I have hallucinated once, and have since concluded I actually hypnotized myself into a semi-religious trance.
I was much younger, and at one of those prayer camps. This one was for Satya Sai Baba. Yes, he is the one whom allegations of child molestation are being leveled against. (What an awkward sentence). Back then I didn’t know, and for a while thought he was real.
I’m not sure if I should tell what I saw. It was fairly private at the time, but I guess I can tell now.
I seemed to look into myself, and did this for a long time. Then it seemed as though I could see a representation of my heart, as a black pearl. As I watched, it opened up and slowly began turning white, and glowing. It seemed to fill the space it was in with a white light. Then, when it was completely white, a single long-stemmed rose sort of floated down behind it, and the whole picture froze there for a moment.
Then quick as a blink the scene changed to a new one. I could see two young girls, much younger than me (I was probably 15, and the girls were 8) but I knew they were both me. One was well-fed, and nicely round, with nice clothes. The other was emaciated, with rags and no shoes.
And in my delusion I felt as though the “fortunate” girl was the one that **Sai Baba ** could make me. I lost that impression in only a couple of months, but that *moment * has never left me. I don’t know what, exactly, to make of it other than I have a very vivid imagination, I was extremely tired, and very susceptible.
I often get auditory hallucinations when I’m falling asleep. Usually it will sound like someone is talking into my ear. It’s very realistic but I know that no one is really there. Most of the time it’s in my mother’s voice.
I got my wisdom teeth out a couple of summers ago and the pain pills they gave me made me hallucinate a bit. I remember the walls and TV were pulsing and rippling like they were breathing.
I regularly have hallucinations of spiders. I have an irrational phobia of spiders and I constantly “see” them scurrying around out of the corner of my eye. Usually there is nothing there, and this happens usually every day or every other day.
When I’m really tired, I hear voices. The best was in a room with an aquarium; the white noise of filter pump had me hearing lots of stuff. I can tell what it is I’m hearing (for example, two spies talking about a mission) but I don’t hear actual words. I just know. Sometimes I’m so sure it’s real that I’ll sit up in bed to get a better listen. This always freaks my husband out, telling him I hear voices in my head. Glad to know I’m not the only one!
When I was in the hospital in November, I was on an IV drip of, I think, morphine and was also suffering from a suspected embolism. Needless to say, I was a bit out of it. After a day or two, the doctors finally got worried enough that they transferred me to ICU and hooked me up to even more machines and the whole time, I felt like the Eye of God was staring down at me no matter where I looked. I even thought the TV was a window into his soul or something and I was freaking out. I knew it was just a hallucination and I’m a total atheist but I was severely uncomfortable for those couple of hours.
Then, the next day, they put me back in my normal room and God left me alone. I was still strung out though and thought if I just moved my lips enough, I could somehow distort the space-time continuum through force of will (since everything’s interconnected and all) and get the damned door that was letting in all the light to close.
Until then, I’d always been curious to try hallucinogens but I’m not as curious anymore.
I get auditory hallucinations all the time when I’m falling asleep. Sometimes they’re really weird, sometimes they’re really cool, but they always go away as soon as I realize I’m hallucinating.
I also get strings of weird words right before I go to sleep. Usually that’ll wake me up completely because I’m like “what the fuck is that?!” They never make any sense, and they really bother me. They get stuck in my head like annoying songs until I feel like screaming.
I don’t know if this counts as a hallucination, but I’ve always had half-dreams that I’m falling. You know, my eyes are still open but I’m sorta dreaming that I’m falling off the curb or something. It used to be that I would just kinda jerk awake, but lately, I’ve been jerking so hard from “the fall” that I wake up my husband.
I did this as a child; I had forgotten this. Some people have mentioned migraine associated halucinations—prior to the onset of severe migraines, I’ve seen flashing lights and so on, but I never thought of them as hallucinations. I’ve always thought they were just stuff that happened along with a migraine.
You know, about the strange words and all, I was afraid to admit this to anyone until I read it here, and shared by several others. It’s quite bizarre really, sometimes like I 'm thinking in a completely different language, but mixed in with english. I’m almost in a quasi-concious state at the time, and when I realize I’m doing it, it actually wakes me up fully and it stops.
This sort of hallucination is called a hypnogogic hallucination. They can be both auditory or visual. In my experience the visual ones usually are simply the form of thinking I spotted a bug out of the corner of my eye while I’m falling asleep. The auditory ones can range from hearing mumbling out of thin air, to hearing someone calling me. They are perfectly normal, and happen to lots of people while falling asleep and waking up.
Very minor hallucinations, if you can call them that.
Sometimes while driving at night, I’ll see what I think is a cat or a dog, or sometimes even a person on the sidewalk until I drive by it and see that it’s a mail box or something like that.
I had an experience similar to the OP and the dish washer. Years ago I had a best friend who lived with his parents until them moved to a different city. In order to help with bills, they had an aunt of his move in with him. She, from what I remember, was a very conservative and fundamentalist type. So imagine my surprise when he and I walk into his (and his aunt’s) house and I hear and electric guitar being played on the radio. I commented to him that this sounded like and awesome guitar solo and that I was surprised that she’d listen to something like that. Then we walked into the kitchen. She was using an electric can opener.
Small Clanger, pepperland girl and Rebus - thanks for the assurance that I’m not alone in being completely whacked And thanks OtakuLoki for the explanation!
I kind of think of those on-the-verge-of-sleep hallucinations as my brain doing a final system dump-and-defrag before reboot.
I get some. Right now I am seeing doctors trying to see if they are from panic attacks or something else. They are really strange. I’ll just be doing something random and something will just flip a switch in my head . It feels like deja vu but to something I have never seen in real life. It’s like a dream scene playing and I can see it but I can also see what is still going on around me in the real world. I hate them. I get very sick to my stomach and headachey and tired. They suck.
And thanks OtakuLoki for the explanation!