‘Disney’ has always been an integral part of every person’s childhood, irrespective of the country they were born and brought up in. Be it Mickey Mouse or Beauty and the Beast, Disney has managed to be on every kid’s priority list. Among the other characters that Disney presented us with, Alice from Alice in Wonderland was one of the most cherished characters of all time. The movies were based on Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
In the story, Alice would eat cookies or drink from a bottle which would result in her body either shrinking or expanding to all possible sizes.
But have you ever wondered what it would be like if these fairytales ever came true? What if you were Snow White and a kiss from the prince brought your dead being back to life? Or what if one day you woke up and found yourself living in a jungle with Mowgli and his bear friends?
‘Every coin has two sides‘ they say. So if you ever wish for a fairytale life, think twice. For it may unexpectedly become your worst nightmare instead of a perfect fantasy. Talking mirrors and crossroad demons, we better not come across them in today’s world! But somewhere somebody’s wish was granted when they hoped for a fairytale life just like Alice’s. And soon, a number of people started experiencing it. The Alice in Wonderland syndrome.
This syndrome affects the perception of a person’s brain. Once you’ve been affected by it, you would always seem puzzled about what size a particular part or the entire body of people around you is. You may sometimes find certain things quite enlarged or other things quite minuscule. This syndrome is named after Alice since she experienced the same size distortion issues while in Wonderland. Though it is said that a person experiencing this disfigurement could be due to his habit of drug abuse that mess up the brain’s activities, this syndrome is quite common in children. Kids have got to be careful what they wish for while blowing out their birthday candles!
When the parts of our brain that deal with the perception of vision lack blood flow, the Alice in Wonderland syndrome is triggered. It makes you believe that your own body is altered and also interferes with your other senses. To go with this, it is also accompanied by a migraine, which is most common in this syndrome. People have recounted their symptoms which include them thinking that they have shrunk or that their limbs are moving even when kept still and also feel that they are taking a lot of time to reach an object even though they are swiftly moving towards it. There have also been suppositions that the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll also suffered from the same condition and wrote about his own experiences in the novel. So Lewis Carroll’s fairytale is actually his own visual hallucination!
Amazing Blog. Really enjoyed reading.