5. Or so it would seem. Recently I came across a marvelous 1845 report by Truman Abell, a physician who started to lose his sight in his
fifty-ninth year and had become totally blind by 1842, four years later. He described this in an article for the
“In this situation,” he wrote, “I often dreamed of having my sight restored, and of seeing the most beautiful landscapes. At length these landscapes began to
appear in miniature
Over the course of several months, his visions increased in complexity. His “silent, but impudent visitors” were sometimes intrusive, with three or four people who would sit on his bed or “come to my bed-side, stoop down over me, and look directly into my eyes.” (Often his hallucinatory people seemed to acknowledge him, although CBS hallucinations typically do not interact with their hallucinators.) One night, he reported, “I was threatened to be run over about 10 o’clock by a drove of oxen; but having my presence of mind, I sat quiet, and with much crowding they all passed without touching me.”
Sometimes he saw ranks of thousands of people, splendidly dressed, forming columns that disappeared into the distance. At one point he saw “a column at least half a mile wide” of “men on horseback riding towards the west. . . . They continued to pass for several hours.”
“What I have here stated,” Abell wrote at the end of his detailed account, “must appear incredible to those unacquainted with the history of illusive visions. . . . How far my blindness contributed to produce such a result, I am not able to say. Never before have I been able to realize the ancient comparison of the human mind to a microcosm, or universe in miniature . . . [yet] the whole was confined within the organ of mental vision, and occupied, perhaps, a space of less than the tenth part of an inch square.”
6. A particularly good description of hallucinations in CBS (“I See Purple Flowers Everywhere”) is provided by Lylas and Marja Mogk in
their excellent book
7. The reverse may also occur. Robert Teunisse told me how one of his patients, seeing a man hovering outside his nineteenth-floor apartment, assumed this was another one of his hallucinations. When the man waved at him, he did not wave back. The “hallucination” turned out to be his window washer, considerably miffed at not having his friendly wave returned.
8. I have heard from at least a dozen people who, like Arthur and Marjorie, hallucinate musical notation; some of them have eye problems, some parkinsonism, some see music when they have a fever or delirium, some see it hypnopompically when they awaken. All but one are amateur musicians who often spend many hours a day studying scores. This very specialized and repetitive sort of visual study is peculiar to musicians. One may read books for hours a day, but one does not usually study print itself in such an intensive way (unless one is a type designer or proofreader, perhaps).
A page of music is far more complex visually than a page of print. With musical notation, one has not just the notes themselves but a very dense set of information contained in symbols for key signatures, clefs, turns, mordents, accents, rests, holds, trills, etc. It seems likely that intensive study and practice of this complex code somehow imprints it in the brain, and should any tendency to hallucination later develop, these “neural imprints” may predispose to hallucinations of musical notation.
And yet people with no particular training or even interest in music may also have hallucinations of musical notation, as Dominic ffytche has pointed out. In a letter to me, he wrote, “although prolonged exposure to music increases the likelihood of musical eyes, it is not a prerequisite.”
9. I was reminded, when she said this, of a case I had heard of in which as a patient ate cherries from a bowl, they were replaced by hallucinatory cherries, a seemingly endless cornucopia of cherries, until, suddenly, the bowl was totally empty. And of another case, of a man with CBS who was picking blackberries. He picked every one he could see; then, to his delight, he saw four more he had missed—but these turned out to be hallucinations.
