Share your fever-induced hallucinations

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Since I can’t think of anything more mundane or pointless at the moment… Please limit your sharing to hallucinations not experienced under the influence of drugs. Someone else can start a thread for that.

When I was in high school one of my science teachers told us about how his preschool aged brother had been sick while the then-teenaged teacher cared for him. The little boy saw a big black horse, so he said, and totally freaked out. At that time I couldn’t imagine believing that something that wasn’t real was just because your temperature went too high.
Since then I’ve had two of my own fever-spawned hallucinations, both occurred while in college. I don’t know about the health services at your school, but ours sucked, and I tended to try to avoid it. Guess I should have visited twice more than I did…

The first one was pretty boring, just an auditory one. While I was trying to rest one of my neighbors played the same song(TTWS “Walk on the ocean”) about 8 times, randomly stopping at odd points and replaying it. She actually only played it once and went to class, so it really wasn’t playing for an hour like I thought.

The second one was “witnessed” by six other people. I had a bad cold, but I thought I was feeling better, so was hanging out in my friends’ room, talking. I don’t remember what the conversation was about, but I know I was following it just fine. I was sitting on the floor, which is a preference that always irks people, and happened to look at their radiator. It was one of the old-fashioned ones, that is tall, segmented, and full of water. The strange thing I noticed was that there were little colored lights between the segments of the radiator. Itsy bitsy red and blue lights, which, upon further examination, I realized were blinking in intricate patterns.
I thought it was pretty cool, so I asked the two girls who shared the room how they did it. “What lights?” six people ask me. I pointed to the lights, puzzled that no one else noticed them. " There aren’t any lights," they all said, though I protested that there clearly were, and I didn’t think it was funny for them to pretend not to see them. Eventually they convinced me that I wasn’t the butt of an elaborate joke, and there really weren’t any lights. Since the lights disappeared a while after I took aspirin as ordered, I guess they were telling the truth. I swear they looked real, though.

So…what has your brain produced for you in the mists of illness?

2

Last fall, I was helping to grade a test, and I started not feeling so well. I got home, laid down, and proceeded to believe that I was still grading the test for four hours. Then I believed that I was in Russia. I was completely out of it for the rest of the day, and felt just fine the next morning.

3

My mother once had a bad fever and was lying in bed. I was out in the living room watching tv and waiting on her if she called for me. So she calls for me, and I go in, and she starts crying for me to get the man off her bed. She insisted that there was a man sitting on the end of her bed playing the banjo at her, and she’d asked him to stop but he wouldn’t, and she didn’t like the song he was playing.

That was rather frightening.
When I was in the hospital back in '98, between pain, septic infection germies in my blood, and morphine I was pretty delirious for almost an entire week straight. At one point I became convinced that the overhead lamp was named Bob, and had conversations with it.

4

Well, as a child I would almost always hallucinate when I had a fever. They usually centered around the idea that many people were watching me fall asleep, making comments the whole time. This, of course, kept me awake. Just last year I had a 24 hour flu that I didn’t realize was the flu until afterewards. Anyways, I had a headache, vomiting, fever (103 degrees, yikes! :eek: )

Well, that same hallucination, that I hadn’t had since childhood, came back. I can’t remember details, but I imagined people all around me and they would not SHUT UP! Geez, some hallucinations are so inconsiderate.

5

Fevers always produce a distortion of size for me. I’m not sure how else to say it. Things are sized wrong. :confused:

6

I get this wierd visual thing going, but it has not happened in years. I would see different shapes, kinda fuzzy, in the air in front of me. They would expand and contract at a high rate of speed, sort of like the camera effects from the '60[sub]s[/sub], zooming in and out, growing and shrinking very fast. It was very disconcerting.

O

7

Only one experience of that nature. When I was very young I had Scarlet Fever, complete with tempertures of around 103 and fairly intense pain ( mostly of the headache variety I think, but not your garden-variety headache ). I still have vivid memories of a hallucinatory episode where giant animated wasps ( the size of my head ) were swarming around me, stinging me repeatedly all over my body, including right through the sheets. The stings of course, corresponding to real pulses of agonizing pain. Absolutely terrifying. I probably haven’t had anything you could call a nightmare in 15 years, but when I was a kid this episde definitely appeared from time to time in my dreams :frowning: .

Oddly enough, I never developed any insect or wasp phobias as a result. shrug Go figure.

  • Tamerlane
8

I used to get frightfully high temperatures when I got sick too as a child.

I still remember a hallucination I had when I was about 9 years old. While lying in bed with one of my infamous high temps, I could see my sister outside my window laughing at me. I called my mom in and asked her to please make her stop. I remember being hysterical about it. Of course, sis wasn’t there at all. :eek:

What’s weird is that I still have the memory of seeing her there, when in fact she wasn’t there.

9

I had a hallucination in the fifth grade where I was lying in bed and I “saw” a repairman walk into my bedroom. He had a bag with him, and he took this white marble slab out of the bad, the slab was smooth with rounded edges, about the size of my fist. He then proceeded to nail the slab onto my forehead. I remember being paralyzed with fear and pain from the hallucination, and I don’t remember much after that.

My mom told me that she heard me scream, and I kept telling her that “the marble hurts like the Winter Olympics!” I still have no idea what the farg I was talking about, but it sounds like a good album title to me. :slight_smile:

Argh. This is giving me a headache just thinking about it. :mad:

10

A long while I ago while I was working 3rd shift at a factory, I started to have problems with insomnia–after 4 straight days of not getting more than 3 hours of sleep, I heard children playing at the other presses. Later on that night, I watched a small pile of plastic out of the corner of my eye turn into a toad and hop off. Not a good experience when you’re working on a machine the size of a schoolbus that can clamp down at several tons of pressure per inch…

11

When I was a kid with a high fever, I used to see orange, striped cats clawing at the walls. Weird.

12

This past summer, I ended up with a kidney infection while Simetra and I were visiting his family in Kentucky. I almost never get fevers, but I certainly had one this time, and I was pretty delusional. For a while, I was convinced that I was at my house and I was talking to my sister and my friend Allison (who were both back home in New York at the time, definitely not hanging out in Lexington). According to Stephen, I just wouldn’t stop talking and most of what I said didn’t make sense. You’d have to ask him what most of my delirious ranting were about, but I do remember asking him to explain the difference between Team Cheerios and regular Cheerios, declaring that I hated the shorts I was wearing and I wasn’t going to wear them anymore, and promising that I’d behave if only he would make the temperature in the room feel normal.

13

I’ve been known to experience rare periods of low blood pressure, requiring me to lie down until normailty is achieved. The last time this happened was a couple of months ago. I left work 4 hours early, moving in slow motion, and went home to bed. I drifted in and out of consciousness over the next few hours; at one point, Angie walked in and asked if I needed anything. I said, “No” and she asked if I was sure. I said I was and she walked out. In reality, I don’t think she was even home at the time.

14

The worst I ever got was when I was sick with mononucleosis over Christmas break back in my college days. I had a bad fever and I remember laying in bed… knowing I was laying in my own bed… but my body felt like it was hanging upside down. It was the strangest sensation.

15

I was sick as three pups yesterday (still a bit wobbly but I hjope—Weeble-like—not to fall down). I turned on the TV and was greeted by the sight of Eva Gabor doing the watusi with Thelma Ritter. I’m still not sure if it was delirium, or a really weird early-60s movie . . .

16

When I was 9, I had a wicked-assed fever. Not the highest I ever hit, but respectable.

I saw my mother rush into my room with a large knife in her right hand, raise it up over her head and lunge at me. I screamed wildly and raised my arms up to protect myself.

At that point ( of course ) the image broke and I was looking at my mother standing in the doorway, looking rather pale with a glass of water in her right hand.

That’s the only time for me. I hit a temp of 104.1 on New Year’s Day 2001, and had no hallucinations.

Eve, I am sending ecchinacea and goldenseal vibes unto thee. Heal, fine lady, heal. I bet it WAS an old movie !!!

Cartooniverse

17

When I was visiting my cousin’s house out of town at about the age of 12, I came down with something. I started feeling sicker and sicker throughout the evening, but I was having so much with all my cousins and their friends who’d come over to play Tripoli that I wouldn’t go to bed. So I was sick AND tired.

Tripoli basically was a series of poker card games. I don’t remember the details, but we played cards for hours and hours.

Several times after I did finally go to bed, I would awaken convinced, at different times, that I was was still playing cards, that I WAS a card (the Queen of Hearts, of course ;)) or that various kids were in the room, talking with me about cards. The next morning they told me they could hear me talking in there. I was hideously disoriented; I couldn’t shake the feeling that the comforter on the bed where I’d been sleeping was a card and it was alive. <shudder> It’s funny how vivid this all still is, nearly 30 years later!

Serendipity, if I’d known you were coming to Lexington to hallucinate, I’d of baked you a cake!

18

I used to get really high fevers (like 104-105 degrees F) every time a new molar came in. I remember one time when I was three and in preschool, I had a high fever, and I thought my friend was behind my sister’s crib (it was up against the wall, with no space, and of course she wasn’t really there). I also remember thinking I was on a merry-go-round with several of my friends from preschool, and these boys from our class were shooting at us and trying to kill us with bows and arrows. That was really scary.

My mom said it was one of the worst experiences ever for her, because she watched me go through this hallucination and couldn’t do anything for me. And my fever broke the next day. It returned when my 6-year molars came in, but I don’t think I hallucinated that time.

19

I have very similar experiences, mostly in feverish dreams, but they give me such a bizarre feeling that I thought they were unique to me.

When I had mono, there were two hallucinations I remember best. One was a friend calling my name (he was three states away) over and over again at different volumes. Another was a picnic table that wouldn’t get out of my way. I kept trying to get around it but it would move to block my path. The scariest part was that the table was actually there, so I’d really bump into it each time I tried to walk away from it.

20

I’ve felt the size-weirdness during fevers, too. It feels like you’re small, but very very heavy. The room you’re in feels way bigger than normal. Hard to describe.

At seven, I had a bout of illness with some strange hallucinations. I kept seeing a huge “crab” hovering above my bed. That’s what I called it then. Later, I recognized that it was a scorpion; I just didn’t know the word.

With the same fevers, a tall woman with long dark hair used to come and talk to me. She wasn’t scary, and seemed to be concerned about how I was. She seemed quite real. I’ll hazard it was a projection, but that’s amazing in it’s own right; that even a young mind can conjure up an apparition that seems real.

I’m curious. Does anyone know the mechanics of * why* a fever creates a hallucinatory state?