What Is Alice in Wonderland Syndrome?
3. Altered Sense of Time
Many factors can affect a person’s perception of time. For example, age, personality, cultural background, and engagement in an activity all contribute to whether time seems to “fly” or to “drag on.” People in crisis situations often report that they see things happening as if in slow motion. However, for people with AWS, perception of time becomes altered in ways not predicted by circumstance.
An example of time distortion in AWS would be walking across a room and feeling that you moved at super-human speed. Another example would be asking someone a question and feeling that he or she looked at you for several minutes before answering, when in actuality the person responded after only a brief pause. For Alice, time was altered as she fell down the rabbit hole; Carroll describes it by writing “Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next.”
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