Hallucinations полностью

This was an immense relief — much better DT’s than a schizophrenic psychosis. But I was quite aware of the dangers of the DT’s: confusion, disorientation, hallucination, delusion, dehydration, fever, rapid heartbeat, exhaustion, seizures, death. I would have advised anyone else in my state to get to an emergency room immediately, but for myself, I wanted to tough it out, and experience it to the full. Carol agreed to sit with me for the first day; then, if she thought I was safe by myself, she would look by or phone me at intervals, calling in outside help if she judged it necessary. Given this safety net, I lost much of my anxiety, and could even enjoy the phantasms of delirium tremens in a way (though the myriads of small animals and insects were anything but pleasant). The hallucinations continued for almost ninety-six hours, and when they finally stopped, I fell into an exhausted stupor.¹⁰

As a boy, I had known extreme delight in the study of chemistry and the setting up of my own chemistry lab. This delight seemed to desert me at the age of fifteen or so; in my years at school, university, medical school, and then internship and residency, I kept my head above water, but the subjects I studied never excited me in the same intense way as chemistry had when I was a boy. It was not until I arrived in New York and began seeing patients in a migraine clinic in the summer of 1966 that I began to feel a little stirring of the intellectual excitement and emotional engagement I had known in my earlier years. It was in the hope of stirring up these intellectual and emotional excitements even further that I turned to amphetamines.

I would take the stuff on Friday evenings after getting back from work and would then spend the whole weekend so high that images and thoughts would become rather like controllable hallucinations, imbued with ecstatic emotion. I often devoted these “drug holidays” to romantic daydreaming, but one Friday, in February 1967, while I was exploring the rare book section of the medical library, I found a hefty volume on migraine entitled On Megrim, Sick-Headache, and Some Allied Disorders: A Contribution to the Pathology of Nerve-Storms, written in 1873 by one Edward Liveing, MD. I had been working for several months in the migraine clinic, and I was fascinated by the range of symptoms and phenomena that could occur in migraine attacks. These attacks often included an aura, a prodrome in which aberrations of perception and even hallucinations occurred. They were entirely benign and would last only a few minutes, but those few minutes provided a window onto the functioning of the brain and how it could break down and then reintegrate. In this way, I felt, every attack of migraine opened out into an encyclopedia of neurology.

I had read dozens of articles about migraine and its possible basis, but none of them seemed to present the full richness of its phenomenology or the range and depth of suffering which patients might experience. It was in the hope of finding a fuller, deeper, and more human approach to migraine that I took out Liveing’s book from the library that weekend. So, after downing my bitter draft of amphetamine — heavily sugared to make it more palatable — I started reading. As the amphetamine effect took hold of me, stimulating my emotions and imagination, Liveing’s book seemed to increase in intensity and depth and beauty. I wanted nothing but to enter Liveing’s mind and imbibe the atmosphere of the time in which he had worked.