When I was twelve I slept in the
same room as my elder brother, John. One night I awoke in a state of serious
disorientation. It seemed to me that the world around me just wasn’t right,
whether my eyes were closed or not. It threw me into a panic to the extent that
I jumped out of bed and ran into my parents’ room shouting, ‘Our John’s done
something awful!’
Hard on my heels
was my brother, quite truthfully protesting that he hadn’t done anything. My
parents assumed it was some sort of nightmare and we were sent back to bed.
However to me it wasn’t a nightmare as I was wide awake and the problem was
still there. I made no further mention of it as I, at that age, didn’t have the
words to describe it. The ruffles in the bedclothes seemed as big as monstrous
waves in the sea, my fingers felt like sausages and the bedroom door, perhaps
twelve feet away, might well have been fifty feet high and a hundred feet away.
Eventually I fell asleep, and when I awoke in the morning the problem was gone.
I sincerely hoped it would never return.
Some days later I
was off school with a migraine― an ailment for which my mother found me a surefire
cure in Beecham’s powders (not the pills, I hasten to point out). My mother had
to go to work that day as she had a part-time job and I’d been left in bed with
a supply of this stuff, to take whenever my headache came back. I was fine with
this. Staying at home on my own was never a problem with me...until then.
I went downstairs
and sat in the front room, perhaps to read a book or a comic, when the problem
returned. Everything around me seemed out of perspective, big and distant; my
own body felt wrong; my mind was disturbed in a way I could never describe,
even to this day. I was twelve and I thought I was going mad. There was no
escape from this, closing my eyes wouldn’t shut it out, all I could do was hope
it would go away, which it did after a couple of hours. By this time my mother
was back. Once again I didn’t tell her about it as I didn’t have the words,
besides I didn’t want her to think I was going potty. I certainly didn’t tell
our kid about it, as he already thought I was potty.
At frequent
intervals, over the next two or three years this problem returned. Not once did
I mention to anyone, not even to my friends. It was my personal problem and I
didn’t see how anyone could help. It came and it went and, as I got older and
perhaps mentally tougher, I learned to live with it because I knew it would go
away after a while. After a couple of years, when I felt the problem coming on,
I decided to take it on, live with it, try to figure it out, even have fun with
it. Somehow, once I’d started to cope with it, the problem began to leave me.
For a few years I got the strange feeling in passing, but it didn’t stay with
me.
It wasn’t until I
got much older that I heard a friend talk of ‘That Alice in Wonderland thing.’
I asked him about it and sure enough
it was what I’d been getting. Just like me he hadn’t mentioned it to anyone but
somehow, in later years, he’d found out it was a recognised syndrome in
children, with the nickname that Alice in
Wonderland thing― a pretty good description.
According to
Wikipedia it seems that the syndrome was first discovered in 1955 (two years
after I’d first suffered from it), by
psychiatrist called Dr John Todd who worked in a mental hospital not ten
miles away from where I was living. It’s officially called Todd’s Syndrome but
it’s also called the Alice In Wonderland Syndrome after Lewis Carroll who was
thought to have experienced it and used it to describe how Alice grew big and
small in Wonderland.
Last week I was
watching a hospital drama, Holby City, on TV with my wife who has an unusually
wide knowledge of things medical, to the extent that she can usually tell me
what’s wrong with a patient well before the TV doctors come up with their
diagnosis. On this occasion the patient was a young woman who was displaying
all my old symptoms (although hers were somewhat more dramatic).
‘She’s got that
Alice in Wonderland thing!’ I declared, much to my wife’s amazement. Up until
then the patient was showing no signs of anything other than not being right in
her head. The problem continued to baffle both the doctors and my wife until
five minutes from the end when the doctor pronounced that she was suffering
from Todd’s Syndrome. My gave me that look told me I was wrong but in her next
breath the TV doctor went on to say how it was also called the Alice In
Wonderland Syndrome. Now I’m not a great one for triumphalism in the home but I
have to say that my arms shot up in the air like they do when England score a
rare goal.
I now wonder how
many people have suffered such a thing without actually telling anyone? I’m
writing a crime book whose main protagonist is Septimus Black, a man with
psychiatric problems. Such is the value of personal experience that Septimus
also had the Alice in Wonderland thing when he was a boy.
