Here's an interesting article

[conuly]

On "Alice in Wonderland Syndrome" - not sure if that's the real name or not.

It reminded me of something I go through sometimes, that I think started round about in high school. I posted about it a few years ago, and got some concerned responses, but I really couldn't *do anything* about it at the time so I worked *really hard* to forget all about it, and eventually the problem went away.

Well, it came back a few months ago, and was really freaking me out, and it seems to have stopped for right now, but let me describe it.

Sometimes, I stop... I stop registering part of my body as mine. I mean, I know it's mine, and I can still use it, and I feel things... but it doesn't seem like mine to me.

So I'll be sitting and it will seem like all my vision is coming out of my left eye (it's usually the right side of my body that's affected). If I close my left eye, my right eye still seems fine, and, indeed, with both eyes open I have full 3-d vision, so it's not a physical thing - but I perceive it all as being from my left eye only, not both eyes.

Or I'll stop thinking of my right hand as mine, like it's disattached from my body. I know it's mine, I know it's there, and I can hold things with it, but I can't stop the creepy feeling that it's not actually mine, that it's gone or that it's a fake hand or something.

And then, on top of all this, I start thinking that because of that I'll have trouble *using* the affected body parts.

All I can find with the amazing internets is that sometimes this is related to DID. But... I don't think that applies. It's not stopping me from living my life, anyway, it's just very... creepy.

Comments

[caprinus.livejournal.com]

Fascinating that you should have these feelings of alienation from your body! I don't know if you got the AIWS link from my LJ, if not, I wrote about it recently -- but yes, it's one name for it, the other being Todd's syndrome. Actual feelings of detachment aren't really a part of it, just distortion. Detachment ideation and an inability to habituate yourself to clothing sound like a more basic disruption of proprioperception -- cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioperception#Impairment -- but not something long-lasting, like Neglect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemispatial_neglect#Varieties_of_hemispatial_neglect) or Agnosia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosia). Out of curiosity, do you get migraines?

[conuly]

No, I don't. My mom and sister do, and for a short period - starting in high school - I got something I thought then might be cluster headaches, but they weren't very often nor especially severe.