The five senses are our gateway to the world; they are the only way through which we can know what is going on around us. We believe that they accurately show us the truth; however, they can sometimes betray us.
When you open your eyes in the morning, what do you expect to see? You expect to see a normal scene; perhaps the inside of your room. So, unless your room is a messy disaster, or there has been a natural disaster while you were sleeping, all should seem well in the morning. For people like me, it does not always go this way.
The comforting thing about all those hypnagogic hallucinations is that they happen around the time you are sleeping. When you are fully awake and on your way to work, you will just tell yourself that this was a silly little dream-like incident and forget all about it; after all, it did not really interfere with your waking life. However, what if your senses could trick you even when you are completely awake and out of bed?
Seeing Things
If you have watched the film “A Beautiful Mind”, you would have seen how wakeful hallucinations are like; from Hollywood’s perspective, anyway. Rather than fleeting images or incidents that are very closely related to sleep, these hallucinations happen when you are totally awake and could have disastrous consequences. The most popular culprit behind those hallucinations is schizophrenia; a mental disorder that affects about 24 million people in the world as of 2011.
Paradoxically, schizophrenics who hallucinate have a much better chance at recovering than the ones who do not. The fact that hallucinations are not something normal you might experience if you are sane makes a person more ready to get rid of them; they are just not typical enough to be accepted and lived with.
People with schizophrenia and experience depression, anxiety, and emotional problems, but not hallucinations, are the ones who have more trouble getting better. That is because those symptoms are something they have already normally experienced before; they are thus not atypical enough.
Schizophrenics may think that their hallucinations are real; even if they are told that these things are not, they may not believe it. This is because their actual consciousness believes that they are seeing or hearing these things. What is peculiar is when you have a hallucination that you know is not true and your mental health is normal.
In 1926, French neurologist Jean Lhermitte diagnosed the first case of a neurological disorder “Peduncular Hallucinosis”. His 76-year-old patient told him that she saw images of colorfully dressed people who were not there. The woman did not have any signs of mental disorder and she saw these visions at a normal conscious state.
The cause for Peduncular Hallucinosis (PH) is not mental disorder; it is purely neurological. What happens is that certain parts of your nervous system relating to your vision start to develop lesions—a form of tissue damage—that cause their function to be impaired. In most cases, however, the subject was aware that their hallucinations are not real, and did not usually have or develop psychosis.
Hearing Things
We all have a voice in our head. While reading this article, you are most probably not moving your lips, but reading it with that voice. Sometimes we converse with ourselves when making a tough decision, but in the end you know that is just you inside there.
If the voice in your head is telling you to do something, you will do it because you know that is you thinking of it. Or is it? How can you be sure it is your voice in there? What if you started hearing someone else in your head? Someone telling you to do something terrible, perhaps?
It is not necessarily a sign of mental illness; it is something that a lot of people have reported happening to them at least once in their lifetime. Research has shown that there are many who have lived their whole lives with this phenomenon without ever seeking medical assistance. Some even find those voices comforting and inspirational; but they all agree that it is not their own voice and they do actually hear it as if someone else “inside” them was speaking to them.
A voice hearer, as mental health professionals call them, may find their experience a little bit darker than usual. The voice might start to issue them commands; these commands may very well be dangerous to the person hearing them or the people around him/her. It has been a common defense in lots of criminal cases that the defendant was hearing a voice that told them to commit the crime.
The murder of John Lennon, one of the most famous murders of all time, was committed by a man named Mark Chapman. Mark had read a book entitled “The Catcher in the Rye”; he was carrying it with him on the day he murdered Lennon. Mark sat in front of Lennon's house for hours until he emerged, and shot him four times. Apparently, he was thinking that the main character from the book was talking to him; he said in an interview that he heard a voice telling him to “do it”.
It is a scary world out there; with all these diseases and possible causes of hallucination, it is a wonder that most of us lead normal lives. You could go crazy just worrying about the numerous things that may go wrong with your brain. So, instead of worrying, just let it be! If something happens, it happens; you will deal with it if the time comes.
References
www.wisegeek.com
www.schizophrenic.com
www.huffingtonpost.com
www.mentalhealth.org.uk
The article was first published in print in the PSC Newsletter, Summer 2013 issue.
Cover image by rawpixel.com on Freepik