Too Big for the Bed

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a clock, and a mattress spring, and a sense of scale being lost)
Your hand is the size of the room.

[Verse 1]
Nothing is moving. Everything is exactly where it was.
And your left arm is enormous — genuinely enormous —
it has a weight like a fallen tree and it goes on for a while,
and your head has swollen to the dimensions of a church,
and somewhere down there, very far away, are your feet,
which are small now. Which are extremely small.

[Chorus]
Too big for the bed! Or far too small for it!
The body loses track of its own borders as it goes —
a limb inflates, a hand detaches, a leg belongs to nobody,
and there is no pain in any of it, and nothing is wrong.
Too big for the bed. Alice in the corridor.
It has been reported for as long as there have been reports.

[Verse 2]
There's a word for it in the literature and the word is marvellous:
they call it Alice in Wonderland syndrome — genuinely, in journals,
after the girl who drank the bottle and filled the house with herself.
Some get it with migraine. Some get it with fever.
Most people get it here, at the threshold, once or twice a year,
and never mention it, and would struggle to describe it if they did.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
The proprioceptive map — the sense that tells you where you end —
is maintained continuously, all day, at some expense,
and going to sleep means switching that maintenance off,
so the map goes soft at the edges, and the edges start to drift,
and for about a minute you are a shape without a scale.
Then it resolves. It always resolves. It has always resolved.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the clock, unbothered)
There. Normal size.
Whatever normal size is.