I have a migraine and daily headache condition and one of the side effects is a changing assortment of hallucinations. It’s nothing to worry about, we keep track of them as part of my treatment and do periodic MRIs just to be sure when the hallucinations change…
But they are pretty damned normal, even outside of having a condition that impacts your brain, and most people don’t really understand that, and keep it to themselves if it happens to them, so I figured it’s worth asking.
Without drugs being involved, have you had hallucinations? Not just sounds or visions, but smells or touch or proprioception (body position) hallucinations? Those are far more common and much less talked about than hearing voices. Do you know what caused them, if you had them, or was it an alarming experience?
My biggest one is that chicken usually smells like peanut butter. I hate peanut, and actively avoid anywhere that uses peanut oil, and yet chicken still smells and tastes like it’s cooked in peanut flavoring. Awful hallucination.
Recently I’ve had some other olfactory (smell) hallucinations, lavender, sage, etc. sometimes a mild burning smell which is alarming because that’s associated with other issues like stroke. Have also had some audio hallucinations, the sort of thing I pause whatever’s playing to see if I’m imagining it. No big deal, because I’m aware of it happening.
I have visual snow syndrome and as a result experience a low level visual hallucination at all times. Usually it’s just a sort of fuzzy TV static up top of everything. Sometimes I get black dots in my vision that linger for seconds at a time. It gets considerably worse in the dark, resulting in a level of night blindness that actually prevents me from reading in dim light when a normal person should have no problem. I also frequently experience closed eye hallucinations that typically take the form of multi colored spinning fractals.
I experience migraines where my brain initiates an auditory hallucination, causing someone to speak to me. Simultaneously, a smell and flavor are perceived, making me feel almost detached from my body for a brief moment. This sensation evokes a feeling akin to what some might describe as the sensation of the world not being real. I figure it might be a focal seizure.
I have major depressive psychosis, so I experience hallucinations at varying rates depending on my mood. Sights and sounds are most common.
I’ll see shadows moving in my periphery and they usually register as birds to me. Occasionally I’ll see a silhouette of a person looking at me. Both things disappear when I go to look at them.
Sounds are typically laughter or screaming in the distance, very rarely it’ll be someone calling my name. When I go to bed, I’ll occasionally hear mumbling in my ears.
Touch and smell are extremely rare, but do happen. Smells are usually some random persistent scent that goes away when I look for it. I’m anosmic (no sense of smell) so I know it’s not real every time. Touch is usually in the form of feeling bugs crawling on me or feeling random wetness.
It’s sounds like a lot when it’s written out, but it’s honestly not that bad. I’m so used to it that I don’t really bother with my antipsychotics anymore.
With migraine, yes I would get hallucinations with the ones that dragged on. Like dreams they were, mostly fantasies about how to stop the pain by walking in the right direction or solving some math problem.
I do often hear music in the fan sound or running water. Those are funny because it sounds like music coming into my ears from outside, but is coming from my mind. Not particularly good music.
Idk if it counts as a hallucination but I’m pretty much unable to be in a dark room without seeing shadowy figures moving about. It used to terrify me as a child and teen but now ive got a “fuck it if it gets me it gets me” attitude and that allows me to sleep. Plus having someone else as a shield helps.
Only once (that I recall). Had a fairly traumatic experience watching a loved one nearly bleed out. A few days later in the hospital, hallucinated very briefly that the plastic tubing you see for O2 on the wall near the bed, was full of blood. only lasted a few moments but was bizarre.
I’ve had audio hallucinations of really, really amazing drum beats. It happens when there’s some loud but not necessarily rhythmic noise. Like a loud engine thrumming away at a steady throttle, like an aeroplane or boat. If that’s “noise” then I guess my mind tries to determine a pattern and just kinda overlays something when there’s really nothing. It sounds really amazing though.
I have that. It tinnitus. I also heard crickets. It took me living on a mountain and realizing that crickets couldn’t possibly be in the snow for me to realize it wasn’t real. If you crinkle paper in your ears and it goes away, it’s tinnitus. I had low humming, swooshing, ping sounds and crickets. All stress induced.
Just house a colony of crickets in your living room and it stops being a problem! I did that for a while and it was awesome. Reminded me of rural living. (Fed to chickens, wasn’t just for kicks)
More seriously, there’s a volume reduction treatment available for tinnitus, something I’m actively seeking right now and go in for later this month for tone matching. Might be worth looking into for you as well. It seems the mechanism behind it is just stimulating those frequencies regularly at a volume you don’t consciously register, so the receptors aren’t searching for phantom noise all the time. So if you can tone match your noise (probably professionally), you can mix it into a low volume band on whatever music track to stimulate those hairs. And it’s supposed to make everything quieter so you can tolerate it better. Idk yet if that’s true, when I’ve listened to a tone that’s close it stops being so loud so I have to think it is, but might be worth a lookie loo for you as well :)
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When I wake up from “about to fall asleep” I notice that during that period of not really sleeping I usually have music playing. It’s like calm cafe-like music usually and it happens practically every time I notice I’m in that state. Very pleasant!
For me, it’s seeing things I know aren’t real, or things that don’t match my memories. Trucks turning into giant mouths was one related to sleep deprivation / energy drink use.
But more recently it’s things like: That mural is different than yesterday but could not possibly have been repainted in this amount of time. No idea what triggered these kind, but I am diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.
That’s a really disquieting sort of hallucination, where you just sort of feel things are wrong. Or different. I’m glad you recognize them as unreality.
I have a really active dream world that I genuinely struggle to distinguish from waking real life, so I kinda get how troublesome that can be.
Friend, have you ever spoken to a mental health professional about the struggle to distinguish reality from your dream world?
Oh, no need, I already have strategies to help ground my reality thanks to the hallucinations. I think it’s mostly a result of being aphantasic, so the only things I see are real, other than when dreaming. Coupled with intensely vivid imagery it just feels real.
But my dreams are pretty calm and mundane these days, since I started taking meds for nightmares, and take place in easily recognizable (as dreams) locations. The struggle is more the interactions with friends, waking feeling like I wronged them. But I’ve learned how to handle that.
I appreciate the concern though :)
<3 I’m not a mental health professional, so I’ll leave it at that, but if you notice it getting more difficult, please speak to someone who is a mental health professional. There are solutions for if it becomes overwhelming or hard to distinguish.
I’ve only hallucinated when I was young and really feverish and sick. I was scared of “lava buckets coming up the stairs” according to my dad.
I work with people with delirium who commonly hallucinate, it’s often things like people or animals. Common things are small children and dogs for the nicest ones and spiders or aggressive people for the less nice ones. They also don’t realise they are hallucinating a lot of the time. Being unwell is hard.
Is “lava buckets coming up the stairs” a Minecraft-inspired hallucination?
A solid decade before Minecraft at least no idea where it came from.
I’ve experienced psychosis and hallucinations before, it happens to me sometimes when I’m under a lot of stress, I think I have some latent schizophrenia that kicks in or something like that.
It’s strange, because there’s always a part of me that recognizes that I’m hallucinating/delusional, and it’s very scary to me, it always feels very dangerous, like I am at risk and I need to be careful.
The actual things I see and hear varies wildly. Most commonly, I will see weird lights, like the flash of a camera. Often, my brain will kinda play tricks on me, and turn shadows or tricks of the light into something that looks like some kind of monster out of the corner of my eye, but when I focus on it, it looks normal.
My sister’s schizophrenia is far worse than mine. She has told me a number of crazy stories, and she’s been committed to mental hospitals a few times unfortunately.
Feel free to ask, if anyone has any questions
I have something like this. It’s mostly music, things on or under my skin and some smells, sometimes people lose their heads too (didn’t happen for a while). But I can’t make it disappear, even if I know there is nothing. I kinda like the music, but the first occurrences were scary. It sometimes happens I can’t tell what is common reality and what is not, and of course it’s always fucking scary things.
I had it for delusion too, like I know it is, but it doesn’t matter. I was paranoid for years, it went worse and worse and I knew it was paranoia. I still believed some people could read thought my eyes while I writing, following me, etc.
It protects me for saying it to the wrong person, and it doesn’t take all my life, but it’s annoying. But there are nice things in it, like the music, I’m understanding with weird people, I’m creative for hiding things, I spoke with my tiles one day, I don’t panic easily.
Huh. I had the thing where I saw shadows moving out of the corner of my eye. It always spooks the hell out of me. It usually comes when I am stressed beyond belief. My partner and I clean air bnbs for a living, and some of em are out in the woods. Once, when I was by myself, I swore I heard someone walking around upstairs. This was a big 6 bed room house in the middle of the woods. I have never felt terror like that.
I even had moments of thinking I heard footsteps coming down the hallway as I was in the master bedroom cleaning. It wasn’t like I could see down the hallway either. It was the hallway that led to a huge master bath, and the master bed is around the corner.
This was at like 12 at night. I remember saying, “If someone is there, I’m not a nice person, I will kill you.” Not sound like a badass, I was cornered in a room, and I’m not one to be backed into a corner. When I stepped out and saw nothing, I felt so odd.
Luckily, I have been dealing with my stress better so it’s not as bad as it us to be.
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Yes, after being awake for 36+ hours, horizontal surfaces start to ripple like water.
Following open heart surgery, I was on a RAFT of pharmaceuticals, and every time I closed my eyes I could see a painted brick wall directly in front of my face in perfect detail. I could see the pores of the bricks, the grout work, everything.
Further, every time they put me in a new room, the wall would change color.
Once me and my mate wanted to see how long we could last without sleep and i lasted about 2.5 days.
I kept seeing shadows and blurs in the corner of my eye, like something like a dog about to bite my foot or a car about to turn into me, but would vanish when i turned to look at it. With the prices of drugs and everything else these days, might have to resort to doing it again to save money
That’s super unhealthy to actually do, but what were the hallucinations like, emotionally? They sound like fever dream scary stuff, which most hallucinations are not at all.
Well i was incredibly exhausted so i dont know if it was 100% the hallucinations but emotionally it was a lot like the comedown from MDMA for me. Every time it would happen it felt like so much of what little energy i had left was being sucked out just so i could react by being startled, if that makes sense.
I get sleep deprivation hallucinations sometimes and they are usually accompanied by an almost childlike fear. I can feel uncomfortable walking past my bed and don’t like walking past dark rooms. It feels ridiculous in the moment but feeling ridiculous doesn’t stop you from being atleast unnerved.
I used to have some when I was a kid but they stopped at some point, now nothing unless you count tinnitus.
I’d see little dots of light racing around on busy designs such as a Persian rug. Occasionally I’d get this thing where time would seem to slow down for a moment and every sound would seem like booming explosions.
Sometimes if I’m very tired, looking at complex textures like a rug or speckled ceiling will start to twist and wobble like when one does shrooms, or acid. Ill also experience auditory hallucinations but theyre like crashing waves of machinery, or like I’m in a cave. Pretty sure its just my brain not having the energy to accurately piece reality together and filling in the blanks with nonsense while struggingg to maintain consistency.
