Hallucinations engendered by immobility, whether from motor system disease or external constraints, were frequently seen when polio was rampant. The worst afflicted, unable even to breathe by themselves, lay motionless in coffinlike “iron lungs” and would often hallucinate, as Herbert Leiderman and his colleagues described in a 1958 article. The immobility produced by other paralyzing diseases — or even splints and casts for broken bones — may likewise provoke hallucinations. Most commonly these are corporeal hallucinations, in which limbs may seem to be absent, distorted, misaligned, or multiplied; but voices, visual hallucinations, and even full-blown psychoses have been reported, too. I saw this especially with my postencephalitic patients, many of whom were, in effect, enclosed in immoveable parkinsonism and catatonia.
Sleep deprivation beyond a few days leads to hallucination, and so may dream deprivation, even with otherwise normal sleep. When this is combined with exhaustion or extreme physical stress, it can be an even more potent source of hallucinations. Ray P., a triathlete, described one example:
Once, I was competing in the Ironman Triathlon in Hawaii. I was not having a good race, I was overheated and dehydrated — miserable. Three miles into the marathon portion of the race, I saw my wife and my mom standing on the side of the road. I ran over to them to say I would be late to the finish line, but when I reached them and began telling my tale of woe, two complete strangers who did not even remotely resemble my wife and mother looked back at me.
The Hawaiian Ironman Triathlon, with its extreme temperatures and long hours of monotony under grueling conditions, can provide an athlete with a fertile venue for hallucination, much the same as the vision quest rites of passage of Native Americans. I have seen Madame Pele, the Hawaiian Volcano and Fire Goddess, at least once out there in the lava fields.
Michael Shermer has spent much of his life debunking the paranormal; he is a historian of science and the director of the Skeptics Society. In his book
Mushers go for 9–14 days on minimum sleep, are alone except for their dogs, rarely see other competitors, and hallucinate horses, trains, UFOs, invisible airplanes, orchestras, strange animals, voices without people, and occasionally phantom people on the side of the trail or imaginary friends.… A musher named Joe Garnie became convinced that a man was riding in his sled bag, so he politely asked the man to leave, but when he didn’t move Garnie tapped him on the shoulder and insisted he depart his sled, and when the stranger refused Garnie swatted him.
Shermer, an endurance athlete himself, had an uncanny experience while competing in a grueling bike marathon, which he later described in his
In the wee hours of the morning of August 8, 1983, while I was traveling along a lonely rural highway approaching Haigler, Neb., a large craft with bright lights overtook me and forced me to the side of the road. Alien beings exited the craft and abducted me for 90 minutes, after which time I found myself back on the road with no memory of what transpired inside the ship.… My abduction experience was triggered by sleep deprivation and physical exhaustion. I had just ridden a bicycle 83 straight hours and 1,259 miles in the opening days of the … transcontinental Race Across America. I was sleepily weaving down the road when my support motor home flashed its high beams and pulled alongside, and my crew entreated me to take a sleep break. At that moment a distant memory of the 1960s television series “The Invaders” was inculcated into my waking dream. In the series, alien beings were taking over the earth by replicating actual people but, inexplicably, retained a stiff little finger. Suddenly the members of my support crew were transmogrified into aliens. I stared intensely at their fingers and grilled them on both technical and personal matters.
After a nap, Shermer recognized this as a hallucination, but at the time it seemed completely real.
1. While the romantic use of sensory deprivation, as that of vision-producing drugs, has diminished since the 1960s, its political use is still horrifyingly common in the treatment of prisoners. In a 1984 paper on “hostage hallucinations,” Ronald K. Siegel pointed out that such hallucinations can be magnified sometimes to madness, especially when combined with social isolation, sleep deprivation, hunger, thirst, torture, or the threat of death.
2. There may be severe visual impairment or complete blindness without a hint of CBS, and this might seem to imply that visual deprivation alone is not a sufficient cause for it. But we are still ignorant as to why some people with visual problems get CBS and others do not.
