I laughed loudly when I saw "Alice in Wonderland syndrome", how apt! Fortunately I don't have this symptom, which would be pretty dysphoric:
Surprisingly enough, those Alice in Wonderland syndrome symptoms, which are called micropsia (where everything seems smaller than usual) and macropsia (everything seems larger than usual), can be quite fascinating rather than unpleasant. I used to experience micropsia and macropsia on a regular basis — almost nightly — as a child, usually while in my bed, just before going to sleep. Though as I grew older, these experiences slowly disappeared.
So I suspect I also likely have (or at least had) temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Though it's only actually in the last few years that I learnt about this connection between Alice in Wonderland syndrome and TLE. I was very excited about discovering this, and that's why I now know a little bit about TLE.
The whole subject area of TLE is quite fascinating. I always had a bit of spiritual type personality, and was naturally interested spiritual subjects, consciousness exploration, paranormal research, etc. I never questioned why I had these interests. But now I realize this TLE connection may well explain it.
So TLE, or temporal lobe electrical instabilities, probably endowed me with this spiritual disposition. Even if I no longer seem to have any seizure manifestations (I no longer get Alice in Wonderland syndrome), I think that just having temporal lobe instabilities (without seizures) can still impact upon mental state, and energize the mind spiritually.
Michael Persinger has for decades being doing very interesting research, where he takes normal healthy subjects, and "tickles" their temporal lobes using oscillating magnetic fields generated by a helmet placed on the subject's head (called the
God helmet). Persinger is often able to evoke spiritual / timeless / presence-of-God experiences in the minds of these people. Which shows how electrical activities in the temporal lobes are able to create these transcendental states.
I don't incidentally think that just because these timeless / presence-of-God experiences are evoked by electrical activities in the temporal lobe, that that somehow explains away God, or explains away states of consciousness that transcend time, as a fabrications of the mind; it could well be that these abnormal seizure states in the brain do
physically have a timeless quality to them; if they involve quantum phenomena, then the thermodynamic arrow of time does not apply to such phenomena, and so these brain states may well
physically possess non-ordinary temporal qualities, meaning that the timelessness subjectively experienced during temporal lobe seizure is genuine, a real McCoy encounter with the eternal.
I never experienced any other symptoms of TLE as a child, apart from (and this is going to sound very weird and kind of embarrassing) seeing some strange gnome hallucinations, which I describe in
this post. My assumption is these hallucinations that I frequently saw were also caused by TLE.
For me personally, if TLE is indeed the reason why I have a spiritual-type disposition, then I would consider this more of a gift than a curse. In other words, I wouldn't like to lose that disposition. Unfortunately though, since developing ME/CFS, much of my spiritual disposition has in fact vanished: ME/CFS seemed to move my mind away from the sacred end of the spectrum, towards the mundane secular end. Possibly ME/CFS has somehow dampened the electrical "zinginess" in my temporal lobes, which then put an end to much of my spiritual mind state.
I wish my spiritual energies were still there, because I would have loved to further explore them, especially in the context of now knowing that they might be underpinned by TLE or temporal lobe instability; knowing this only adds to the interest, as I always enjoyed exploring spiritual matters from both the objective scientific and the subjective experiential angles.
There's quite a bit of literature about the connections between TLE and mysticism, ecstatic states, and so forth. Professor Vilayanur Ramachandran (University of California, San Diego) has a lot of interest in this area.
So you might want to look upon TLE in the same light: that it may bring advantages as well as disadvantages, and to an extent, the influence of TLE and temporal lobe instability may be part of who you are, part of your personality. I am not sure how problematic these déjà vu and amnesia periods are for you, but if you do see them as a problem, there are some treatments you could try.
I think you can get EEG tests (which measure brain electrical activity) to help diagnose TLE, but I am not quite sure how this works. I have not looked into this myself, because I am primarily focused now on trying to ameliorate my ME/CFS.
In terms of treatment, anticonvulsant drugs can help TLE. Anticonvulsants have a seizure-suppressing effect. One commonly-prescribed anticonvulsant is Lamictal (lamotrigine), and this is also one of the drugs Dr Jay Goldstein would use for his ME/CFS patients. I bought some Lamictal online not so long ago, and I tried very low dose Lamictal myself, 12.5 mg daily, and it helped my ME/CFS a bit, but the benefits seemed to wear off after a few weeks.
A ketogenic diet is an established dietary treatment to help reduce the number of seizures you get.
Glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter, and plays a role in the triggering and spread of seizures. So possibly anything that reduces extracellular glutamate levels might help prevent seizure (but this is just my own hunch). I was experimenting recently with high dose amoxicillin (an antibiotic), which can significantly lower brain extracellular glutamate (see
this thread).