"So Bel, have you had hallucinations?" "No Dr, I have never had them, except one time when I was a kid and had a bad fever...."
She said.
So turns out I may have been wrong about that after all- I
have done some reading after stumbling upon something in a you tube clip and apparently
standard hallucinations are a little less severe than I thought they were…. I
watched a beautiful mind once upon a time so there for I sort of assumed that
when ppl said they have hallucinations they were seeing complete people /
objects etc talking and walking like the furniture in beauty and the beast….
According to the literature hallucinations can be shadows
and dream like imaginings crossing into reality while awake type stuff – erm, I
do actually get that. And I get it quite a lot... Usually when I’m fairly hypomanic.
It’s particularly bad (and a pain in the neck) when I’m driving as I keep
thinking that the shadowy things are are Kangaroos etc beside me about to dart
out in front of the car, (let me add that that’s quite realistic where I live)
it can be a bit of a problem really because I tend to drive a little over the
recommended speed when high so swerving imaginary wildlife isn’t practical.
Now while I was aware these little migraine-like flashes
/shadowy things weren’t real I assumed that it was either A speeding related
phenomenon or my eyes were just playing up because my body was tireder than my
mind (I also tend to not sleep for several days when ‘up’) and had considered
seeing an optometrist in case I needed glasses for driving.
As for the dream like imaginings kinda like a little scene
playing out in my peripheral usually with mild audio should I care to listen –
which I don’t – you know when you first
wake up in the morning and someone is talking to you but your still kinda
dreaming? Yeah that. Thankfully this is less common and generally more annoying
than anything else, unless I’m mega hypo and then they blur into reality a
little too much and it can be hard to judge wtf is real or not. Now I’m
wondering if these are actually visual hallucinations…??? God I hope not,
that’s weird. I have had a few experiences which may have been hallucinations
where I have seen cars plain as day and then they have miraculously disappeared
into nowhere and I hate to admit that on one occasion driving to work while
reasonably hypomanic I saw two such ‘ghost cars’.
The first car looked
like an unmarked police car (commodore, thick antenna… Aussies you all know
what I mean) and I was mildly paranoid that it was tailing me as someone may
have dobbed me in for my rather persistent and reckless speeding along that
stretch of road, and by mildly I mean thought crossed my mind stayed there for
a while and resulted in my working out a getaway plan… then the car disappeared
into nothing on a country road with nowhere to turn off.
This experience freaked me out a bit and then closer to town
there was a marked cop car doing a speed check on the other side of a straight
stretch of road – as I passed I saw it pull out in my rear view mirror and pull
a u turn behind me, I was thinking “shit I’m sure I’m not speeding”, looked at
the speedo (not speeding) looked in the mirror again and the car had vanished –
again nowhere to turn off. That freaked me out a fair bit as I thought that’s
two things that I thought I saw, how much of what I am seeing now is real and
how much isn’t? It all looks real, but then so did the cop car…
Ok. That sounds WAY crazier when I write it down. Hmm. BUT
in my defence when the car ‘vanished’ I was aware that I must have imagined it
(so that makes it NOT a delusion. Right?) In the end due to *hallucinational content I
put it down to some sort of subconscious guilt about speeding.
So, I guess there appear to be a few things about me I
thought were totally normal/ marginally quirky that don’t actually happen to
everyone else and I’m finding it a wee bit disconcerting and am very glad I
didn’t TELL anyone about it.
*MS Word claims “hallucinational” isn’t a word, but I think
it should be, particularly in this context, it just works.
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