When I was 14 I was sitting in my room and my parents turned on the diswasher I heard it playing “Angels We Have Heard on High.” I thought this a bit odd but later just chalked it up to my brain trying to make some sense out of white noise. Years later I was in a computer lab and I saw a chair suddenly jerk a good two feet. I decided I was tired and that it was time to go home and I saw a couple other odd things when I walked home.
Since then I’ve had the “white noise” business frequently and have often seen objects change shape or move as I look at them. I generally assume it’s the result of exhaustion or illness.
Has anyone else had this happen? I’m not talking about sleep related disorders or the stuff you see if you take drugs, I’m talking about situations where you normally wouldn’t expect to have hallucinations or illusions but you do anyway.
Only once other than the numerous times I took psychedelic drugs. That was when I was around 20 years old and caught meningitis. The hallucinations were visual, and just blobs of color moving around. (Note this happened before I took psychedelic drugs, so flashbacks wouldn’t have been a possibility.)
I’d have to say any hallucinations I can recall have been either sleep- or drug-related. I had a weird reaction to the nicotine patch, which gave me incredible waking nightmares – I would consider that to be a drug-related hallucination, I think. Sleep-induced (or sleep deprivation-induced) hallucinations for me seem to include hearing or seeing strings of unrelated words. I wish I could give you a concrete example of this but they fade pretty quickly… um, something like “the veracity plumbing of the ashes withal.” Sometimes I let them slide right over me, but other times I get weirded out trying to make these random word strings make sense.
I have been hallucinating for the past week because of the 'flu. Well, it happens at night while I am “asleep” - horrendously bizarre and life-like dreams.
Watched a friend float off into the distance after six of us put a 1000 mushrooms in a pot and made tea. “The night of a 1000 mushrooms” is still talked about nearly 15 years later.
One night about 10-15 years ago I drank about 10 pints and then lowered 3/4 of a bottle of Southern Comfort in one go. After that I when for a walk and had a little “altercation” with a policeman. Ended up having my head cracked open. I was locked up for a few hours and hallucinated horrible shit. I was in Room 101 and was having the cage with rats put on my head etc. :eek: When I eventually got home about 12 hours later I was carried into bed but was found an hour later in the kitchen having a debate with the wall. When asked what the hell I was doing I found it hard to believe why they couldn’t see James Joyce crucified on the kitchen wall.
Ahhh yes good times indeed
Once, when I was very very tired, having worked several days solidly without sleep, I returned home and flopped onto the bed, but couldn’t sleep because the soft toys in the room (belonging to my wife) were waving at me from the corner of my vision (I’d look round, but they would stop, only to start again when I wasn’t looking directly at them).
Just last week, I got some kind of blood-borne bacterial infection (I think it got in through a tooth that is currently mid-way through a root filling) and I spent one night in a sort of delirium, knowing that ‘this block has four inputs, and the display module won’t work unless you all wait and take a turn - stop trying to connect all at once, because the block only has four inputs, and they are blue and rectangular’
I’ve had sleep deprivation hallucunations. Nothing to write home about, I would just catch glimpses of birds in my peripheral vision swooping in formation like a flock of black birds were flying around the studio.
When I was six years old, I had a really neat hallucination though. I woke up in the middle of the night because I was thirsty. Somehow I sat up and was looking around my room before the sleepytime dream mechanism had fully shut off in my brain. I saw the head of an old woman over at the corner of my bed. She had straight white hair and a metal head band with a red inlay. Just her head, no body. Her eyes were closed.
I realized, “Well, that can’t possibly be there” so I reached up and rubbed my eyes, and the apparition was gone.
Yes, while manic, in October 2004 (a month before the election)
First, I thought I saw Dick Cheney at the wheel of a maroon SUV, driving around in Des Moines. My first instinct was to ram his car because Dick Cheney = Evil, but fortunately, better judgment prevailed.
Then I started seeing George W. Bush out of the corner of my eye when I was reading an article on the 2000 election in Vanity Fair. I was convinced that he was there watching me because he knew I was thinking bad thoughts about him.
After going on lithium and coming down from the mania, it hasn’t happened again.
I guess I sort of consider my sleep paralysis episodes to be hallucinations, since you’re technically awake when they happen.
The first time sleep paralysis ever happened to me, I was a kid. I saw a witch in my bedroom, and she tried to kill me.
Didn’t happen again for 10 years.
The second time, I was taking an afternoon nap in my dorm room. I awoke to the sound of someone unlocking the door to my room. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t move. A maintenance man proceeded to come in and sexually assault me. I know that this was a hallucination because when I really woke up, the chain was on the door.
The third time, I was again taking an afternoon nap in my dorm room, about a year later. I hallucinated that a masked burglar broke into my room. I tried to get up and run, but I couldn’t move my limbs and succeeded only in falling out of bed. The burglar stole some things, then sexually assaulted me. Again, I woke up to find the chain lock set on the door.
I quit taking afternoon naps, and it hasn’t happened since.
P.S.–sleep paralysis hallucinations almost always involve the hallucination of being attacked by an animal or another person
Only once, whilst on exercise with the Officer Training Corps (British equivalent of ROTC, roughly.) It was our passing out exercise from basic, so we’d been in the field for about 4 days, during which I’d had a total of about 4 hours of sleep. (Pretty tame for actual soldiers, but rather hard core for university students…)
Last night of the exercise, we’re deployed on a standing patrol: go out to a slight rise, sit on it, watch and report back on what you see. About an hour in, I’m scanning the horizon through my rifle scope, and I swear to God I saw two men carrying the head of a toy giraffe. Despite telling myself this was clearly a hallucination, pinching myself, rubbing my eyes, etc, the fake giraffe continued to move across the field until it disappeared over a hedgerow at the far side.
We gather at the end of the patrol, and I report it to my section commander. He had the most puzzled expression I’d ever seen - though it was surpassed a half-hour later when we made the same report to the company 2i/c.
A shrink put me on a new medication. After taking it for two or thee days, I saw a woodchuck walking on the sidewalk in downtown Cincinnati. I was stopped at a red light and the damn woodchuck not only smiled at me, it tipped its hat before continuing on its way.
I hear music in running water and similar noises all the time.
I also occasionally get auditory hallucinations when I’m on the edge of sleep, especially if I take a nap during the day. Sometimes I’ll also get the feeling that something is touching me, usually on the hand or foot.
A friend and I got into a silly contest to see who could stand the most consecutive days with a turn at watch. Usually, this involved getting put onto the mid-watch list, and having to walk around the barracks for 2 or 4 hours. As one can imagine we ended up really short of sleep after this challenge got past the the two week point. Finally, one night we were on the physical security roving watch, and we both swore we saw the crosswalk, painted on the road, get up and walk across itself.
I don’t know how the Hell it did that, or what it was trying to do, but we both decided that we’d had enough of standing all these extra watches, and stopped trying to wrangle our way onto the watchbill after that. And our section leader (who’d been trying to get us to stop taking so many watches anyways) kept us off the watchbill for the rest of our time in bootcamp.
There were a couple of episodes when I was a kid and had really bad fevers. I don’t remember much, just a small faerie-like being on my writing desk, firing arrows into nothingness, and the torso and head of a muscular man.
Also, I had a very weird sensory hallucination that I can’t really explain. It felt like my fingers were touching something softish with something hardish or slightly sharp or somewhat coarse on it or inside it.
Told you I couldn’t explain it. When I think about that the memory of being five years old and ill comes right back.
I hear music in white noise a lot. It’s not a crazy thing, it’s just that quite often the rhythmic pulsing of a dishwasher or washing machine will remind me of a certain song or peice of music. My brain will fill in the gaps, and I’ll hear the song. Weird.
When I was in high school, I had the flu, and had a temperature of 104. During my horrible fever, I hallucinated all the time. One day, I had a long conversation with my grandfather as he sat on the foot of my bed. Strange thing was, he wasn’t there.
The strangest, and most puzzling experience, in my opinion, was when I was about 12. I was taking a bath. I dunked my head underwater, and opened my eyes for some reason. Right in front of my eyes, distorted by the water was this. I have never forgotten that experience. It didn’t convert me to catholicism or anyhing, but I wonder what the hell was going on in my brain that made me see that.
