happened was a couple of years ago.
I do have a history of migraines, and I used to experience some stuff like this, especially in my adolescence. Walls/floors/ceilings might look like they were “breathing”, furniture and things with obvious 90° corners seemed very crooked, the color of everything appeared very washed out, I would feel way extra tall sometimes, and things near me would seem really far away. I also had a history of auditory hallucinations.
These things usually came alongside feelings of elevated anxiety.
But, I do feel like I’ve mostly grown out of this. I always attributed it to anxiety or side effects of certain medications.
Stucco ceilings still crawl before my eyes.
Wow, does that sentence sound like something out of Lovecraft.
Same. It wasn't drug related, either.
No way, I get the breathing objects feeling aswell. I absolutely pooped myself when then walls looked like they were breathing.
i was actually afraid of telling anyone about what i experienced once in a while, about my hands ballooning and in the first 10 to 20 seconds of the episode i would go crazy about the feeling before realizing that my mind is making these up.
even today when im 21 years old, i suddenly experience them sometimes when i stare into the computer screens for long periods along with the migraine aura symptom.
now that i know that it might be related, i guess i have to go check a doctor, its really annoying for 10 to 15 minutes straight to look at my hands to check every second that they arent big. and the things around me are small.
I dated a girl who was “diagnosed” with this when I was about 16
She was overall a very normal girl
But occasionally would see things get larger and smaller suddenly like objects on the wall
Very odd as she would have them in random spouts without much explanation or connection
And not often at all
But the doctor called it Alice in Wonderland syndrome
Which I hardly took seriously until today when I saw this video
You just described me😶
I get stuff like this when I go to sleep. I start to feel both as big as a house and small as a mouse. Like I could reach out from my bed and close the door without getting up, but at the same time, I was so small that I was smaller than my pillow. Or that my bed was a mile wide and my arm was just as long. Almost all of them are the "big and small at the same time" type. Honestly, it kinda helps me sleep by putting me in an imaginative mood.
That's hypnagogic hallucination
Ive had ive had this before, when i was around 10 or 11 ive felt my fingers like fat sausages and seconds later they would become as thin as a toothpick and 1 time my dad had the tv on with a guy playing a guitar and his voice sounded weird, it would alternate volume, i just assumed i felt sick or that i was too tired, that was i think when It was really strong but it kept happening over the course of 4 years ,yesterday is when i had my most recent “episode” and thats when i realized this probably isnt normal and its not just happening to me so i went online and researched for hours and encountered other people that had it, i researched if it was dangerous but I still havent gotten a straight answer
When I was a kid I used to lie in my bed and my room was dimly lit by a nightlight. Sometimes my room would seem to start to shrink and the walls and windows would begin to come towards me and I'd start to get slight anxiety. Only lasted a few seconds.
When I was a child I had some pretty bad trauma. After that when ever I was feeling highly stressed the room would distort and stretch, my fussing father would grow a giant head and hands, i would panic and his anger would grow. It happens rarely now, but still happens. It’s terrifying. I also have dissociative/derealization along with my anxiety and panic.
Since I was a kid, I sometimes get the feeling that I’m shrinking small enough to fit in my own mouth as I fall asleep. It’s a weird feeling that I’ve learned to embrace and enjoy.
I feel exactly this when I’m falling asleep! It’s become oddly comforting but occasionally jolts me awake if the shrinking happens too quickly
@@finntrew9184 same!!!!
I’m really glad these people are helping others understand AWS and the symptoms
I was diagnosed with this when I was 4 or 5 and mostly I Experience everything going fast, and things look small, my hands also fell numb and heavy I had a different type of this last night, and it scared me SO bad that I ran into my mom’s room crying :(
I have this, occasionally my hearing will get super sensitive and things get smaller and far away. I rarely experience it these days.
I used to get this frequently as a child, sometimes the auditory affects were so dramatic I'd experience a bit of a panic attack. I still occasionally get the "things getting small and far away even though they're close" thing. Sometimes correlated with stress, sometimes not. Do you also experience ASMR?
Try looking at your fangers for a while. Actually focus and im sure itll happen again. That how it happens with me, sometime randomly.
Sometimes when I get super stressed or tired I get a mix of second long migraines and start feeling like I have super powers with everything passing by faster, feeling more sensitive, and everything getting louder.
Me too and it feels like I'm having panic attacks. It's really scary
I’m 19 and I regularly have this. It’s almost always when I’m trying to fall asleep and I’ve found the only way to get myself out of it is to get back on my phone and distract my brain for a bit. Even then sometimes the screen itself freaks me out and any time this has ever happened I get in an extremely panicked state and when I was very young I would cry ALLLL THE TIMMEEEEE bc it was so frightening and confusing. Now it just really makes me panic. I’m so glad there’s a lot of other people with it tho bc I fully felt alone bc I had no way of describing this to anyone without them thinking I was insane.
I’ve also found a video that has triggered it. I watch UA-cam regularly and I was watching some people play golf it or golf with friends whatever. And there’s a thing in some maps where the ur ball becomes really big and 80% of the time that triggers it and I start to freak out and have to skip that part of the video or watch something else. absolutely crazy phenomenon tho lol
I woke up with this today for the first time since I was around 10. Now I'm 30. When I experienced this as a kid, I felt very isolated and scared, so It's always lingered in my mind that I hope it doesn't happen again. I've never shared this, but today I found an article and it relieved me I'm not alone. I'll try to explain it in detail since I just experienced it:
1. I feel a tingeling in my body, my mind races fast and I'm very confused of what is going on.
2. I stare into the void, but I'm not processing what I see, instead I get scared and fascinated at the same time. I feel my fingers with my hand, they feel very big or very small, but I'm not sure which. I feel all my fingers again and again, they feel thin as chopsticks, but at the same time 1 finger alone fills my entire palm. It's like they alternate in size. There is some additional emotion in play, one I can't explain.
3. My tounge is heavy and moves very slow. As it touches my teeth, I realize they have grown and I't feels like I spend all my processing power trying to understand it. I feel the teeth in great detail, and travelling from far left tooth to far right tooth with my tounge seems to take a long time. I do it again, again, again, trying to increase the speed, and get a little more frustrated and puzzeled/scared every time.
4. I'm starting to explore ways to make it stop. I try to sit up, and realize I was in a trance or paralysis. I get my normal thought process back, as if my brain was busy or stuck, and I feel like like I've had a fever, I'm cold, and my arms are numb, stomach hurts a little. Slowly recovering, and after around half an hour, I'm now starting to feel normal.
I called my episodes "The Dream". I experienced the impossibly distant, then close visual illusions, accompanied by a high pitch squeal that would follow the visual illusions, impossibly faint and high pitched to overwhelmingly loud. There was also a sense of body weight and size oscillating from tiny to huge. My "fix" was to watch TV close to the screen. Often without a broadcast signal since it was usually after the broadcast day was done. Last full episode was when I was fifteen in 1975. Had a few less intense episodes through my twenties, and the last time at around thirty five. My sister had them too, and her grandson has them.
@@flbartlett Truly facinating, I hope I can experience it again some day even if it's weird and a bit scary, I feel like we are lucky to tap into something unknown. thanks for sharing!
Im 18 and i still have it happen to me sometimes. Tbh now that im older i really like when it happens. I think the perfect way to describe is if you were ant man and started shrinking rapidly in a room
Get your DNA tested for SYNESTHIA, Miss. If you prove positive; AVOID halloicogenics & intoxicating substances of ANY kind, Rx or not. I can trip on baby aspirin like the Beatles did on LSD.
@@PinkieFlamingo too late 💀
But im fine I'm pretty sure i dont have synesthia
i had this mildly when i was a kid and had a severe fever, it felt like my fingers where long wooden logs and i could touch anywhere in the room from my bed
Sometimes when a person is talking to me and I'm looking at them and listening for a long period of time, they start to drift away and get smaller. I have to look away and blink a couple of times and then I look back at them and they look normal again. I wonder what this is.
As a kid and even teen, I experienced things ‘seeming very far away” on rare occasions, as if looking through a telescope backwards exactly as she described. Particularly if sick, and even more so if feverish. AS exactly as described, it seems I grew out of it. It has never occurred as a an adult.
I'm 17 currently have it and it happened just 2 hours ago, can't really explain it beside somehow my hands became smaller and the walls is closing in, very trippy but I'm not really scared about it, fascination instead...what a weird brain we have.
I used to get this so much as a kid. Not all the same on the video. It would sometimes happen when I’m just sat around and instantly everything was 2x as far away. It was like someone edited my FOV. Also, while this was happening people’s voices and noises sounded sarcastic and aggressive to me (this is very hard to explain). This used to last a while and I would always rub my eyes to make it go away but it was like I was trapped until it went away naturally. This hasn’t happened to me for a very long time but I used to be able to activate it, all I had to do was stare at somebody’s face for a very long time and not blink but once I activated it I couldn’t really get out (this was at the worst times)
ohh cool i also hear everything super aggresively when it happens
My neurologist said I had Alice in Wonderland syndrome but no brain scan or anyting and I don't have the same exact symptoms. What happens though when I'm in my room it looks like objects are morphing getting bigger or smaller. When I walk outside sometimes it looks like the road or walkway is stretching when I'm standing still. I do know when I was a kid I was diagnosed with auditory processing disorder so maybe it's possible I have a visual processing disorder as well.
I never had this. Since everyone is explaining their side.
You’re lucky. It’s terrifying as a kid to experience it
@@officiallolnick My experience was I'm small and next day I'm big, the open space in the room is suddenly wider than normal, and all of it was more curious than creepy.
That is, until I experienced depersonalization
(not disorder [I hope] )
and it was someone else on the mirror. Really creepy
Yes that's very scary and horrifying especially when you get that things at night.
I had this when I was a kid and still have it
This happened to me a lot more when I was a kid, it would actually distort my perception of sound, time and feeling which was horrific to experience. Time would often be slightly too fast, the ground would crease up so anywhere I walked felt like a pile of clothes and sounds were too loud and fast, often I would sit down and I would hear things coming towards me, for example one night I experienced it and remember hearing running coming towards the door next to me. I also experienced the walls grow and shrink like many others.
Same with me bro. Time distortion. First time i had 10yrs old with an infection, and now at 30s i feel it with stressfull moments while working. I am with you.... Its so hard to explain to people how time looks to be faster, everything you hear or moving its to damn fast. Just searching about this right now cuz never felt was an issue, but is being quit annoying.
I had this when I was a kid, I called it "Fast thing" mostly because everything seemed faster than it was and sometimes id see things far away or closer to me! I use to cry because of this! But the thing that helped me was distracting me and one thing i did was play the tin whistle and it really helped lmao
Reminds me of some strange sensations I had when I was a kid, I think typically when I was feeling a little under the weather. I've never been able to reproduce those feelings after growing up, and I don't remember it well enough to describe any more.
I love it when it happens. I feel tiny and disconnected from my massive body. Breathing in air feels like a giant gust of wind traveling through a cave.
I had this as a child. Glad some ones talking about this bizarre condition.
I guess I had this as a kid. I remember lying down on my parents’ bedroom, staring into space when suddenly the room started expanding, stretching further and further away from me. It honestly scared me a lot and I always kept myself curled up in my bed. Another experience as a kid was when I went to the bathroom and my sink looked like it had shrunken, looking smaller than usual. I actually never knew this disorder even existed, I thought I was crazy when I experienced this as a kid 😅
I used to get this as a child when I had a fever. It goes away the next day. Strangest dreams happen too.
I also in childhood
How to relieve this problem???
@@jagwindersingh3254 You grow out of it.
Most of the time, I hate seeing people talking on my infomercial video, but this is educating and you have amazing way of captivating your audience, ma'am 👍
Sometimes whenever I look at people giving a lecture, they start looking smaller and the room gets bigger. Also, sometimes when drifting off towards sleep, my room starts feeling bigger and I feel smaller and heavier. Both happen very rarely and I’ve been experiencing it since I was young. Glad to see you guys covering this!
I think this would be scarier than drugs. With drugs, you know you took them and that can help keep you from freaking out. But when there's no known reason for you to be hallucinating, that sounds truly scary.
I never knew there was a name for what I went through as a child
I used to get this when I was a child; whenever I had a fever, I would experience myself getting too big, or everything being too close or too far away. My hands and head would be the wrong size and my wallpaper would move. It's how I knew I was really sick, but I never told my mum. I now realise they were probably febrile hallucinations resulting in Alice in wonderland syndrome, as they resolved within hours. It was absolutely terrifying! And I'm so glad I no longer have them!
I experienced this very often as a kid, and still occasionally do. The type of visual hallucination I got was like the "looking through a telescope" example, and was often paired with a zoned out/spaced out feeling and a low, pulsating hum.
Was often triggered by focusing intently on something, like listening and looking at a teacher in class, or when trying to fall asleep.
I actually enjoyed it and wish I experienced it more often, I always knew when it happened that if I switched my attention to something else it would go away, so I would sit or lay there and just relax.
Hoping that the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon takes effect now :^)
You know, I just tried explaining what I felt like in a comment. This is exactly what I've experienced as well. You just explained it so much better.
Feels weird not being alone with this specific kind of trigger.
Take comfort in it :D
If by the "looking through a telescope" example you mean in the opposite direction so things would seem small and farther away than they actually are, then I had the same exact thing, with the same triggers. It was sometimes accompanied by auditory hallucinations though, and those were pretty miserable.
@@bsd103 No I mean things look close and large. But yes, otherwise the same!
What made it miserable? I always loved it.
@@demon4511 Ah mine was the opposite then, small and far away, sometimes "pulsing" between that and normal. The auditory effects were generally like time slowing down, echoing, loud, very anxiety inducing. Those pretty much went away entirely over time but I still see the visual stuff on the really rare occasion.
I used to get teleposia (like looking through the wrong end of binoculars) every night as a child. Now it only happens to me when I am extremely tired + focused on something. Its occurrence is dropping in frequency as I age, though.
I remember experiencing something like this once when I was small, I woke up at night and was heading to the toilet, but suddenly my wardrobe looked like it stretched and was as tall as a skyscraper... What's interesting is, I was diagnosed with Epilepsy when I was 14 so that may be the reason? idk
I've got this. It usually manifests as a distortion in my perception of time. It happens really infrequently these days, but it makes me feel like the world around me is really slow and I'm really fast. Never had mono before, but I get migraines and migraines run in my family. I've never experienced an episode while having a migraine, though.
1:10 yep I've experienced that as a child
What wasn't mentioned here is change in perception of time, which I also had frequently as a child. It would feel like I would tell my body to do something and have to literally wait for it to happen. The inverse, we'd be driving down the road and I felt like we were barreling along around corners at lethal speed, yet we were going 30 MPH. These days it's universally a sense of speeding up perception, like more samples or frames per unit time. Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors or sleep deprivation bring it on. I have seem to have a general, but non-fixed deficit in judging the absolute size of an object and distance. Usually I notice distance by how close the floor seems. Sometimes I'm way off the floor and my body is quite large, sometimes it seems I'm very close and my legs should be in the floor.
I also have visual snow, and it may be they have a common underlying basis. Cacao, or anything with methylxanthines, has a profound effect. I'm not sure if this is strictly mechanical, an aspect of altered blood flow, of it has a root in altered calcium flux (esp dumping intracellular stores into the cytoplasm repeatedly, ryanodine receptor action, NO synthesis). Dopaminergic stimulants do the opposite, they improve spatial awareness and reasoning. Dextroamphetamine caused the grain of visual snow to become like rainbow waves on surfaces, which is interesting. Lastly, marijuana brought on the time dilation the most intense it's ever been. I ended up playing paintball and could literally see the paintball whizz passed me. Jumping I would hang in the air for a very long time.
Anyway, it appears to me that perception of time and motor output are generally synchronized. In AWS, they are not, and there are errors in the spatial map as well which gives rise to feeling like the floor is made of jelly or some such. Like most cases of migraine I would look to the upper cervical spine, alignment of the atlas, and the position of the jaw. Stimulation of the vagus or trigeminal nerve, tugging on the brainstem, poor CSF circulation, all would cause issues of the temporal and occipital areas. These things are screwed up for me, and perhaps therefore, I am screwed up in turn.
When I was little I had these periods where I could hear what others will say a second before they say it.
Merto6 me too I have this coincidences too and auditory hallucinations I’m hyper sensitive/vigilant and I have vivid imagination to the point where my dreams are realistic and when I wake up I forget that it was a dream
I had this syndrome since I was 3 and somehow I still have it even now. It used to scare me so much but over the years, I began to learn to cope with it. But to be completely honest, I was so traumatized when this first happened to me that I still remember it 12 years later.
This is interesting. I've had instances where when I am looking at someone they suddenly seem so so far away. Like ten feet suddenly looks as if it is fifty feet. Happened before I ever contracted mono. How interesting.
I had these hallucinations a lot when I was a kid (ages 4-7) and always as I was trying to fall asleep, I only found out years later what was going on with me... and only after browsing Wikipedia in my early adult years. It turns out that the growing brain of a child can sometimes cause these things to occur, at least that's my reasoning. I would see wood patterns start warping into human figures, I would see objects becoming larger and trying to attack me, and one night, I saw paper white fat pot bellied children running around naked behind the living room's foggy window. I screamed at the top of my lung for my parents.
When you're on drugs you can still usually tell what is an illusion and what's not, so it does seem similar to hallucinations induced by drugs.
I agree
Aye. I've had some pretty intense psychedelic induced hallucinations but am always aware of their true nature.
Even as I engage in a conversation with the beings in front of me I know they're not real.
Since I was a teen I've had brief episodes where everything seems to move in the same rhythm. As in, things that are slow will seem to go faster and things that go fast will seem to go slower. This is accompanied with an auditory thing where everything will sound like it's right next to me. I haven't been able to find anything matching the specific symptoms but a year ago I looked up Alice in Wonderland Syndrome and it is the closest thing to my experience.
Try reading synesthesia maybe you'll find something there.
Oh! This really explains those weird times I had as a child when it would seem that my bed was small enough to pick up with just to fingers.
I’ve had AIWS since I was a child, and honestly it is not that bad (for me.) I have very sporadic episodes that last about 15-20 minutes, in which things move and feel EXTREMELY fast and sounds are EXTREMELY loud - unpleasantly so, as if everything is being done in a rage explosion. I’ve also noticed recently that objects (if I’m holding my phone, for instance) feel heavier than they normally do. Only a couple days ago I decided to look it up and discovered that this weird sensation I had been having since a little kid was an actual condition. I remember many times in high school when I would have it in the middle of an exam - it felt as if all my thoughts were yelling and talking really fast, and I would write with (what for me was) such velocity that it sounded like I would destroy my pen. But somehow I also knew that these things weren’t happening in real life - something inside of me would know that, in spite of feeling movements, thoughts and sounds in an extremely aggressive way (that’s the best word I can find to describe it), that was not how things were actually behaving.
So yeah, it’s uncomfortable but, for me, not a very big deal. I’ve never had distortions of size or anything visual, though. Would be interesting to meet more people with the condition!
That is the exact experience I have with my episodes but also experience size distortion. Now 43yrs old I still experience them especially when stressed. And I recently found out that my adult daughter has them also.
"My head feels like a frisbee. Twice its normal size."
My mind has been blown. I stumbled across this by accident after a very severe episode of a headache. I’ve had about 4 similar headaches as a kid, all with visions when I’ve closed my eyes, rocking and one which left me with awful derealisation/ depersonalisation.
I genuinely thought it was my ptsd that caused it but now looking at everything relating to vestibular migraines I believe that is what I experienced
I wonder if similar parietal lobe dysfunction plays a role in the distorted body images of those with eating disorders.
Can confirm. At 16, experienced AIWS, but since I was also anorexic and malnourished, they attributed it to poor diet and psychiatric induced body dysmorphia. But I just had another episode today at 28, and I'm defs not malnourished or anorexic or body dysmorphic.
I've had this since i was very young, i'm 18 now, and have learned to live and cope from time to time, for me its mostly that my hands, or limbs feel big or small, or that what i'm holding is very big and very small at the same time. Which is really really uncomfortable. With this said i know this feelings in and out. They are not hallucinations, but rather illusions. It is different from person to person but all research I've done and all the time I've felt it, i know for a fact for me and a lot of people, t is not a hallucination, you can still differentiate it from reality. It is just in your brain. And it is not dangerous, so try to relax, the years I've found small solutions to help you to get rid of it for the moment, or maybe forever, and for me it has always been about just thinking about other things, very simple!
Ex: Taking a shower, drawing, playing video games, jump around swinging your arms or legs, watch a movie, etc.
Anything that will get you thinking about something else, that makes you happy. And trust me it will go away, i'm 18 now and my father had it too, which also makes sense, because research shows it can be genetically transmitted. For him it went away in his early 20s, which also makes sense because i also read that it mostly shows in late teens to early adults (16-22), but of course also is likely in kids, which was the case for both me and my dad.
With this said if you are feeling this. I want you to know that, you are not alone and it will go away if you keep focusing on the things that makes you happy, go talk to your parents and ask them about it, maybe tell them to read this comment, or your friends, or a psychologist. Just remember that it is going to be okay no matter what happens.
I’ve been diagnosed but idk if this is another kind symptom. There are these moments I have where I’m standing or laying still and my head will start spinning backward in a circle. Kinda like I can feel the earth moving as i’m staying still. it happens almost everyday, usually in the afternoon and it goes away in 20 seconds. :( Wondering if anyone else has experienced this.
I had this same thing when I dropped acid and did shrooms. It went away, though.
Doesn't matter. Your case and theirs is different.
@@uniqhnd23 nice grammar Einstein
@@patstaysuckafreeboss8006 Damn didn't even notice that. Thanks Newton.
So, that must be what Roger Waters from Pink Floyd was talking about in Comfortably Numb.
"When I was a child I had a fever. My hands felt just like two balloons."
It sounds like something I've experienced as a child a few times, it started by me feeling that my head is like 2-3 times bigger than normal, the weight being to big for me to lift my head from the pillow, like feeling every cell of my skull pressing on me, at the same time every little noise in the room would provoke me pain, or rather discomfort, that was worse than any kind of pain I've experienced till now. I think that rather then being a rare syndrome, it's something that is rarely reported, I never told somebody because while in that state I only wished for it to end and also I was unable to speak properly, after that I would rather not remind myself about the experience and never told my parents or something, nonetheless it was a very rare experience and after a while it never happened again.
Maybe there is more to it.
I think that's a stroke
I too have this, it’s the strangest thing as the room stretches as your own arms and hands become smaller while also being fully aware nothing in the world has changed, it’s almost like your FOV field of view gets set to 250 and a few minutes or seconds later it’s gone and you won’t have it happen again for months or years...
When I was younger I would feel really tall or really short so when I found out my real height I was always confused
This happened to me when I caught the colds as a kid. And this happened before I threw up, very nauseous-inducing. Glad it went away.
When I was a child I had a fever, my hands felt just like two balloons.
Now I've got that feeling once again, I can't explain you would not understand, this is not how I am.
I have become comfortably numb.
curently having this, remember this from when i was a kid. probrably the aura you can get before getting a migraine ( tingling hands and feet as well) the part i hate is the auditory parts. everything is loud, i hear my appearent tinitis (didnt have that as a kid, thanks nightclubs for having music always way too loud) and the most annoying thing is my thoughts will sound super loud and sometimes like my thought is screaming (not hearing random voices but just your "thought voice" i guess i could call it.
I definitely had this or something similar when I was a kid, sometimes I would feel like I was much bigger than I was, and sometimes I would feel like my hands were made of stone. My hands weren't heavy or hard to move they just felt like they had a hard surface.
Sporadically, I got the feelings later in life too
i cant stand people always calling this rare or a disease
ITS CLEARLY A SYNDROME.
ITS COMMON, VERY COMMON
Brit you are so talented! I'm taking a science communication course right now and you have everything down so well. I hope I can be as skilled as you one day.
for me this has existed ever since I was born
1st stage : my field of view increases making me see everything is really far or I am really big
2nd stage : i have a kind of ringing in my ears and cant hear anything with distorted voices
3rd stage : time slows and the pain lasts more long
4th stage : spikes come out of my body and it feels like my bones are breaking and coming out of my throat
I used to get this all the time as a kid especially when I was ill. Hands felt huge and room looked tiny. What's strange is that it happens even now as an adult mostly when I'm in a dark room thinking about something profound but can also happen when I'm in a intensely focused conversation. It used to scare me but now I kinda enjoy it because it's so interesting. Moving and looking around the room normally snaps me back to reality!
Holy cow, this may explain the wacky hallucinations I had with an infection I had in my early teen years. It felt like the TV was playing in fast forward mode, my hands felt very large, and any cloth I touched felt like that really dry, uncomfortable wool. I also found out much later that I had had EBV at some point in my life. I wonder if the "rarity" of this condition is more associated with either dismissal of the symptoms as generalized hallucinations caused by dehydration and infection + dismissal of children's imaginations.
I had this a lot myself when I was a kid (everything looks really small like in a doll's House, increased awareness of my peripheral vision and preceded by my vision rapidly seeming to zoom in and out and feeling like I'm spinning around), about the same time as my chronic 24/7, 365 depersonalisation started. Still have the same DP episode like 30 years later with no sign of it ever going away, but the Alice in Wonderland syndrome has subsided a bit, but sometimes comes back mostly when I'm overtired.
This sounds exactly like what I would experience, but sometimes with auditory hallucinations as well
I remember that whenever I experienced this, time seemed to be moving faster or slower than it was. Everytime this happened, I tried to focus on the nearest clock to help me keep track of time, by following how fast the seconds hand was moving. Unfortunately from my perspective, the hand just looked like it was moving twice as fast or twice as slow.
I'm also having an hallucination now. I'm seeing Brie Larson as the presenter. I wonder if I'm the only one.
I am currently 34, suffering from status epilepticus seizures for the past 10 years and migraines since I was a kid.
These symptoms are always a sign a seizure is coming.
Most common ones are the distorted perception of my body size and smelling ones.
Sometimes I feel my leg is 3m long, sometimes I smell something badly burnt.
I had none of these before the seizures started though.
I have these symptoms as part of my depersonalization / derealization disorder. But my brain is otherwise intact, I've had a lot of neurological tests done.
I feel you bro
Same
3:24.5 Glorious 'one'. Listen to that smooth transition of tone color. It's like a UFO taking off.
I get these symptoms with migraine and hypoglycemic episodes.
I remember feeling like i was upside down and kept tripping cause everything was tilted
Brit looks really good in this video :)
what about time distortion! everything seems faster than it is!
and i think it's related to the oxygen in the blood, if you try to take deep breaths it goes away.
Yeah I had time distortion occur to me too but I don't think everyone gets it, certainly not as many as the people who get sight distortion.
90% of comments: I 100% have this
Statisticians, psychologists, and physicians: .......**sigh**
I mean given how brief the episodes are and how not that distressing the distortions tend to be along with the fact that it usually happens to children I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of thing is actually quite common and just not very much reported.
@@eoincampbell1584 Or, Occam's razor, it's just more Web MD cancer diagnoses of another color.
@@custos3249 Or, Occam's razor, this many people wouldn't lie about their experiences for attention especially when so many people are commenting meaning that a person saying they have maybe had this syndrome isn't at all guaranteed to get them attention?
@@eoincampbell1584 Interesting. Despite your implication, I never said they were lying or looking for attention. But don't worry. I'm aware of how Hanlon's razor works too.
@@custos3249 Damn it I had to look up what Hanlon's razor was just to find that you're insulting me. Sneaky and stylish I may have to steal that.
Anyway soz I misunderstood what your explanation for all the comments was. I'd like to know why you think all these people would describe similar experiences if they aren't lying and also you don't think they've had episodes of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome.
thanks sci show, now I've randomly burst out into choruses of "one pill makes you larger aaaaand one pill makes you small, and the ones that mother gives you don't dooooo anything at all." thanks for that.
2:01 A great opportunity WASTED