Illustration by Emily Taylor
I wrote a blog for Shakespeare Day on 23rd April but it’s still in draft form. It didn’t get published because I started feeling lousy and now it’s out of date. We’ve been having a series of health problems here, none of them to do with Covid 19, but most of them alarming.
22nd April was the first day of a bad migraine which went on for five days. On the sixth day I woke up to find that the headache was gone but instead I was suffering from hallucinations. Some objects around me seemed to increase in size and others looked smaller. I remember one foot seemed bigger than the other and some things in the room were out of place. Other things seemed to be moving past me but when I turned to look they weren’t there. I lost my sense of time and I couldn’t read the wall clock in the kitchen. I checked the other one in the living room but it was just the same. Some numbers were bunched up together and others spaced out but none of them were distinguishable from bunches of black sticks.
I spent the whole afternoon in Warwick Hospital having all the tests available, the full MOT on brain, heart and blood. When asked to describe my perceptions I answered that it was like being Alice in Wonderland. Everyone seemed sympathetic but my description drew no further comment. At the end of the day the doctor who was looking after me reported that they could find little wrong except for lowered potassium levels in the blood. I told him that I’d been feeling a little better since he took an armful of my blood and he replied jokingly that it was good to know that the old methods can still work. I promised to send him a bucket of leeches.
I continued to feel quite fragile for about three weeks but then I felt up to doing a bit of research and it didn’t take long on the internet to come across Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (AIWS or AWS) also known as Todd’s syndrome after the British psychiatrist who identified it in the 1950s. It is a very rare condition that mostly affects children and, as demonstrated by the hospital staff, it is not very well known. I was reassured to read that it is not dangerous on its own.
This made me transfer my attention to Charles Dodgson (1832 – 1898) aka Lewis Carroll to see if he suffered from migraine with aura (another way of saying perceptual disturbance). Apparently at least one of Dodgson’s doctors diagnosed him with epilepsy. Later on, in the 20th century a consultant neurologist examining his medical records expressed the opinion that he very probably suffered from migraine as well.
If that is true, I think it may shed light on how Alice in Wonderland came to be written and, having been in that strange world myself, I think it carries as much weight as the many Freudian theories that have been put forward to explain the story.
Thank you, Emily, for sending me your delightfully quirky and colourful illustration of Alice. It has proved to be an invaluable stimulus to help me start writing again.
