people are strange
The images above are illustrations representing what Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (AIWS) must feel like. The Alice in Wonderland syndrome is a neurological condition characterized by distortions in the patient’s sense of time, space and body image. In patients with AIWS, size and shape are altered, resulting in a different and unnatural perception of themselves and other people/objects. These bizarre feelings about outside images are named Alice in Wonderland syndrome due to their similarity with Alice’s dreams. AIWS can include both macropsia, objects perceived to be larger, and micropsia, objects perceived to be smaller than they are. The AIWS has been associated with psychoactive drug use, migraines, traumatic brain injury, and visual distortion. AIWS can also affect vision, touch, hearing, and sensation.
(via sourmilksea & houseofmind)
I.D.
Several decades ago, a leading U.S. weekly, perhaps Time, conducted an interview with the singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. At one point, the interviewer, noting that Dylan wrote the haunting lyrics for his own songs, asked him if he considered himself a poet.
“Nope,” Dylan said.
Well, then, the interviewer went on, he must consider himself a composer, since he wrote all his own music, too.
“Nope,” Dylan said.
But, the perplexed interviewer wondered, if Dylan didn’t consider himself a poet or a songwriter, then what was he?
And Dylan said, “I’m a dancer.”
-Overheard in line while waiting to be seated for a performance at the Brooklyn Arts Exchange, January 7, 2004.
The Ultimate Cure for a Cold
Ballerina and choreographer Ruthanna Boris remembers this home remedy that dancers of the ceaselessly touring Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo used when they had to perform “white lots of stuff streamed out of the nose during pirouettes”:
-Set out several sets of nightwear.
-Prepare your bed to be ready to jump into.
-Draw a bath so hot that you can barely tolerate it.
-While the bath is running, prepare a mixture of hot water, lemon, honey, and you favorite hard liquor. (The alcohol can be eliminated; however, she says that the Ballet Russe dancers preferred Jack Daniels.)
-Set the drink on the edge of the tub.
-Get into the bath, and, while you lie there until your skin puckers, slowly slip the entire drink.
-When you get out of the bath, wrap yourself in a big towel. Do not attempt to dry yourself off completely. Instead, throw off the first set of nightclothes and jump into bed.
-Soon, you will begin to sweat profusely. Throw off the first set of nightclothes and get into the second set.
Continue this process throughout the night, until you’ve run out of nightclothes. In the morning, you’ll find that “you’re either cured, or you’re dead.”
-Mindy Aloff, interview.
Page 1 of 2
