Oh yeah, and one more: I smoked hashish with a pal and went to see *Koyannisqatsi * at the local arty theatre. Could I be more of a child of the 1980s? 
I was driving from Dallas to Salt Lake City, and I was low on food and sleep. I looked down at my foot and saw a violet-winged wasp the size of a sparrow. I was absolutely certain it was trying to bite me.
I kicked and screamed, but it kept flying around. When I pulled over, I couldn’t find anything, and after a good nap, I never saw it again. Whoosh.
BTW–what was the date?
I mean, just for laughs?
I used to be freakishly afraid of needles. Still am to a certain point, but that’s irrelevant to the following story.
When I was around 15 I needed a filling replaced and my mother made an appointment at a dentist that offered gas as a replacement for a local.
Fifteen years after I still crack up when I think about the hallucination.
When the dentist leans over you to say “Ahhh open wider” I looked up and I kid you not, my dentist had turned in Mr Ed telling me to open my mouth.
Any pain from the drill was transformed into a big black teardrop that hung in front of my eyes. When pain hit, the teardrop would fracture. When the drilling stopped, it would reform solid.
Another time, in my heady days of substance and social exploration, I was in a car with a friend, and I was really really stoned.
We were driving along a country road that had no streetlights, but the reflectors on poles around 3-4 feet off the ground.
I have incredibly bad eyesight, so they appeared as stars to me instead of round reflectors as I wasn’t wearing my specs.
Suddenly, the Violent Femmes started playing “Blister in the Sun” in my mind, and as the headlights swept past the reflectors, instead of reflectors, they turned into pacmen on their little poles.
I think my earliest hallucination was also among my most vivid. I was about five years old, and feverish. My aunt had one of those “Knocking Jesus” pictures hanging above the mantelpiece, and Jesus was very obviously moving around in there.
P.S. This post was originally a whole lot longer, trying to express the detailed flavor of the experience as I tried to interpret it through the lens of my five-year-old grasp of Catholic theology; and reflecting on whether the incident might have somehow colored or presaged my perspective on religion later in life, or had any other, wider significance.
Then, when I tried to post it, it was eaten.
In hindsight, that’s probably for the best.
I was getting dental work done once and they gave me nitrous. The dentist was on one side of me and his assistant was on the other. For a few minutes it was like I was in a movie theatre with 2 screens at opposite ends, him on one screen and her on another. I could even see all the rows of seats.
I just remembered another one. When I was probably 3 or 4 years old, We lived in a trailer in Texas. I was sick with a fever. At one point I actually saw the heating ducts stretching out of the walls after me. I freaked out and ran into the living room where my mom was and jumped into her lap and burnt my hand on her cigarette.
I had a invisible car one once, driving to see my girlfriend when I was about 17. Imagined the whole incident, including the car crossing the centerline and playing chicken with me, and me improbably spinning a skidding smoking-brakes 360 in a Jeep Cherokee Laredo without flipping it over.
I also get fever dreams where I perfectly visualize four spatial dimensions. Used to freak me the HELL out when I was a kid and there was stuff that was right next to me but impossibly far away (especially since these often combined with the “I can’t make any vocalizations” dreams). Since I took college-level math and physics, it’s just a useful barometer–oh, shit, seeing four dimensions, better take an asprin and lie down.
I had reconstructive surgery done on my foot a few years back, and the doctor gave me percocet for the pain. Apparently, I get very bad side effects from percocet, including inability to go to the bathroom, nausea, and hallucinations. The pain was horrendous for the first few weeks, so I took them almost constantly.
Almost all of the hallucinations were auditory, but once I watched the shadows on the wall break up into little lizard shapes and run around for a few minutes, and another time all the dots on some patterened tiles winked at me. Right before they happened I had this feeling that that’s what should happen, like it was supposed to be that way.
I mostly hallucinated music. I heard what sounded like a swing band playing just around the corner for a whole day. The next day I listened to the sound track from Aliens over and over. I would be lying quietly in bed and suddenly a song would start and play to the end, and then it would be quiet again. Sometimes I would hear people having conversations in the next room, people that I knew were in other cities. I heard cicadas at all hours. It’s kind of weird to hear them at midnight.
I finally begged the doctor to give me something different cuz nausea isn’t much fun.
This happened recently and freaked me right the eff out.
I went to bed before my husband, and woke up about an hour later to find a big, black dog sitting next to the bed, real as you like, just staring at me. It wasn’t growling or anything, not menacing, but we do not own a dog and it scared the hell out of me. I sat there watching it for some time, trying to figure out what to do. Should I call for my husband, who is terrified of dogs? Should I run out of the bedroom? As I pondered my course of action, the dog…not faded, but I just realized over the course of a few minutes that it wasn’t there. Took me some time to fall back asleep, I tell you.
Probably some sort of night terror experience or something.
Dormitory rooftop, cloudy evening ~1979.
I won’t say what I had taken, but the subtle variations of light and dark in the cloud cover suddenly seemed to take on a regular geometric pattern across the entire sky. It was rather like the tread on a tire. It was beautiful.
After I had surgery I was on Percocet and it was pretty cool. I had “waking dreams” wherein I would dream normally but experience them as though they were real. And it wasn’t the dream-typical “this dream is so real” feeling, but more like I had two realities (actual reality and dream reality) and kept floating between them. It wasn’t scary, just different.
I also kept having perfectly real hallucinations that my grandma (my caretaker) was feeding me, so when she really would wake me up for food, I was cranky with her because I had just eaten. As far as I was concerned she was trying to feed me every half hour or so. Back off, grandma!
Driving back from Ohio to PA late one night and low on sleep, I slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting a very large blue and white washcloth that someone left crumpled in a heap in the middle of the road. By large, I mean it stood 5’ high and spanned most of the roadway. The pattern on the cloth was one that my parents had when I was about 3yrs old.
Stupid giants should mind their laundry.
I once got some surprisingly unstepped-on LSD. Toward the end of the trip, I put my head down on the carpet, because I needed to figure out exactly what it felt like on my face.
I kind of zoomed in on the flecks of dirt that I saw in the fibers, and they revealed themselves to be little tiny men with spears. They were running all over the place at first randomly, until I zoomed out a little and saw that they were forming into 8 x 12 ranks. These ranks were forming next to each other in rows of eight and columns of twelve. After two of the large units had fallen in (while the others were still mustering), they began quick-marching straight towards my right eye, followed by the ones that had assembled while they crossed the expanse of rug. I quickly sat up and began discussing PIL, which was playing on the boombox.
At some point I was leaning forward on my knuckles and I felt them stinging. I looked down and sure enough my knuckles were torn up and bleeding. There was an empty paper grocery bag standing in the corner of the room. It had text printed on it, but all i could see was the big red NO in the middle, in 84-point type. A friend of mine had informed me earlier that evening that this was a Bag Of No. I grabbed it and emptied it onto the carpet and the little men were routed.
My knuckles were actually bleeding and torn because earlier, while we were out stomping, I’d assaulted a tree.
Syracuse, New York, 1976. I went out with a few buddies to some big bar with live music. Can’t remember the name. We all dropped acid.
A college girl started hitting on me seriously. I do remember her name, but I won’t mention it, because she’s probably put a lot of time, effort and money into forgetting the whole thing.
Every time she touched one of the empty beer bottles on our table, a flame would come up. A small one, just like the beer bottle was a candle. Pretty soon there were about a dozen of them going.
Just so it doesn’t look like I’m endorsing drugs in any way, in 1977 I had a seriously bad acid trip. No hallucinations, just really, really delusional and dangerous beliefs that led me to do stupid, stupid things. I haven’t used any illegal drugs since then. Although I don’t mind having a drink or two.
At some point in my early teens I was very sick with a very high fever. I can still remember my hallucination now. It was the apocalypse. I was alone and I rode an abandoned train all across the continent trying to find other. Criss-crossing my way around. Supposedly my parents found me in the middle of the night curled up against the toilet bowl mumbling things about death to myself. I must have walked there from my bed while hallucinating. If I had turned the wrong way, down the stairs I would have gone.
Then there was the other one where one plus one didn’t equal two. It’s hard to explain but it was like living in a world where everything was unknown and no one could explain anything to anyone else. Frustrating and creepy.
And this is why I hate getting fevers. Even a mild one can cause a hallucination.
The drug ones are different…happier and more colourful.
During my one and only acid trip, I had several hallucinations that I don’t believe I’ll ever forget. I remember playing NCAA 2007 on my X-Box and seeing all of the characters on-screen as little men playing real, honest-to-Og football in that box on my TV stand. It made the game surprisingly hard.
Then, as I was being driven to Kroger, I saw about thirty or forty streetlights grow comet-like tails, and then all meld together to create this incredibly gorgeous, luminous snake of light slipping up the side of the road.
Driving past the side of Sanford Stadium (at the University of Georgia), I saw the normally slightly dingy building appear as an indescribably stunning marvel of architecture. It was perfect and clean, so majestic that I felt for a second as though I was in one of those Christmas Villages my mom used to set up the week before Christmas Eve.
We went out (we being my fiancee, a friend of mine, and myself – I was the only one tripping, since my friend had done it the night before and my fiancee was babysitting me) to a field and parked on the edge, near where a nature trail begins. It was nighttime, with a full moon, and I was sort of idly staring out of the side window. A car came alongside us with its lights on and illuminated a tree next to us while casting a shadow on the one behind it. It looked for a moment like the lit-up tree was made of the most fragile, silvery diamonds I had ever seen. It was undoubtedly the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen in my life, and there is absolutely no way I can ever, ever, ever put it into words.
A slight hijack, if I may be so indulged: doing acid that one time was probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I had been in therapy for major depressive disorder for months and had reached a sticking point. I was genuinely despairing of ever being truly happy (MDD is something I’ve fought for as long as I can remember, although I was only diagnosed very recently). I had a serious aversion to beginning an antidepressant regimen, because I didn’t want to become dependent on a pill to be happy. Taking LSD, though, showed me just how beautiful the world can be. The trees had emerald leaves, and when my breath fogged it made a trillion tiny diamonds. I thought of it as “chemically happy.” I knew antidepressants wouldn’t be anything at all like that, but because of my experience, I realized that it’s not so bad to get some help in pill form. I’m certainly not saying that I started antidepressants because I wanted to be high all the time – just that, for the first time ever, I understood how happy I could be, and I was willing to do what I needed to do to get there. I started citalopram (an SSRI) soon after, and I’ve recently been pronounced cured by my therapist. Turns out drugs aren’t always all bad, after all.
In 1979, under the influence of psychedelics, I looked into some deep-pile carpeting and it morphed into a lush, tall-grassed lawn swaying in a breeze that ebbed and flowed in tune with the conversation in the room.
Post accident, during a two week coma, adrift on a sea of oxycodone and halcyon, I drifted to New York and met Mr. Cat. He was a stately cat-standing over six feet on his hind legs, with striking blue eyes. Think of a white tiger to get an idea. He was also an upscale cat, wearing a collar and tie.
He and I were discussing the sad state of affairs in which classical arts find themselves, the loss of WFLN-FM (Philly’s only commercial full time classical music station-off air in 1995), the need to expose children in public schools to fine arts and music, and so forth.
Mr. Cat then said that there was a PBS special airing that afternoon that he knew I’d just love, and he invited me to watch it with him on his big screen TV. I agreed, and we began walking up the sidewalk. He then mentioned that he also had some yummy chardonnay to share.
While walking, no one found the sight of a six foot cat to be odd. He then displayed his lovely baritone voice, suddenly bursting forth: I love New York in June, how about you? I love a Gershwin tune, how about you?
Oddly enough, I found him 6 years later-a stuffed white tiger with blue eyes. Someone had put him out for the trash, and I brought him home where he now lives along the top of my living room couch. 
I have lots of hallucinations, mostly from night terrors, some from sleep deprivation.
Many times, Lego men in a Lego helicopter (about a foot long, red and yellow) would buzz me or hover near me and shout at me. Even knowing they were a hallucination later, I could wave my hand through them, and it would persist. I could look the other way, look back, and it would persist. I don’t like hallucinations to be persistent.
Floating afghan rugs in the room.
Origami dove made of lace.
Single sheet of notebook paper.
Small kittens dancing around a teacup on the bed and cajoling my chihuahua to join, and if he did he would DIE so I had to rescue him.
Infinite bug-related ones.
Some ‘figments’ from the video game Psychonauts all over the place.
A leprechaun-looking guy glaring at me through the crack from my bedroom door not being quite shut (yet it was in reality), many times. When he left for good, the Lego men started up shortly after.
A Garfield phone by my bed levitating around.
Never had loooooooooong hallucinations, just persistent, common, tiny ones.