I’ve had a few episodes of cellulitis, where I get extremely high fevers. I’m talking of fevers of 104 F. I hallucinate. During those times when I was able to talk, I told my husband that my foot was broken, and that I was a Martian, by which I meant that I was a native sentient entity of the planet Mars.
Later, when I was rational again, or at least as rational as I ever get, he said that this explained a lot about me.
We’ve agreed that if my temperature goes over 101 F, he’s gonna drag me to the ER, kicking and screaming, because not only do I get delusional when I get a high fever, I get very stubborn. More stubborn than usual, and that’s pretty bad.
I’ve got a hormonal imbalance and am trying to tackle it with some interesting medication that is also used to treat Parkinson’s. Very few people hallucinate on it, but I am one of them.
I think the scariest one was in the middle of the night hearing people walking around talking in normal voices in my kitchen. I got up to check, and they stopped talking just when I rounded the corner. I was pretty sure it was a hallucination because burglars would probably whisper.
I’ve also had hallucinations where I was laying down and suddenly I was convinced I was sitting up and brushing my hair. Only lasted a second but was a little strange, could feel the brush and the hair and everything. Other hallucinations were boring
I once had a very vivid hypnagogic hallucination of three Gollum clones in trenchcoats and fedoras standing over my bed, discussing my life and general state of mind.
I wasn’t really scared, just sort of fascinated as to why they cared.
I have hallucinated exactly once, while hiking in Horseshoe Canyon in southern Utah. It was 123 degrees (F) that day, I had pushed my body to its limit, with total exhaustion, cramped leg muscles, back spasms and a migraine. And at the end of the hike I was faced with an 800-vertical-foot climb out of the canyon. I had serious doubts that I could get out without help . . . and there was no way of getting help. So while I was making that climb, I kept seeing other people in my peripheral vision . . . though there were in fact no other people in the canyon that entire day. The hallucination didn’t “scare” me so much as indicate how I was pushing myself to my physical and mental limits.
I’ve also had a migraine “aura.” But I knew what it was, and I was more fascinated than scared.
Most of the time it was when I was on high dosages of morphine. I don’t recall this too clearly, but my Mom tells me that my dead father came to visit while I was recovering from one particularly bad operation. I would tell her that Dad was standing in the corner of the room and that he had brought some friends (friends that I didn’t recognize) with him. Mom would remind me that Dad had passed and I would smile and say: I know, he’s just here to watch over me.
I do recall telling her that Dad was there, but only very vaguely. However, Mom is not prone to embellishment, so I believe the rest of it.
Again, after a particularly bad operation, I remember my anesthesiologist coming in and saying: If Marc Anthony had never met Cleopatra, how would the world be different?
I wasn’t sure if this was a joke, if it was meant to see how clear my mind was or if indeed it were really happening, so I said: I don’t know, how would it be different. He just smiled and left the room.
I am amused to believe that he was just messing with my head. But maybe it never happened.
I’ve had hallucinations due to sleep deprivation. Mostly fleeting stuff in my peripheral vision, like a flock of blackbirds swooping nearby (which was strange given that I was indoors).
This happened to me once. Coming home late after working to much and sleeping to little. Way out in the country by my parents farm a mail box mounted on an old wagon wheel turned into an entire wagon with a team of horses… standing in my lane of travel. I swerved into the other lane to avoid them. That’s when the adrenaline kicked in and reality returned. Luckily it was 2:00 am and there was no one else on the road.
I had hallucinations and paranoia when I had pnemonia and had high fever and a fluoroquinolone antibiotic, either or both of those could have been the cause. I had a notepad next to me and drew a bird which I don’t remember doing and didn’t look like any birds I’ve ever drawn before. I can’t remember any if the hallucinations though, I couldn’t finish the antibiotic, I had to get two other ones because I was so anxious on that stuff.
I’ve also had the sleep deprivation hallucinations of something just outside my peripheral vision.
Was he amused, or worried? I scared the hell out of a roomful of friends once, when I asked them how they got the neat lights making patterns in their radiator. At first they thought I was joking because I was entirely lucid otherwise, but someone remembered that I was getting over a cold so they made me take my temp after I stubbornly and repeatedly insisted that the lights were real and it wasn’t nice to keep how they did it a secret. 103F. I still remember the lights as if they were real…
The last time I had a fever hallucination was just before Christmas, and someone threw snow glitter at me while I was in the craft store. This time I suspected it wasn’t real since I was under the weather and looked down for the glitter which of course didn’t exist. It’s weird that we sometimes know it’s not real and at other times don’t.
He was worried when I told him that my foot was broken, and amused when I claimed to be a Martian. He made me use the bathroom, got some juice down me (I can’t keep any solids down when I’m having a cellulitis attack), and put me back to bed, with firm instructions to stay there until I needed to use the bathroom again.
Like others in the thread: Once, when I had a systemic infection, and my temp climbed to 105, I was having conversations with my MIL that she wasn’t actually involved in. (Hey, at least she was really there; I wasn’t hallucinating a MIL!)
Same infection, caused by a kidney stone: nurse came into my hospital room and put 8mg of morphine into my IV, and it’s the only time I’ve ever hallucinated under the influence of opioids. Could have been a combo of the morphine and the fever, I guess.
I could feel myself floating off my hospital bed, toward the ceiling, and even remember thinking “Oh, that’s gonna hurt when I hit the ceiling!” But I didn’t hit the ceiling. I floated through it, into a lovely field of wildflowers. I also recall wondering if I could carry one of the flowers “back to the other side” with me.
Given the fever and the huge dose of morphine, I don’t consider this a near-death experience. But it wasn’t until months later that my husband worked up the nerve to tell me that my doc had told him I probably wouldn’t live through the night.
When I started working the graveyard shift I was having a lot of problems trying to sleep well. I started seeing insects crawling in and out of things in my peripheral vision. Not all the time, but enough to notice it happening. I remember when I was a kid I had pneumonia and I had some wacky fever dream where some version of McDonald’s Fryguys floated over my bed. They never said anything, just kinda hung around. I’d completely forgotten about it until I read Stephen King’s The Langoliers (I first read that story on a fucking airplane if you can believe that happy crappy) and it all came back to me. I imagined the Langoliers looked just like my pneumonia vision.
This may not exactly count, but the first time I smoked pot I heard this awesome music on the car radio and my arms and legs felt like sparkly. It seriously drowned out everyone talking, it was all I could hear. Everyone else was high from the same stuff, but the radio was off and no one else hallucinated. It never happened again, so I don’t know why it happened like that.
My friends and I were getting into meditating, Buddhism, etc. and we often attended lectures at the center. One night an “enlightened master” from India was there and was giving out personal mantras to all who were interested.
I got mine and began using it while going through my nightly mediation.
One night while meditating, I (?) suddenly was up in the corner of the ceiling looking down at my body (right where I left it!). It only lasted an instant, but the sight of my body sitting there was quite clear.
I don’t remember hearing any lectures about Astral projection at the time and I was certainly not *trying * to do it.
And as much as I tried, I could never do it again.
I couldn’t say – it’s usually a weird, sort of musty smell.
And I don’t know if this counts as a hallucination, but shortly after I was diagnosed, my sister and I switched rooms. (Not related to my epilepsy). And for the first few times after I’d have seizures, when I’d first come to, I would try to go to my old room. (This continued for about a year or more. My mother said I was extremely confused as to why “my room” was all different, and that she had a hell of a time getting me to go to my room.) Or one time I had a black out when no one was home, when I eventually did wake up, I found myself sleeping in her room. (I never remember my seizures. Just the “hangovers”, which are hell on earth)
I feel like I’ve had this when I’ve been either sick. Not in years, though. Like, I’d be lying down and I feel like people are walking around, murmuring or whispering. It’s weird–I haven’t thought about that in ages. It’s kind of creepy. Glad it hasn’t happened to me recently.
I had a fever at some point between 7 and 10 years of age, where I was largely unaware of the physical world - not asleep - and felt like I was directly experiencing something like cell division on a massive scale. I only describe it as that retrospectively, but it still remains very clear and terrifying in my memory after 20-odd years. It was the infinitesimal size/infinite time feeling which was so scary; ‘trapped for eternity in a primordial flavour soup’ sort of thing.
Pregnancy did weird things to my sense of smell. I still don’t know if that disgusting smell in the basement and on my husbands clothes was in fact real. It might have been real, an additive in laundry detergent that I suddenly could smell. Or it might have been an hallucination. All I know is, I’m glad it is over.
I’ve had hallucinations from enforced sleep deprivation as a result of my job at the time.
It WAS worrying as I it would happen in hostile environments and I wasn’t sure what was real and what wasn’t.
Apparently you’re dreaming while awake.
In ordinary life many people honestly believe that they haven’t slept for days but I can assure you that they have.
They drop off and then regain consciousness without having been aware of it.
They shouldn’t really be hallucinating at all, I think it was after about four days that i did so on each occasion possibly longer.
