Common Hallucinations
Our culture has taught us to fear the word, but Hallucinations are part of our everyday lives. We each have a different experience when presented with the same sensations. Maybe we are very attentive towards what we are looking at, and our brains blur and ignore the background. Maybe you are lost in thought and day dream entire landscapes, ignoring the input from your eyes. Images and sounds in our dreams are hallucinations. That buzz on your thigh when your phone isn’t even in your pocket is a hallucination. It could be argued that we have more hallucinations than real perceptions on any given day.
Visual Representation of Palinopsia
A condition where the brain creates an image of something you saw before, but is no longer present.
But there are much stranger, often more disturbing hallucinations, that we rarely talk about. Some of the most common are hearing a door handle turn or hearing your name called from a distance. Many people see shadows moving, or lights pulsating. Ask enough people, and you’ll find that most people have these as well. What is happening is well understood, but rarely discussed. The truth is that our brain is constantly making things up, connecting dots, filling in gaps, and much of the time we never know it's happening.
The most common hallucinations can become very distressing to some people. Tinnitus is a ringing sound that many people hear. It usually occurs with hearing loss, and it is the brain’s response to that reduced auditory input. Other people will hear music, usually calm pleasing music like a quiet orchestra in the background. Similarly when there is vision loss, many people begin to see dreamlike images or landscapes, even cartoonish ones. These hallucinations that occur after the loss of a sensation are called “Release Hallucinations”. They occur because the brain was always making that sound or that image, but the sensory input was suppressing it. Loss of the sound or visual stimuli “releases” the hallucination.
Other common hallucinations involve an overlap of one image or sound with others. These are more common in migraine or with substance use and include Visual Snow, tunnel perception, tingling or vibration in the body, throbbing or clicking sounds, and others. While they are often benign and easy to ignore, some people become very distressed and even frightened by them.
These release hallucinations and overlap hallucinations are extraordinarily difficult to treat. In fact, most people would never want to take a medicine for something that isn’t associated with any medical problem.
However, when Visual Snow or Tinnitus gets bad, I’ve had patients say they’d rather be blind or deaf than have to suffer any longer with it. Luckily some medications used in Migraine can give substantial relief. Some people try supplements like Magnesium. While I think trying different supplements or medications is typically safe, the data shows that many people never respond.
Another type of hallucination experienced by most people can occur right before falling asleep or right after waking up. Even when there is a concern for dementia, a mood disorder, or psychosis, it is hard to know if parasomniac hallucinations should be considered. The most common parasomniac hallucinations are the sense that you’ve fallen, a loud bang, soothing or pulsing sounds, or dream-like and cartoonish images. As people get older, these parasomniac experiences can become complicated like seeing and speaking to dead loved ones. Along with a chaotic sleep cycle where these parasomniac hallucinations can occur throughout the day, differentiating them from more concerning hallucinations can be tough.
The scope of hallucinations can extend as far as human perceptual experience, and there are many different causes. Migraine is a pretty common one, with many types of aura from seeing lightning bolts to near blindness. Seizures can cause either quick flashes of an image, or an entire dreamscape. Joan of Arc was believed to be having seizures when she spoke to god. Many artists have become famous by drawing what they saw in their migraines. There are even perceptual disturbances where time dilates or contracts, where objects appear to grow to enormous proportions, or where faces turn into dragons. Check out our symptom hub for some fascinating examples, and contact us today if you’d like a consult to discuss your new or disturbing perceptual disturbances.
