Have you ever had a hallucination?

In My Humble Opinion
1

My dad is currently in the hospital. He’s in his 70’s and been dealing with Parkinson’s disease for the past year, and for a few days now he’s also been dealing with some combination of drug interactions and drug side effects. One of the problems he’s facing (believed to be a side effect of one of the drugs they started giving him in the hospital) is hallucinations: he’s seeing insects crawling on his food, and saw them on the phone too when he was talking to me (he’s halfway across the country). These aparently seem very real to him. My sister is in attendance, and she says he’s getting really angry with her because she can’t see them.

He is also dealing with some mental confusion about things, e.g. where he is (hospital vs. home). The confusion is “accessible” to me, i.e. I can understand what that might be like. But the hallucinations? I can’t comprehend seeing the real world and then also seeing an unreal overlay on top of that, and believing in it so firmly - no matter how bizarre it is - that you contest the reports of the people around you.

Have you ever had hallucinations? Not just visual disturbances (e.g. residual images, color tinging), but honest-to-god seeing things that aren’t there (like insects in your food, or people in your room that aren’t really there)? How real did they seem to you? How did you respond to people around you whose reports contradicted your own eyes?

2

When I was about 16 or so I had the flu and a very high fever. I woke up in the middle of the night and “saw” a plane that had crashed in the field next to our house.

I was sitting in my bed, looking out the window and screaming. My dad came in and tried to settle me down.

Keep in mind, that on top of the fever, it was the middle of summer, so very hot.

My dad got me out of bed and took me down to the lake to cool off. We sat in the lake for about 1/2 hour until my fever broke.

It was so very real to me and I was freaking out.

3

Not that it makes a big difference to your question, but I think this is crossing the line from hallucination to delusion. IIRC, the big difference is that with hallucinations, you know what you’re seeing isn’t real, whereas with delusions, you really believe what you’re seeing is there. I can’t say I’ve ever had what you’re referring to, but I’ve had ‘normal’ drug induced hallucinations, but I was fully aware of what was going on (at least WRT to know that they weren’t real). Also, the ones I had probably fell more into the colors/patterns category then what you’re looking for.

I did however have a friend that was so strung out on coke that he waited outside of Walgreens one morning for it to open so he could get some lice shampoo because he was convinced he was covered in bugs.

4

The distinction is between hallucinations and pseudohallucinations.

Hallucinations – You believe those spiders, colours, etc., are real. Potentially very scary indeed.

Pseudohallucinations – You’re aware that they’re actually not. Potentially a lot less scary.

So if pops can be made to understand that his hallucinations are, in fact, hallucinations, there’s a good chance the experience will become a great deal less disturbing too him. If that proves impossible, here’s hoping the good doctor has a card up his sleeve.

5

I had a series of hallucination when I was fairly sick one winter when we were snowed in. I do not remember much other than it involved military guys, and living plants [sort of like the triffids but not from outer space, it was the stuff out in the back yard and garden that animated.] To get the fever down when it did not respond to aspirin [ah the 60s when it was still safe to give small kids aspirin…I have no idea how so many of us survived!] they packed the tub full of snow and buried me in it.

6

That was one of the disappointments for me when I messed around with certain items purported to cause hallucinations. I expected it’d be kind of a fun, Hey look at that fake dog over there! type thing. Instead it was more like noticing patterns in carpets, bends and breathes in walls and other solid material, and some strange lighting.

The only time I had a real hallucination was thanks to consuming a totally stupid amount of Benadryl. I spent the whole night talking to various people who would walk into my room - mostly family members. Trouble was, I was away at college and the house was completely empty. These are real hallucinations, where you don’t even think to question what’s in front of you. The thought just never occurs, y’know?

Benadryl (and closely related Dramamine), as well as other plants like datura, nutmeg, and mandrake are in a class of drugs called “deliriants” which quite literally cause “delirium”. They produce “real” hallucinations, as opposed to the mere distortions of something like LSD or mushrooms and as such, are not terribly popular for recreational use. These type of hallucinations are no fun. wiki

My sympathy to your father (well, and sister of course). As you said, it’s probably some combination of the meds or something, but the problem is it genuinely feels real to him and once something is considered “real”, it’s very difficult to break from that notion.

7

Besides visual hallucinations, there are auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile (hearing, smell, taste, touch) hallucinations. Has your dad had any of the other types? If so, this may be helpful in determining which med is triggering the problem. I’ve read your other thread and I wish your dad a speedy return to better health.

8

Hard-core pain meds tend to make me hallucinate. I loathe them for this reason (although the pain relief is welcome.)

9

I’m a night owl, so I’ve had quite a few hallucinations due to sleep deprivation.

On the way back from a concert when I was an undergrad, I was driving along a lonely stretch of country highway in the middle of the night. I swear I saw an 8-foot-tall mountain main lope out into the middle of the road, stand in my headlights, and raise his huge axe. I swerved around him, slammed the brakes, and of course there was nothing in my rear-view mirror. About an hour after that, I started seeing humanoid creatures made of tar climbing out of the road in front of me. That’s when I finally decided I needed to pull over for a nap.

10

Yes, due to taking copious amounts of LSD but they are slightly different. I also had one once as a kid when I got flu, I thought a cowboy was standing at the end of my bed, my dad told me that I had piled up the covers and pillows to make a wall. This I believed would protect me from him.

LSD hallucinations as Sunshines and Smiles says aren’t quite the same, it always seemed to me to be more pattern based.

With regards to your father, really sorry this is happening but there isn’t much you can do. They will appear totally real to him, it’s not like you see a floating elephant and think ‘well that can’t exist’ everything tells you that it does.

11

I hallucinate when with a high enough fever, and if I’ve taken a sleeping pill (Ambien specifically). Whatever I’m hallucinating always looks as real as any other object to me. Sometimes I know they’re not real - the last time I had a fever-induced hallucination someone threw that fake glitter snow at me in a craft store and I knew enough to look on the floor to see if there was really glitter - but that doesn’t stop them from looking real.

12

I am so sorry your father is going through this…is he distressed and agitated by this?

I’ve had extremely vivid hallucinations back in the 70s due to LSD, but none were distressing to me. I believed totally whatever strange things I was seeing and expiencing and accepted them. But the context was very different.

I did hallucinate as a teenager when I had an extremely high fever from some sort of flu, but it was a comforting hallucination. I was throwing up repeatedly but in my addled state I figured it was OK because there were some kindly angel-like women cleaning up after me…I was alone at the time. I do remember the matron (I was at a boarding school) coming in at some point but apart from being quite ill, I don’t remember any of this being disturbing.

A good friend of mine recently spent time in a hospital and then psych unit for liver toxicity and alcohol withdrawals…he was very agitated and confused but they kept him sedated for the several critical days while he was going through DTs and he says he remembers none of it.

I don’t have any advice really, except perhaps people around him shouldn’t argue or contradict what he is experiencing. Or should minimize it somehow, or tell him it (the bugs, whatever) is being taken care of. To him, it IS real.

I hope he’ll be OK.

13

I have also hallucinated due to a high fever. I was a kid, and I was at my grandparents’ house for a weekend when I got sick. I remember the wallpaper patterns were moving and the clock was talking to me. The clock kept saying the time out loud, and apparently I sat up and and told the clock to shut up. That was when Gran decided it was time to get me to the doctor. I also remember Gran yelling at the doctor that my fever was not from eating too much candy, but whether or not that really happened I’m not sure.

Just recently Gran was hospitalized due to a bad reaction to some medicine. She would talk to her two deceased sisters like they were in the room with her, and nothing could convince her that they weren’t there. One of the sisters died 20 years ago, and the other when she was born 70+ years ago. That was scary to see because Gran is still really sharp even at 84. Fortunately she’s fine now, once the drug that was causing the problems got out of her system she cleared up immediately. And she has no memory of talking to her sisters at all.

14

Five years ago I was hiking solo through Horseshoe Canyon in southern Utah. (Yes, it’s the same canyon system where Aron Ralston had to cut off his own arm.) Bear in mind that I was over 60, not in great physical shape, and not an experienced hiker. And alone. The canyon had near-record-breaking heat, and I was suffering from exhaustion (physical and mental), a debilitating migraine, lower back spasm and every muscle in my legs screaming out in pain. At one point in the latter part of the hike, I was nearing the place where I had to make the 800 vertical feet up out of the canyon. Every single step was torture, and I hadn’t even begun the long climb. I remember seeing other people off in both sides of my peripheral vision. They were walking alongside me, and some of them were calling my name. When I turned my head to look at them, they took about 2-3 seconds to fade away; I had enough time to make out their outlines, but nothing more. I also heard my mother’s voice calling me (she had died less than a year previously). My brain was telling me there was nobody else there (in fact I hadn’t seen anyone the entire day). But my senses were telling me otherwise. It was a totally creepy experience.

15

I have occasional mild auditory hallucinations, usually just before or after sleep. They are vivid and a little disturbing. Usually I hear someone call my name, sometimes my dad, sometimes someone else.

16

Not exactly the same thing, but while recovering from a heart attack some years ago, my father was apparently given some medicine which, as a side-effect, gave him some EXTREMELY lifelike dreams.

Plenty of them were, unfortunately, of the nightmarish kind: Piles of corpses, and that kind of thing…

Others sounded like fun, though: At one point, he imagined walking down the halls of the hospital and discovering a “secret room” full of Asian dudes working away at their computers. As it turned out, those guys were programming the weather…! (So that’s where that comes from, I guess!)

In any case, the next time dad went to the hospital, he simply told the doctors about his negative experiences the last time around, and they gave him either a smaller dose or other meds (can’t remember exactly). Whatever they did, it did the trick – no such nightmares this time around.

(He’s fine now, by the way.)

As for my own experiences, I had an LSD trip at one point, during which I was aware of the “imaginary” nature of what was happening 99% of the time. A couple of times, however, the illusions were simply too strong, and the line between real and imaginary was blurred out.

For example, while listening to a certain piece of music (the beginning of Phillip Glass’ Satyagraha), the beauty was so overwhelming that I began crying. When I apologized to my friend about this, saying that I hoped my crying didn’t bother him and whatnot, he just smiled and pointed out that I wasn’t crying at all!

It got even weirder after that: I could very clearly feel the tears running down my cheeks, landing on my sweater, and so on… The whole thing, 100% lifelike… Very, very bizarre – but far from disturbing!

17

I bet that was a supplies.

18

I’ve recently been on meds that gave me hallucinations and it was the bugs. Also auditory weirdness where the sound came from a different part of the room than the source. I had been warned that these were side effects so I could easily convince myself they weren’t real. It was even kind of fun for a while.

Changed the medication tho’.

My mother had listerial meningitis and had major bug crawling action during her recovery, not sure if it was the illness or all the drugs they were chucking at it by that stage. Dad and I asked her to trust us that they were not real and I suggested she turn them into something else. She said they were much nicer as the ‘eyes’ in flowers. Later, when dad and I were talking about something else, she suddenly yelled “And they’re even better when they’re penguins!”

19

He’s doing better, thanks for asking. They discontinued one of the drugs he was taking, and 24 hours later he had improved dramatically: very little confusion, hallucinations were gone, and he was aware that he had been hallucinating the previous day. Will likely be discharged in a day or two.

This wouldn’t have been a problem, except that he was seeing the bugs in his food, and wanted someone to either get rid of the bugs or get some new food for him. IOW, he wouldn’t eat unless he could be convinced there were no bugs in his food.

How real did the bugs seem to you, and how independent were they of the scene in which you found them? Could you see bugs in the middle of an otherwise plain white field (e.g. a smoothly laid out bedsheet), or was your brain taking details in a scene (e.g. the dark spaces in a pile of peas or beans) and perceiving them as bugs somehow?

20

I think so.

I had eaten WAY too many pot brownies and was having a full-on paranoid freakout. Mrs. Homie was talking to me and her face would instantly morph back and forth between her actual face and that of a silver dragon.