My weird hallucinations make life seem like Alice In Wonderland

When Rik Hemsley, 33, started experiencing inexplicable hallucinations, he feared for his sanity, until he discovered the reason for his peculiarly distorted perspective on life.

Here, the software developer, who lives in Nottingham with his fiancée, Penny, explains how being diagnosed with the rare neurological disorder, named after the famous Lewis Carroll novel, has affected his life.

Rik Hemsley: 'When I look at my hands, my fingers stretch half a mile. Day-to-day life can be very difficult'

When it first happened, I was a 21-year-old undergraduate. I had been up late the night before writing my dissertation and drinking a lot of coffee, but that morning I was sober and hangover-free.

I stood up, reached down to pick up the TV remote control from the floor and felt my foot sink into the ground. Glancing down, I saw that my leg was plunging into the carpet.

It was a disturbing sensation, but it lasted only a few seconds, so I put it down to tiredness and forgot all about it.

It wasn't long, however, before I started experiencing more extreme spatial distortions. Floors either curved or dipped, and when I tried walking on them, it felt as though I was staggering on sponges.

When I lay in bed and looked at my hands, my fingers stretched off half a mile into the distance.

These bizarre episodes were starting to happen more often, but because I was under pressure to finish my degree and get a job, I continued to put them to one side, figuring they must be stress-related.

I graduated and took a job as a systems administrator in a new town, but instead of going away, my symptoms got worse.

Everything was now distorted all the time. Walking down the road, cars appeared the size of Corgi models, while I'd feel disproportionately tall.

At work, my chair seemed enormous, while I seemed to have shrunk.

I didn't like going for a walk as it would be hard to persuade myself that what I was seeing was not real.

If steps on a staircase all looked so large that I'd have to jump onto each one, it was hard to ignore this and climb them normally. I had to not look where I was walking so that I'd be less affected, or close my eyes.

Day-to-day life was very difficult. Unable to judge distances accurately, I would often move clumsily or overcompensate.

Soon I found it a struggle to leave the house; I had difficulty correctly perceiving the ground, so walking was tricky. If I didn't think about it I was OK, but, as soon as I did, I found myself struggling to walk in a straight line.

Crossing the road began to feel dangerous; when I saw a car coming, I had no idea what size it was, or how far away.

When I was being driven in a car I would often feel I was sitting lower than I really was, and on spongy material. This, combined with the spongy feeling under my feet, would fool my brain into thinking my feet were low enough to drag on the ground under the car. I knew this was rubbish, but that's what my brain was telling my feet.

I also experienced some odd distortions of time. When I first encountered the condition, I was often lying in bed at night, listening to a CD while I nodded off to sleep.

The music would often appear to speed up for seconds or minutes at a time. I thought that CD players had some kind of mechanism for ensuring they played at the correct speed, so it seemed odd to me that this could happen. Not having any point of reference, I just assumed that the CD player was broken.

Later, I noticed the music speeding up when I was with other people so I asked them about it. They always claimed they had noticed no such thing - to them, it sounded normal.

Then I found that music from other sources - not just my suspect CD player - would seem faster than it should.

Spatial distortion: Alice in Wonderland shrank after drinking potions in Lewis Carroll's novel. Rik's disorder made him see cars the size of Corgi models while he felt disproportionately tall

Occasionally, everything seemed to be happening at the wrong rate - reality seemed to be speeded up or slowed down.

By now I was wondering what on earth was wrong with me. My GP reassured me that there wasn't anything the matter psychologically, suggesting instead that I was suffering from migraines. But painkillers proved ineffective and an MRI scan revealed nothing.

Unable to cope with a job any more, I moved back in with my parents.

It was there that I caught the tail-end of a TV documentary in which a woman complained of exactly my symptoms. It was the first I'd heard of Alice in Wonderland syndrome.

Identifying my problem gave me some hope of a cure, but neither my doctor nor my neurologist could find any medical record of the condition.

For a while I sat around at home, living off my savings, but after a couple of years I started working again from home. This gave me an income, but for the best part of a decade I was unable to enjoy the kind of personal life I wanted.

I liked going out at least once a week to socialise, but my symptoms made these nights out more painful than enjoyable.

In conversation, I would become terrified that an overload of odd perceptions would make me seize up or stop talking altogether.

Thankfully, I only experience spatial distortions about once a month now.

I haven't driven a car for a long time, but I've got a job and a fiancée, and we've bought a house, so I'm not yearning for a miracle cure in the way that I once was.

I'm still no wiser about what the catalyst was for me - perhaps it was too much coffee or long periods spent in a darkened room programming computers.

Whatever the reason, my AIWS is now at a level that lets me lead a relatively normal life.

Undoubtedly, it has been a huge challenge, but there is one part of the syndrome I really enjoyed.

Sometimes, especially just after waking, I would experience a kind of binocular vision. Lying in bed, I would find myself staring out of the window, watching crows flying over trees 100m away, but able to see the details on each bird and treetop as if they were at arm's length. That seems to have stopped now, and I almost miss it.