the figure of a woman in long white Victorian dress in the foreground of a scene with other people in the background. It looked like a faint Victorian photograph, or a black and white version of one of those Renoir paintings of people in the park. . . . The figure was not looking at me, not moving. . . . I did not mistake it as a live scene or real people. The image had no significance to anything in my life. I did not feel any heightened emotions associated with it.
She sometimes has unpleasant odor hallucinations or physical sensations, “the ground beneath me wobbling, for instance,” she says, adding, “I have to ask others if an earthquake is happening.”
She often experiences déjà vu but finds her occasional jamais vu much more disturbing:
The first time it happened, I remember looking at a building I had passed hundreds of times and thinking I had never noticed it was that color or shape, etc. And I then
looked at everything around me, and none of it looked familiar. It was so disorienting I could not move an inch further. In the same way, I would sometimes not
Amy remarks that her seizures most often occur when she is waking up or dozing off
She emphasizes that the images have no personal relevance, are not related to anything that happened that day, and carry no special associations or emotional significance. “They do not stay in my mind as anything to think about,” she observes. “They are more like the detritus of those parts of dreams that mean nothing, like random images arbitrarily flashed in front of me.”
Stephen L., an affable, outgoing man, first consulted me in the summer of 2007. He brought with him his
“neurohistory,” as he called it—seventeen pages of single-spaced typing—adding that he had “a little graphomania.” He said his problems started after an accident
thirty years before, when his car was broadsided by another, and his head slammed against the windshield. He suffered a severe concussion but seemed to recover fully after a few days. Two months
later, he started to have brief attacks of déjà vu: he would suddenly feel that whatever he was experiencing, doing, thinking, or feeling he had already experienced, done, thought, or
felt before. At first he was intrigued by these brief convictions of familiarity and found them pleasant (“like the breeze going past my face”), but within a few weeks he was getting
them thirty or forty times a day. On one occasion, to prove that the feeling of familiarity was an illusion, he stamped his foot, threw one leg high in the air, and did a sort of Highland fling in
front of a washroom mirror. He
His attacks became not only more frequent but more complex, the déjà vu being only the start of a “cascade” (as he put it) of other experiences, which, once started, would move forward irresistibly. The déjà vu would be followed by a sharp icy or burning pain in the chest, then by an alteration of hearing, so that sounds become louder, more resonant, seemed to reverberate all around him. He might hear a song as clearly as if it were being sung in the next room, and what he heard would always be a specific performance of the song—for example, a particular Neil Young song (“After the Gold Rush”) exactly as he had heard it during a concert at his college the year before. He might then go on to experience “a bland, pungent smell” and a taste “which corresponded with the smell.”
On one occasion Stephen dreamt he was having one of his aura cascades and woke to find that he was indeed in the midst of one. But then to the usual cascade was added a strange out-of-body experience, in which he seemed to be looking down at his body as it lay in bed, through an elevated open window. This out-of-body experience seemed real—and very frightening. Frightening, in part, because it suggested to him that more and more of his brain was being involved in his seizures, and that things were getting out of control.
