Folie à deux.
I never said I understood it. 
Maybe the Navy was testing out some sort of mind control ray. Or maybe crosswalks have evolved enough to be able to move on their own.
All we were certain about was that we were done with our contest.
Yeah, sure… when I was a kid, I frequently woke up in the strange hours of the morning and hallucinated.
The most vivid: early Easter morning, when I was three or at most four. I’d taken some wooden blocks and made a large stonehenge-like circle in my bedroom during the day (I was a weird kid), and was not sleeping well. First a fiery orange light would gutter behing my bed. In that light, everything in the room - the curtains, the walls, the wooden stonehenge - looked like glazed porcelain. Then these stern-looking faces leaned out of the wall and played catch with a black ceramic ball. I would get up screaming and run out of the room. When my mom put me back to bed, it would be dark again… but only for a few minutes. The orange light would ignite and it would all start again.
Auditory hallucinations when I’m falling asleep - still occasionally for me. But the only time I really saw a hallucination as an adult was when I’d been up all night working on a paper. The eraser marks on a chalk board looked like an elephant to me. Not a big deal until the elephant moved its trunk.
I hallucinate very weird things when I first wake up. One time I swore I saw spiders crawling across my ceiling–before I realized it was the lamp-light throwing shadows.
I’ve only had auditory when sleep deprived, thank goodness. I think if I seen half of what was reported in here, I’d get really spooked. I’ve had it where I think I see something out of the corner of my eye, but that happens fairly often, so I don’t really think it’s a hallucination.
Anyway, when I stay up all night then during the next day I hear the voices of those that I was around with the previous day. It’s a really weird feeling because it’s as though they are in the room with me.
Once when I was laying down in the nurse’s office with a full blown migraine I saw a little white elephant on the wall. He was slowly gliding around the room. Other times I’m not sure if I was asleep or not.
I never had a visual hallucination until I was an adult, but when I was very small and before it was known that aspirin is not a good thing for small children with fevers, I had pneumonia and other fever-inducing illnesses a few times. My mom would always dose me up with children’s aspirin and put me to bed. I almost always had sensory hallucinations; usually of being too big on an unimaginable scale, too small, or floating or tipping.
Even now, if I get a fever or even think about the feelings too much, I have a little flashback to it. Or if I taste that peculiar orange taste of the children’s aspirin, which I fortunately have no need to do.
As an adult, I was on an ROTC exercise for several days, and we were doing something at night after moving all day. I was in a trench, and I swore up and down that I was watching a javelina (which we didn’t have there), a skunk, and a porcupine. Sure, I might actually have seen a skunk, but a javelina? Turns out that not only was I on the verge of heat exhaustion, but there was a Guard unit out there too - we didn’t know each other were there, but catching the waving lights and voices was surreal.
Sorry, no drug hallucinations; I’m boring that way.
After giving birth to my daughter, I was too excited and full of endorphins to sleep while at the hospital. When we got home my dad came over to bring us dinner, and when he left, my best friend called and said she wanted to come by and see the baby. I told her to come on over; since she lived next door I knew she wouldn’t take long and I figured I could put off sleeping for another 20 minutes or so (at this point I’d been awake for about 48 hours). I waited a few minutes and then looked out of my side door. I saw her walking up with her two boys, so I left the door open for them and went to get the baby. I walked back over to the door, and she wasn’t there. She showed up about five minutes later, with only one son in tow and a different outfit on. I told her what I’d seen earlier, and she assured me that she didn’t go home, drop off a kid, and change her clothes. I’d just imagined the whole thing.
I used to do this with road noise on long car journeys as a child; I could make it play whatever song I chose.
I also used to get this one if I had been ill with a high temperature - an odd sort of memory of a sensation that was somewhere between a tactile and visible texture; every now and again, I’ll see or touch something in real life that is vaguely reminiscent of it and the memory will come back, but it dances on the edge of my mind and is hard to grasp fully.
Sometimes, normally when I’m on the crapper, I’ll be staring at the wall and it’ll appear to move or deform slightly. Much like the effect you’d expect on a very small dose of hallucinogenic drugs. Quite odd.
When I was a kid I could stare at a bright light (such as a lightbulb) for a time then close my eyes and make the resultant bright image imprint (sorry, don’t know how to explain it better. Sure you know the effect) distort apparently at will. Can’t do that anymore though so I think it’s one of those “the magic of childhood” imagination things.
On LSD, mushrooms, MDA, mescaline, hash brownies and PCP (not all at once, though). BUT, I didn’t hallucinate everytime I was on psychedlics… I think. So, that, and when running a fever.
Yes. I was in my mid-20’s and under a great deal of stress. I swear to God I thought I saw a potted plant in the corner of the room. I looked back and it was gone. Freaky…
Just last week I came down with an ear infection. The infection caused me to be partially deaf (temporarily, I hope) and simultaneously caused loud rushing/ringing in my ears.
At one point, for several minutes, I very clearly heard a trip-hoppy kind of music playing that I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard before. It was pretty good.
I get auditory hallucinations fairly frequently (a few times per year). Almost always music, usually from my childhood or adolescence.
I have had scotoma (flashing lights, like shattered crystal) just prior to migraine once.
I have seen a white figure twice out of the corner of my eye–once upon selling the house I grew up in (last walk thru) and just last August while cleaning out my sister’s apt after she died.
I get visual disturbances from migraines sometimes, but nothing that could really be classified as hallucinations. However, I did learn not to mix kava-kava (an herb for relaxation) with Imitrex (a prescription medication for migraine). My husband found me downstairs at our old apartment, staring fixedly at the photograph collage on the wall, because the figures were moving in the photos (like the wizarding photos in Harry Potter). My pupils were very dilated, but I was more or less coherent. He put me to bed and checked on me every hour or so until he was sure I wasn’t going to die.
Sometimes, I’ll see flicks of color or patches of black flitting in my peripheral when I’m critically tired. Once, when I was about 9 years old, I was sick with an extremely high fever and delerious. I sat on my bed as I watched my closet door open and my clothes come out (in their hangers still) and circle my bed. I was hysterical.
I also had night terrors when I was a child; I would frequently see a VERY tall silhouette of a man with a large earing in his ear standing in the corner of my bedroom at night. As my father recounts, on more than one occasion with eyes wide open, I would be screaming at night, and my dad would come in and I would say that satan was coming to get him, and I could see him behind my dad. Needless to say, it creeped my dad out significantly. It was quite disturbing. I think it was a developmental issue though, because after I was about 15, it all abruptly stopped and I haven’t had a problem since.
I’m completely normal now. Oh gotta go, the Pontiff just walked in asking me for advice…again…sheesh, the guy won’t leave me alone! 
Some of these stories are freaky.
I hear the ‘ghost music’ all the time. At my old workplace I was responsible for turning off the music and there were many times when I thought I heard music after the music was shut off!
I’ve had a lot of experiences with visual hallucinations, most of them were mild, out of the corner of my eye, type stuff, but I’ve had a few more serious ones too.
For exmaple, once I was taking a shower and when I looked down at my hand, my skin was wearing away. It lasted only a minute or so, but that was a very scary minute when I thought that I would have to live without skin.
I also have very realistic dreams, so realistic, that sometimes I get confused if they are dreams or memories. That can be confusing.
One night when I was about fifteen, I was staying the night in my uncle’s living room when I began to hear a noise coming from the fireplace. It was kind of a mix between striking matches and hundreds of marching feet. It scared me to death. I knew it was a hallucination because it would stop if I concentrated really hard on something- like singing songs in my head. I spent the whole night frozen in fear on my air mattress singing “It’s a Small World” over and over again in my head until the point of exhaustion, and as soon as I was too tired to focus the noises would start again.
If anyone has any explainations of this or similar experiences, please tell me. I’ve been freaked out by this incident for years.
So it’s not just me. . . One time I started writing them down as they popped up, they mostly come out as sort of newspaper headlines:
Love tangle over ballistic blister fortress (soup)
Gather nine-pins while the snow shines
Five fingers fighting weather corkscrew
Art shy whatsit eats fire
Crimefinder judge bites fingers in shifts forgery game
Lotus pineapple Edinborough
Not on my parish - said Mr Bicycle
Itchy watch secures seminal country and western article
The stuff I bothered to write down goes on for another page or so, it’s quite an odd experience, this stiff coming out of nowhere. I guess it’s just word salad but still my brain says what?
A visual thing I get occasionally when trying to get to sleep is a very quick montage of snapshot images (like the burst of images in the Rockford Files intro) These might be landscapes, street scenes or Edward Hopper like pictures. This can go on for some time, but stops if I try too hard to “look” at any particular scene too hard.
I’ve had random hallucinations on and off since I was a teenager. The first one I remember was an auditory hallucination - I think I was about fifteen. I was laying in bed and I heard an alien laughing. No idea how I knew it was an alien; I just knew. My first visual was when I was seventeen - I was sitting at McDonalds with a friend of mine, and there was a guy sitting in the smoking section. I could see the smoke going down into his lungs and turning them black. Very peculiar.
The absolute worst one I ever had came during my first severe panic attack, when I was 18. I was in Chicago with some friends, and as we were coming down the elevator from the Sears Tower, I started to get a little delusional. I was convinced one of my friends was trying to kill me. I knew that if the two of us were alone, I’d be dead. The buildings were all leaning over, like they were going to fall down on me. Fortunately, this happened at the end of our trip, so I didn’t have to spend more time wandering around the city with someone who meant to murder me; unfortunately, it also meant that I was going to have to spend the next four hours in a car with someone who meant to murder me. In order to keep from having to sit in the back with my would-be killer, I volunteered to give directions (no one knew, incidentally, that I was freaking out. I didn’t want my killer to know that I was on to him, so I tried to act normal). Ever try to give directions in Chicago while panicking and delusional? It doesn’t work.
So we were lost and in a bad neighborhood and there was a murderer in the car and… It wasn’t good. It was pretty bad. And as we were driving along, trying to find the way out, I saw a dead body in the middle of the road. Fortunately, I was shocked into silence. And as we drove past the dead body, it started to dawn on me. No one else had seen it. No one was saying we should call the cops, no one was locking the doors - no one was worried at all because no one had seen the body. Even as my mind was racing for some sort of a justification (they’re all in on the conspiracy, I’m seeing the ghost of someone who died here earlier), it hit me that I must have hallucinated. And after that, I started to get my head together a little bit. By the time we got back to college, I wasn’t delusional anymore. My friend wasn’t going to kill me. There was no dead body. But it was all very strange and very frightening, and it’s stuck with me to this day.
It’s never been that bad since. Usually it goes in spurts. For a month or so, I’ll hear muffled voices from the drain or in the corners of my room at night, or see black bats swooping across the room or black cats running along the floor. Then it’ll go away, and I won’t hear anything or see anything out of the ordinary for months at a time. I haven’t really had any delusions again, and though I’m in therapy for other problems (anxiety and depression, mainly), I’ve been assured that I’m not showing any real signs of schizophrenia or even mania. I don’t know why I hallucinate, but it’s not really interfering with anything at this point, so most of the time I just acknowledge that it’s happening and then move on.