Self-perception symptoms
Your brain monitors and manages your body’s functions. This is extremely important, as it keeps you safe and healthy. However, it’s also possible for something to go wrong with that ability, which is what happens with self-perceptive symptoms of AIWS. They include:

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• Changes in your perception of your body. This can cause part of your body to feel too big (partial macrosomatognosia) or too small (partial microsomatognosia). This effect can also cause your whole body to feel unusually tall (total macrosomatognosia) or unusually short (total microsomatognosia).

• Derealization. This is a form of dissociation when you feel disconnected from the world around you.

• Depersonalization. This type of dissociation makes you feel disconnected from your own body, thoughts or feelings. Some people describe this as feeling like watching your own life in third-person, as if you were watching from over your own shoulder or outside of yourself.

• Feeling of being split in two. Known as somatopsychic duality, people often describe this as feeling as if they’re split in two vertically. That makes them feel as if their body’s left and right halves exist separately, but they can still feel both.

• Disruption in sense of time. This changes your ability to judge the passage of time. People who experience this may feel that time is standing still or as if time is greatly slowed or sped up.​

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Visual perception symptoms
The most common symptoms of AIWS affect visual perception. That means the symptoms affect the way you see things around you. They include:

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• Changes in size. Objects may appear larger (macropsia) or smaller (micropsia) than they actually are.

• Changes in distance. Objects may appear closer (pelopsia) or farther away (teleopsia) than they actually are.

• Changes in both size and distance. Objects may appear smaller and seem to be moving farther away (porropsia).

• People appearing smaller than they actually are. This is known as Lilliputianism (pronounced “lil-ip-yew-shun-ism”). This gets its name from the fictional, tiny residents of the island of Lilliput from the 1726 fantasy novel “Gulliver’s Travels” by Jonathan Swift.

• Changes in object appearance. Objects can appear distorted. Straight lines can look wavy or squiggly. Lines that are level vertically or horizontally can look skewed or slanted.