Have you ever hallucinated? (non-recreationally) Did it scare you?

In My Humble Opinion
1

So, I’ve kind of had this minor sinus infection/cold/upper respiratory infection going on for a week or so. Not fun, but I wash my hands and don’t really worry about it, rest when I can and drink lots of fluids, didn’t need to book off work. Friday night it blew up into full blown conjunctivitis, ear infection, sore throat and sinusitis. Saturday morning I went to the doctor. I think I slept most of Saturday after I got back from the doctors, with eye drops ear drops and a systemic oral antibiotic. Sunday I tried to engage with the world in between naps and eye/ear drops. Later that night my boyfriend had to be out for 4-6 hours, leaving me and my 6 year old at home. Other than the antibiotics, I only took Aleve for ear pain.

I fell asleep around 830, then woke up around 10 30 to the sound of “people” walking around in my house.

No one there. Boyfriend still out (I expected him home around midinight-1 am) All the doors locked. If I go upstairs, I hear them in the back rooms or in the basement. If I am in the basement, I hear them walking around upstairs. When I go back to the bedroom, I hear them in the front rooms, or going into the basement. Then I thought I saw shadows.

Ok, there is no one in the house. I know this. I also have a massive infection, which can cause delirium. I also have tinitus, and I expect it to be exacerbated by the infection. Logically and rationally I knew exactly what was going on, but I was seeing and hearing things that weren’t there. I was scared out of my mind, and very very grateful that my boyfriend got home earlier than expected, leaving me only an hour or so alone with my hallucinations.

So, not ever having experimented with “recreational hallucinations” (being drunk makes me happy, then hyper then angry then asleep, so I don’t do that much. tried a bit of the mj back in the day but since I don’t smoke I didn’t like and everything else scared the living heck out of me) and only a faint recall of being “floaty” once on post-op demerol, I had no previous experience of dealing with things that aren’t there. I am a nurse who works with psychiatric and dementia patients. Honestly I now have a better idea of what people go through. It was creepy as anything and I knew it a) wasn’t real and b) what was causing it. How on earth would someone with schizophrenia or Alzheimer’s or anything else cope with this?

Share your stories, but please I would rather this thread be saved for mental or physical illness related hallucinations, not “brown acid” type stories.

2

The only hallucinations I’ve ever had have been auditory. When I’m physically exhausted, when I finally lie down to go to sleep I get the same sound as the din of a cocktail party. I know that’s not much help, but that’s all I’ve got.

3

Do hypnagogic hallucinations count?

4

There was a week or so years back when I would go to sleep and I could feel the cat walking around on the bed. Pretty ho-hum and normal.

Until I realized that my GF had moved out and took the cat with her. Then it was just freaky.

5

I have a lot of trouble sleeping used to often see movement where there isn’t any after 2ish days of no sleep. It was especially bad in highschool where all the brick walls would appear to move around almost like tetris blocks if I hadn’t had any sleep in a few days. And once when I went for about 3-3.5 days with no sleep I saw the protagonist of a book I was trying to read sitting at the desk in my bedroom while I laid on the bed.

They’ve never really been persistent enough to frighten me though. Usually as soon as I started paying direct attention to them they disappear. Not to reappear until I let myself get groggy again.

6

Before my sleep apnea was diagnosed and taken care of, I used to have hallucinations just about every damn day. I was taking bookkeeping classes at the time and I’d be sitting at my desk, doing the simulations and I’d just see people. Who weren’t there. And they’d talk to me. I knew that it was just my brain trying to cram some dream-sorting into my daylight hours, since (as I found out when I did have my sleep study shortly after) I wasn’t going into REM for more than a couple of minutes at a time at night*. But it was freaky.

*When they hooked up the CPAP machine halfway through the night, I almost immediately went into REM and STAYED THERE for over THREE HOURS! That’s how much in deficit I was. I still can’t believe I survived that period…

7

Got chickenpox as an adult. High fever and audio hallucinations-I kept hearing ELO and The Monkees all day.

8

I have hypnogogic hallucinations all the time. Some of them scared me initially (severe injury to my hands or arms, which is one of my most common ones), and others I just found amusing (a little ghostlike girl in a white nightgown standing by my bed, a vase of flowers). Now that I’m familiar with them, I just sort of observe them. One recent new one that I found fascinating was a video camera mounted near the ceiling in the corner of my bedroom.

9

Had a really bad stomach flu 4-5 years back. Threw up more than I ever have before, couldn’t stop, got so dehydrated and desperate for water (couldn’t hold it down) I’d guzzle some in hopes that when I’d inevitably puke some would stay down.

My bed at the time had a palm tree motif, and gross as it is, when I am sick I prefer to puke from the comfort of my own bed into a trash can rather than sit and stare at a toilet on a cold tile floor for hours (and I don’t have to worry about running to toilet in time to puke). I got so dehydrated from the nonstop vomiting that I started seeing/hearing shit like I was in Africa on safari. I was not asleep, I was sitting up and puking/trying to calm down after puking/repeat. Almost went to the hospital but ended up being able to stop puking long enough to sleep a bit then drink enough water to avoid the ER. Took me at least 4-5 days in bed to start feeling halfway normal again, most of my stomach bugs only take about 1-2.

10

Yeah, I have them once in a while. Most are due to dreaming while awake or high fevers.

Some of them are scarier than others. I had a hypnogogic hallucination that a strange man broke into my dorm room and was rumaging through my things, and that was pretty scary; I’ve had a few others that were utterly mundane. The hallucations I had while taking ambien were a mix of silly and terrifying. But ones I’ve had due to fevers haven’t been scary.

11

My hypnogogic hallucinations used to be of people I knew, standing over my bed and talking to me. Classmates, friends, and even a teacher or two. Then I’d come fully awake and realize there was no one there.

One that was a bit different: I was having trouble falling asleep, and I distinctly heard someone shouting “ROSIE!” I am not a Rosie, nor do I know anybody with that name. But it was loud. Scared me a bit.

12

The worst hallucination was after I had been working 80+ hour weeks for about 6 weeks. I barely slept and was having hallucinations while I was driving. Scared the crap out of me, that’s when I quit working all the overtime.

13

I used to hallucinate that I was a moderator on this message board…[John Astin]but I’m much better now.[/John Astin].

14

Several times while almost falling asleep I’ve hallucinated a fly buzzing around, coming closer and closer like it was going to land on or in my ear. Less frightening than disgusting. And it took me a long time to figure out it was a hallucination; the fact that it is always accompanied by sleep paralysis tipped me off, and the fact that I never found or heard a fly once I could move again.

15

I have the hypnogogic problem and it took a long time and a bit of research on my part (for some reason doctors wouldn’t tell me anything when I complained) to realize it’s caused by some poorly understood sleep disorder and that no, the Evil One was not coming into my room to rape me every night.

I also once took a phenargen pill and then sat and listened to the radio for two hours before I noticed the radio was not on.

16

I was on a morphine drip when I broke my leg in 2004, and also had a pulmonary embolism that almost killed me. As they were moving me to the ICU, I felt the Eye of God staring at, into, and through me, and it was really uncomfortable. I kept lucid enough to realize that I was hallucinating, though, and even while I was shifting around, trying to get out from under His gaze, I knew it was all in my mind.

I also thought I had reality warping powers when they took me back to my room. I spent fifteen minutes trying to close the slightly ajar door (on the other side of the room) with my tongue, which I was convinced would twist and distort the space-time continuum if I moved it in just the right direction. It was the more believable hallucination (I’m an unabashed atheist), and I was really sad when I realized that one wasn’t true.

17

Mainly hypnogic and hypnopompic ones, particlarly the latter, because I have a sleep disorder. They can be rather prolonged and totally convincing.

I also once didn’t sleep at all for a very long time, and was hallucinating in a way similar to what jayjay describes, proper visual and auditory hallucinations but not when falling into or out of sleep. We’d been editing a film and I thought that the people I saw walking around the supermarket were also in the film, and kept trying to edit them.

They’re not scary to me, unless the hallucination itself is scary, but they are disturbing because they can make you distrust your own sense of reality.

:smiley:

18

When I’m having a seizure, I usually experience strange smells that aren’t there.

19

I was 19, worked all day partied 1/2 the night and got up with about 3 hours sleep. worked most of the day and set out on a 600+ mile drive at about 2 PM.
Driving rain storm. for the first 200 miles or so.
A stop or two for gas, and more driving.
I was on top of the Grapevine (I5 south of Bakersfield and North of LA) at I have no clue, midnight 1 AM.
We are going 80 or so in my British sports car, top up radio low as my traveling companion is asleep.
I have the high beams plus my driving light (An aircraft landing light) on. Suddenly I see a semi right in front of me. I jam on the brakes hard. I can see all the clearance lights all the way around the back of the trailer.
Then it was not there.
[Kianu Revees] Whoa[/KR]
Back up to speed and less than 3 minutes later I saw the reflective lane dividers lift off the pavement and start moving. When they tied themselves in a knot, I knew it was time to stop.

20

The one they (instructors, reading material) always talked about when I worked in Neurosurgery was “burnt toast”…was that one? I also had a patient smell “Pinesol or Hospital smell” that wasn’t there.

I probably have had hypnogogic hallucinations before, I know my boyfriend says I will jump up to get the phone when I am falling asleep, even though it hasn’t rang. (And my hearing loss while no where near total is enough that I often miss the phone anyway from the tv room) I have no memory of this, so is it dreaming or pre-sleep?

Anyway its a whole new experience for me to be aware of what it really is like to hallucinate. Scary stuff if you cannot talk yourself down, or have someone guide you through it. It is humbling to work in the feild for so long and only now can I empathize with that particular problem.