Hallucinations полностью

People with CBS have, at least in part, lost the primary visual world, the world of perception. But they have gained, if only in an inchoate and fitful way, a world of hallucinations, a secondary visual world. The role CBS may play in an individual’s life varies enormously, depending on the sort of hallucinations that occur, how often they occur, and whether they are contextually appropriate, or frightening, or comforting, even inspiring. There are, at one extreme, those who may have had only a single hallucinatory experience in their life; others may have had hallucinations, on and off, for years. Sometimes hallucinations can be distracting—seeing patterns or webs over everything, not knowing whether the food on one’s plate is real or hallucinatory. Some hallucinations are manifestly unpleasant, especially those that involve deformed or dismembered faces. A few are dangerous: Zelda, for instance, does not dare drive, since she may see the road suddenly bifurcate or people jumping on the hood of her car.

For the most part, however, the hallucinations of CBS are unthreatening and, once accommodated to, mildly diverting. David Stewart speaks of his hallucinations as being “altogether friendly,” and he imagines his eyes saying, “Sorry to have let you down. We recognize that blindness is no fun, so we’ve organized this small syndrome, a sort of coda to your sighted life. It’s not much, but it’s the best we can manage.”

Charles Lullin, too, enjoyed his hallucinations and would sometimes go into a quiet room for a brief hallucinatory break. “His mind makes merry with the images,” Bonnet wrote of his grandfather. “His brain is a theatre where the stage machinery puts on performances which are all the more amazing because they are unexpected.”

Sometimes the hallucinations of Charles Bonnet syndrome can inspire. Virginia Hamilton Adair wrote poetry as a young woman, publishing in the Atlantic Monthly and the New Republic. She continued to write poems during her career as a scholar and professor of English in California, but these, for the most part, remained unpublished. It was not until she was eighty-three and completely blind from glaucoma that she published her first book of poetry, the acclaimed Ants on the Melon. Two further collections followed, and in these new poems she made frequent reference to the Charles Bonnet hallucinations that now visited her regularly, the visions given to her by “the angel of hallucinations,” as she put it.

Adair and, later, her editor sent me extracts from the journal she kept in the last years of her life. They were full of descriptions she dictated of her hallucinations as they occurred, including this:

I am maneuvered into a delightfully soft chair. I sink, submerged as usual in shades of night . . . the sea of clouds at my feet clears, revealing a field of grain, and standing about it a small flock of fowl, not two alike, in somber plumage: a miniature peacock, very slender, with its little crest and unfurled tail feathers, some plumper specimens, and a shore bird on long stems, etc. Now it appears that several are wearing shoes, and among them a bird with four feet. One expects more color among a flock of birds, even in the hallucinations of the blind. . . . The birds have turned into little men and women in medieval attire, all strolling away from me. I see only their backs, short tunics, tights or leggings, shawls or kerchiefs. . . . Opening my eyes on the smoke screen of my room I am treated to stabs of sapphire, bags of rubies scattering across the night, a legless vaquero in a checked shirt stuck on the back of a small steer, bucking, the orange velvet head of a bear decapitated, poor thing, by the guard of the Yellowstone Hotel garbage pit. The familiar milkman invaded the scene in his azure cart with the golden horse; he joined us a few days ago out of some forgotten book of nursery rhymes or the back of a Depression cereal box. . . . But the magic lantern show of colored oddities has faded and I am back in black-wall country without form or substance . . . where I landed as the lights went out.

2

The Prisoner’s Cinema: Sensory Deprivation

The brain needs not only perceptual input but perceptual change, and the absence of change may cause not only lapses of arousal and attention but perceptual aberrations as well. Whether darkness and solitude is sought out by holy men in caves or forced upon prisoners in lightless dungeons, the deprivation of normal visual input can stimulate the inner eye instead, producing dreams, vivid imaginings, or hallucinations. There is even a special term for the trains of brilliantly colored and varied hallucinations which come to console or torment those kept in isolation or darkness: “the prisoner’s cinema.”