I used to entertain myself while falling asleep by hallucinating. I would lie in bed and stare up at the ceiling in the halflight.… I would stare at a fixed point, and by holding my eyes very still, the ceiling would neutralize and gradually become swarming pixels, which would become patterns: waves and grids and paisleys. Then, in the midst of that, figures would start to appear and interact. I remember quite a few — [and] I remember the exceptional visual clarity of them. Once the vision was present, I could look around at things the way you would a film.
There was another way I used to do this. There was a family portrait that hung at the foot of my bed, a classical staged photo of my grandparents, cousins, an aunt and uncle, my parents, my brother, and me. Behind us was a huge privet hedge. Again, in the evening, I would gaze at the portrait. Very quickly, strange and delightfully silly things would start to happen: apples would grow out of the privet hedge, my cousins would begin to chatter and chase each other around the group. My grandmother’s head would “pop off” and attach to her two calves, which would then start to dance about. Grim as that seems now, I found it hilarious then.
At the other end of life, there is a special sort of hallucination that may attend death or the anticipation of death. Working in old-age homes and nursing homes, I have been struck and moved by how often patients who are lucid, sane, and fully conscious may have hallucinations when they feel that death is near.
When Rosalie — the very old blind lady I described in the chapter on Charles Bonnet syndrome — became ill and thought she was dying, she had visions of her mother and heard her mother’s voice welcoming her into heaven. These hallucinations were completely different in character from her usual CBS hallucinations — they were multisensory, personal, addressed to her, and steeped in warmth and tenderness. Her CBS hallucinations, by contrast, had no apparent relation to her and aroused no emotion. I have known other patients (who did not have CBS or any other special condition facilitating hallucinations) to have similar deathbed hallucinations — sometimes the first and last hallucinations in their lives.
1. Many of H. G. Wells’s short stories also involve guilt hallucinations. In “The Moth,” a zoologist who feels himself responsible for the death of his lifelong rival is haunted and finally driven mad by a giant moth that no one else can see, a moth of a genus unknown to science; but in his lucid moments, he jokes that it is the ghost of his deceased rival.
Dickens, a haunted man himself, wrote five books on this theme, the best known of these being
I thought it a strange thing then, and I thought it a stranger thing long afterwards. I turned my eyes — a little dimmed by looking up at the frosty light — towards a great wooden beam in a low nook of the building near me on my right hand, and I saw a figure hanging there by the neck. A figure all in yellow white, with but one shoe to the feet; and it hung so that I could see that the faded trimmings of the dress were like earthy paper, and that the face was Miss Havisham’s, with a movement going over the whole countenance as if she were trying to call me. In the terror of seeing the figure, and in the terror of being certain that it had not been there a moment before, I at first ran from it, and then ran towards it. And my terror was greatest of all when I found no figure there.
2. Losing a spouse, of course, is one of the most stressful of life events, but bereavement may happen in many other situations, from the loss of a job to the loss of a beloved pet. A friend of mine was very upset when her twenty-year-old cat died, and for months she “saw” the cat and its characteristic movements in the folds of the curtains.
Another friend, Malonnie K., described a different sort of cat hallucination, after her beloved seventeen-year-old pet died:
Much to my surprise, the next day I was getting ready for work and she appeared at the bathroom door, smiled and meowed her usual “good morning.” I was flabbergasted. I went to tell my husband and when I returned, of course, she was no longer there. This was upsetting to me because I have no history of hallucinations and thought I was “above” such things. However, I have accepted that this experience was, perhaps, a result of the phenomenally close bond that we had developed and sustained over nearly two decades. I must say, I am so grateful that she stopped by one last time.
