At their worst, they were very real seeming and you’ve nailed it with the second half of your post. Any glitch, shadow, speck of dust would be processed as ‘BUG’, I would ‘see’ a large, multi-legged, moving creature (think Survivor’s madagascar hissing cockroaches!) then I’d look again and see the shadow / speck etc.
Even though I knew they weren’t real, I’d still see an actual bug and have to concentrate on it to reprocess the visual image - rather like my mum and the penguins, but she saw them crawling across a plain white surface.
The sounds were worse, I would hear something and it would be wrong, a scratching at the door or something knocking against the kitchen cupboards. I’d have to stop whatever I was doing and match up the noise to a visual (the budgie scratching in the corner opposite the door or a flowerhead knocking against the window behind me). Once I could match the image to the noise, the noise would ‘travel’ over to whatever was making it and the feeling of ‘wrong’ would disappear.
I am kind of confused. Given your user name, I had assumed that you had quite a bit of experience of hallucinations, or at least a strong and well informed interest in them. What gives?
Anyway, I do not find the fact that someone in a generally confused state should have hallucinations like bugs on their food very hard to understand at all. First of all, lots of internal things neurological and otherwise, can cause specks or occasional little flashes in the line of vision. Notably, most older people have ‘floaters’ in their eyes, little bits of debris floating within the fluid in the eyeball that can appear as black specks or threads. (I have them myself.) These things seem to move about against the background as the eyes move (which they constantly do). Most of us, most of the time, even if we are momentarily take them to be experiences of something real and external, quickly and readily realize that they are not, and discount them (and usually very quickly forget about them). However, for someone in a state of general mental and emotional confusion it is easy and tempting to interpret them as being caused by something nasty such as bugs, and even, perhaps, to elaborate the experience, in their mind, into something much clearer and more definite than it really was.
Furthermore, given the emotional confusion and vague ‘paranoia’ typically prevalent in people in such states, it is not very surprising that a sufferer would be very insistent about the reality of their hallucinatory experiences. To them, someone who does not believe them, or denies the reality of what they seem to see, is likely to seem like someone who is not taking their (very real) problems seriously enough, and needs to be made to listen.
Hallucinations of this sort can be symptoms of something serious (as, of course, sadly, they are in this case), but their causes are rather trivial, and neither the physiology nor the psychology behind them is particularly hard to understand.
When I was very young (about 5 or so), I came down with an especially nasty version of the German Measles. To this day i have hearing problems with my left ear and i’m still prone to nose bleeds.
Another of the side-effects was a series of very high fevers. 106 was typical, and sometimes higher (this from Mother who was my caregiver the entire time, poor woman), which would require immersion in cool water to try to keep the fever down.
I don’t really remember a lot of it, altho there were times I do recall screaming about the things coming out of the walls to get me. Kinda creeps me out right now to remember that… :eek:
Yes, and they’ve always been from sleep deprivation. I’ve twice seen the world sort of rotate into a sepia tone and heard the person sitting next to me speaking incoherently. After a few moments, the world would snap back into full color, I’d ask the person if they’d said anything, and they’d deny it. I now know that means that I need to take a break from driving and take a nap.
I’ve also seen a large black dog loping along the side of the road at night, somehow keeping up with the car at highway speeds.
A lot of elderly people in hospitals hallucinate, especially at night. Nurses call it “sundowning”. I spent a few insane nights with an elderly aunt talking her out of attacking the bugs on the walls, or getting up to wash the dishes, or screaming at the strange men climbing in the window (5th floor).
When my mother was recovering from surgery she became convinced that her hospital room wasn’t real, but was a very clever fake and that she had been kidnapped. She truly believed that the entire room and everything in it was actually made out of paper. She thought the doctors and nurses were all fake too, and she was terrified to let on that she’d figured it out.
It wasn’t until months later that she shared this with me, and when I asked her why she hadn’t told me at the time she said she thought I was her fake daughter coming to “visit” her everyday. She didn’t tell me because she thought I was one of them.
It turns out this was a side effect of the medications and it did wear off, but it makes me sad that she spent that time so scared and with no one to trust to help her.
Auditory hallucinations. Just prior to being diagnosed with complex partial siezures of the right temporal lobe, I had several occasions where I could anticipate what people were going to say. Not word for word, but “He’s going to tell a knock-knock joke” and “He’s going to say Who’s there?” and “He’s going to say something about a priest wearing a pumpkin suit”…etc. I thought my friend was yanking my chain when I asked him about the joke. A week or so later, the Sports Show guy stopped talking about baseball and started in with…I don’t recall (another symptom)…but it was not baseball. I watched his lips and they were moving to the words I was hearing…but when I backed up the Tivo, he was talking baseball the whole time.
That’s when I called the doc. friends joke, Tivo’s, not so much.
I haven’t had an hallucination, but my father had a similar thing to your dad when he [my Da] was given morphine after an operation nearly 20 years ago…
Also, urine infections cause confused behaviour, has he been tested?
Pretty sure that was not the problem. Per my earlier post (#19) he was doing much better on Sunday morning after one of his drugs was discontinued.
On Monday afternoon he was discharged. Tuesday evening he went back to the ER and was diagnosed with a small-bowel obstruction. Has been in the hospital since then, undergoing “conservative” (i.e. non-surgical) treatment, and he is finally showing signs of improvement. If the trend continues he may be discharged again in a day or so.
All of this started last Thursday; it’s been a rough week for the whole family…
When I was 20 I worked as a mailman in South St. Louis and lived 45 min south in a rural area. One summer morning I got caught in a downpour halfway out in one of my walking route sections and then, soaking wet, the temperature climbed quickly into the mid nineties.
I didn’t hydrate enough that day and the heat and humidity kept me overheated through most of the day.
I finally dried out in the afternoon but on my way home in my non air conditioned car I suddenly quit sweating about 15 min from home. I’m pretty sure at that point my fever went higher by the minute.
The last two miles of the trip were on a hilly one lane twisting road. Normally I could maintain 15-20 mph on the road but I started hallucinating that something was darting out in front of my car. I couldn’t quite make it out but the fear of hitting an unknown object the size of a child or dog slowed me down to under 5 mph.
I made it home and my dad who had recognized heat sickness from working in construction immediately got me to hydrate and eat some salt.
I was sick as a dog for two days and dropped from a lean 200 pounds to 185 in that week.
I knew at the time that those hallucinations were probably not real just because they kept happening over and over. But I couldn’t just ignore them because a real dog or child might just pop up in my path.
The worst one was when I woke up to find the ceiling collapsed, pinning me to my bed. The room was on fire, I was paralyzed, there were alarms, smoke, and fire everywhere. I could feel the heat on my face. After what seemed like an eternity of this, I realized that I would already be dead if this was real. That calmed me down and shortly the false reality faded away.
The funniest one was where I kept waking up hearing pan music in the hallway, like a reed flute. I would yell at my roommates to stop playing that damn music without getting out of bed. After the third time, I was determined to make them eat their damn instruments. Then I realized, it was a trick. Leprechauns (gray, earthy creatures with cruel faces) were trying to kidnap me. One was hiding in the wardrobe in the room and as soon as I walked past to get the one in the hallway to stop, he was going to strike me on the head and knock me out to kidnap me. I looked at the clock and it read 5:12. I sat there for the longest five minutes of my life, weighing whether or not I could defeat them before deciding that there might be more hiding elsewhere so I should stay put. Then all of a sudden, I realized the absurdity of it, and it was over.
I was a child running a high fever with the measles. I remember sitting up in bed, watching the seven dwarfs dancing around my bed. The whole room was glowing orange as if there was a fire in the room and the dwarfs were sort of cartoon like, non solid and also glowing orange. I remember it vividly. My mother came rushing upstairs to find me sat bolt upright, laughing my head off. She was very freaked out.
After I got my wisdom teeth out, I found out the hard way that my body reacts very badly to Vicodin.
I had very bizarre hallucinations of aliens, zombies, Borg, and monsters paying visits to me. Was aware in a teeny corner of my mind that it wasn’t real, but the rising panic/anxiety attack eventually won out. shudders So not fun.
Oh, and I was home by myself for the whole day.
Most of mine were hypnogogic things and tended to involve giant spiders, the devil, nazis, and aliens. There was also a kangaroo of death. Once in a while I’d get so excited by the hallucinations that I’d throw stuff across the room in my panic. The worst one was where I had what I guess is called–I’m not making this up–exploding head syndrome and thought WWIII had started, and was a bit miffed when I went to tell others about the bombs and they looked at me like I’d just stepped off the train from Mars.
(And no, at the time I had these hallucinations I was not using any illegal pharmeceuticals.)
My father was put on Haldol when in a nursing home in Arizona. He was brought here to continue his recovery from an infection at a senior care center here in MN. I didn’t recognize him when I first saw the old man in the wheelchair. He was listing to the side, drooling and fighting with his socks. The lead RN was horrified to see that he was on Haldol and swore she would not give it to him. Good move on her part.
It took awhile for the effects of the Haldol to wear off, but gradually we began to see my father’s personality popping up and his awareness of his surroundings come back. Some of his hallucinations were pretty funny, I must admit, but I was glad to get my dad back. Nobody could adequately answer the question of why they stuck him on Haldol in the first place.
My great uncle was in hospital a few years ago, and he was hallucinating a group of native animals (kangaroos, koalas, and so on) in his room. He was very happy to have them there and told us all about them. My cousin, a very no-nonsense type, said “But you know they’re not real, don’t you?” He gave her an utterly heartbroken look, pointed to an empty shelf and said timidly “And they’re not real either?”
When I was about 15, I had a high fever and had taken Nyquil before I went to bed. I woke up in the middle of the night and saw someone standing over my bed. I thought it was my dad checking on me, which was odd, because my mom was the one who would normally be worried, and my bedroom door was closed and locked.
After a minute, the figure didn’t move, and I reached up and the figure disappeared into ripples like I was looking at a reflection in water and then stuck my finger into it.
At that point, I screamed and then my parents were banging on my door trying to get in.
I call this a hallucination because it wasn’t at all like a dream, although it might’ve been.
I’ve only taken Nyquil once since then and I had apnea-like episodes all night until I finally went to the emergency room convinced I was having some sort of heart attack.
When one of my kids was a newborn, I went a while with about 2 hrs a sleep a night. One night I was sitting up with the kiddo and I looked up and saw my coworkers standing on my stairway. They were smiling, nodding with approval, waving and giving me thumbs up. I was happy to see them and was pretty proud. I smiled and waved back before I realized that I was hallucinating. The experience was only a few seconds, but it was pretty funny.
