One such dreamscape was Chicago, where she lived as a teenager. Most of her seizures transported her to this dream Chicago—she has drawn maps of it, which contain actual landmarks, but in which the topography is strangely transformed. Other dreamscapes center around the hill in another city, where her university is situated. “For a few seconds,” she told me, “I flash back to a dream I have had, into the world of that dream, being in a different time and place. The places are ‘familiar,’ but don’t really exist.”
Another dreamscape, often reexperienced in seizures, is a transformed version of a hill town in Italy where she lived for a while. There is another, frightening one: “I’m with my little sister, on some sort of beach. We’re being bombed. And I lose her. . . . People are being killed.” Sometimes, she says, the dreamscapes blend together, a hill somehow turning into a beach. There are always strong emotional components—fear or excitement, usually—and these emotions can dominate her for fifteen minutes or so after the actual attack.
Laura has quite a lot of apprehension about these odd episodes. On one of her maps, she wrote, “This all really scares me. Please, help me any way possible. Thanks!” She says she would give a million dollars to be free of these attacks—but she also feels they are a portal to another form of consciousness, another time and place, another world, although that portal is not under her control.
In his 1881
There may also be chewing and lip-smacking movements in a complex partial seizure, occasionally accompanied by hallucinatory tastes.43 Olfactory hallucinations, either alone as an isolated aura or as a part of complex seizure, may occur in various forms, as David Daly described in a 1958 review paper. Many of these hallucinatory smells seem unidentifiable or indescribable (except as “pleasant” or “unpleasant”), even though a patient will have the same smell in every seizure. One of Daly’s patients said his hallucinatory smell odor was “somewhat like the smell of frying meat”; another said it was “like passing a perfume shop.” One woman would experience an odor of peaches so vivid, so real, that she was certain there must be peaches in the room.44 Another patient had a “reminiscence” associated with hallucinatory smells which “seemed to recall odors in his mother’s kitchen when he was a child.”
In 1956, Robert Efron, a naval physician, provided an extraordinarily detailed description of his patient Thelma B., a middle-aged professional singer. Mrs. B. experienced olfactory symptoms in her seizures, and she also gave a striking description of what Hughlings Jackson called doubled consciousness:
I can be perfectly well in every way when suddenly I feel snatched away. I seem to feel as if I’m in two places at once but in neither place at all—it is a feeling of being remote. I can read, write and talk and can even sing my lyrics. I know exactly what is going on but I somehow don’t seem to be in my own skin. . . . When this feeling happens I know that I’m going to have a convulsion. I keep trying to stop it from happening. No matter what I do, it always comes. Everything goes ahead like a railroad schedule. At this part of my attack I feel very active. If I’m home I make beds, dust, sweep or do the dishes. My sister says that I do everything at breakneck speed—I rush around like a chicken with his head cut off. But to me it all seems to be in slow motion. I am very interested in the time, I’m always looking at my watch and asking someone the time every few minutes. That is why I know exactly how long this part of the attack lasts. It has been as short as ten minutes or may last the better part of a day; it is real hell then. Usually it lasts about twenty to thirty minutes. All this time I feel that I’m remote. It is like being outside a room and looking in through a keyhole, or as if I’m God just looking down on the world but not belonging to it.
At about the halfway point in her seizure, Mrs. B. said, she would get a “funny idea” in her head involving the anticipation of a smell:
