Charles Dodgson was a scholar and a teacher at Christ Church, Oxford England. He was a lanky figure with a number of health issues. A knee injury that gave him a hobbling gait, he suffered from a fever at an early age that left him deaf in one ear and a bout with whooping cough as a teenager that left him with a chronically weak chest throughout the rest of his life in addition to a stammer/stutter that he dealt with since childhood.
While at the university, Dodgson would end up taking the Dean Liddle's children on row boat rides up and down the river. First the Dean's son, Henry and soon after his three sisters, Lorina, Edith, and Alice. It was on these row boat trips that Dodgson would start to tell the children tales based on what they may have seen along the riverbanks, creating fanciful stories of a rabbit dressed in a waistcoat running late to an appointment or flowers singing. Another time, perhaps they would 'see' a dodo bird and the stories would branch off from there. The children loved his stories so much that little Alice begged him to write them down, which he eventually did. Under the pseudonym; Lewis Carroll. Alice would become a central figure in many of his stories from then on.
It was believed that Dodgson may have also suffered from epilepsy. Speculation persists due to the sensation some epileptics report at the onset of an episode, feeling as though they're falling down a rabbit hole. Considering the Wonderland stories are loosely based on real-life occurrences he and the children would see on their excursions, it would make sense that Dodgson, ne Carroll, would include this specific feeling when Alice journeyed to Wonderland.
The reason for this rambling preamble?
Of the many sensations, encounters and activities we experienced at The Garage, the one that was the biggest mindfuck of them all was what I later discovered to be called: Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, AIWS. To give you a quick idea of what I went through, and I wasn't alone in this as I found out both my brother and sister had similar issues was, like the story where Alice drank to become Lilliputian in size, or ate to become a giant, we too would get the sensation of growing or shrinking in size, regardless of the world around us. Just as an example, I may have been laying in bed, wide awake even though it may have been dusk or dawn, and suddenly out of the blue, I felt, had a literal sensation that I was rapidly shrinking in size right there on my bed. Almost to the point where I was going to disappear into the bedding. The effects would last anywhere between a few minutes to maybe half an hour and then it would be gone. Never a revert to normal, you were just back to where you started from. Or sometimes the reverse would occur and it would feel as though we were growing beyond the confines on the bed, the room was shrinking around me and a few times, I thought my bed was going to break under the stress and weight of my now immense size.
For a pre-teen who's already seeing growth spurts, this was a hell of a thing to deal with. And again, it was all three of us kids. You can ask my brother or sister, they'll tell you they felt the same thing.
For a pre-teen who's already seeing growth spurts, this was a hell of a thing to deal with. And again, it was all three of us kids. You can ask my brother or sister, they'll tell you they felt the same thing.
Once we moved to the Mountain Top, I was already in my teens and that Alice in Wonderland sensation would subside and eventually pass before I hit 16 although migraine headaches would replace them for the next few years. I don't know when my siblings would also get over that feeling but we eventually talked about it while we were in our teens and came to the conclusion that it must have been the Garage that was doing that to us. Yet another in a long line of the unexplainable associated with living there.
And I thought that was that. Just a memory and the house being active. Until about 10 years ago when my brother told me one of his kids was suffering from Alice in Wonderland effects. O.k., there's got to be more to it than the Garage. She hadn't lived there, she knew nothing about it but she was dealing with the same problems? I started looking into it on my own.
That's when I found a handful of medical articles describing Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. Yes, it's actually a real thing and apparently a small percentage of the population suffer(s/ed) from it.
According to a case report in Frontiers in Neurology, "Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (AIWS) is a rare neurological disorder characterized by distortions of visual perception (metamorphopsias), the body image, and the experience of time, along with derealization and depersonalization..." "In the literature, no more than 180 “clinical” cases of AIWS have been described (i.e., cases in need of medical attention). Of them, some 50% showed a favorable prognosis. However, non-clinical cases (i.e., fleeting, transient cases of AIWS for which no professional help is needed) have been described in up to 30% of the general population." Up to 30% of the general population means that it's not as rare as one may have thought. But oddly enough, outside of the 4 people I know who have suffered from it, myself, my siblings and my niece, I've never heard anyone ever mentioning going through a similar condition for any length of time. If it's as common as the literature states, where are the other sufferers? After all, to go from 180 clinical cases which required medical attention to 30% of the population is a massive leap in figures. Which makes me wonder just how well it's being monitored/tracked or even diagnosed/misdiagnosed?
According to a case report in Frontiers in Neurology, "Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (AIWS) is a rare neurological disorder characterized by distortions of visual perception (metamorphopsias), the body image, and the experience of time, along with derealization and depersonalization..." "In the literature, no more than 180 “clinical” cases of AIWS have been described (i.e., cases in need of medical attention). Of them, some 50% showed a favorable prognosis. However, non-clinical cases (i.e., fleeting, transient cases of AIWS for which no professional help is needed) have been described in up to 30% of the general population." Up to 30% of the general population means that it's not as rare as one may have thought. But oddly enough, outside of the 4 people I know who have suffered from it, myself, my siblings and my niece, I've never heard anyone ever mentioning going through a similar condition for any length of time. If it's as common as the literature states, where are the other sufferers? After all, to go from 180 clinical cases which required medical attention to 30% of the population is a massive leap in figures. Which makes me wonder just how well it's being monitored/tracked or even diagnosed/misdiagnosed?
But the primary reason why this fell under a Meddling Kids post was because we (my siblings and I) assumed the sensation was related to or perhaps induced by The Garage and not a medical/psychological condition.
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