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Scary Hallucinations?

Ringo

I like to not get involved in these matters
Joined
Feb 24, 2005
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I did a search for hallucinations but only found IHTM posts. I thought this thread could be about hallucinations generally - whether fever, alcohol or just mentally induced. Our stories, other stories and of course, fortean stories.

To kick us off, how's this. I was with my hunting buddies last week and late one night, sat round the kitchen table, weird tales of the forest began to crop up. My father in law recounted his UFO/ball lightning experience and then finished his story by saying, "But at least I didn't see a werewolf!"

At this our hunting leader, I'll call him John, looked sheepish but when I pushed him he told me the following story.

During the late 90's, the hunting team had been out in the morning but didn't get anything. On returning to the cabin, they ate lunch and drank a few beers. John suffers from migraine problems so he took two painkillers and went to lay down on a bed in a separate room. He didn't close the bedroom door, he only intended to rest rather than sleep.

John sat on the end of the bed and began to unlace his boots. He felt someone watching him and looked up at the window. There, standing looking at him through the window, was what he described as a werewolf. It was a cross between a human and a wolf. It was stood upright, had a human torso and arms but a wolfs head. He did a double take and the beast was gone. He rushed back into the main room to say something to the guys but stopped himself for fear of piss taking.

John went back into the bedroom and had a good look out of the window. He saw nothing. He lay down on the bed and instantly felt fearful. He could hear breathing coming from somewhere in the room, mixed with it came low growls and sniffs. He said he could hear the guys talking, the wind outside in the tress, feel and hear his own heartbeat and also, hear the creature.

From his position on the bed he had a look around the room and because he couldn't see it, could only presume that it was under his bed. When he was telling me his story, he said he felt silly now for not checking but at the time he was genuinely frightened. He considered calling for help but agin, he thought twice. After a few minutes, the sound stopped. He got up quickly from the bed and went into the main room to join the others.

He is sure this was a hallucination, a combination of two beers and painkillers. That, he says, is the only was to explain it. I found his story fascinating.
 
I had a rather different hallucination when I was in my mid teens, and suffering from severe depression (which I'm sure was the cause, though I don't know what prompted it to start). The squeamish might like to skip the rest of my post.



I can't remember exactly how old I was, probably 16 or so. One day, I became aware of a deeply unpleasant sensation in my left forearm, a kind of painful throbbing ache. When I looked, I could see a huge gaping wound, probably about 6 inches long and 1-2 wide, right down to the white bone in the middle. I was well aware that I had no such actual injury, but it looked and felt horrible, and real. As the day progressed, I started being able to see and feel maggots wriggling about in it as well, even when I had long sleeves on. The whole experience carried on for several days, but eventually subsided.

I've never had anything like it since, and I sincerely hope it stays that way. It was one of the most horrific things I've ever experienced.
 
Was the feeling constant or would you only feel it when you thought about it?
 
At age 16, I came down with acute appendicitis while playing a club gig two days after Martin Luther King was assassinated. I became so sick so fast that the gig was curtailed and my bandmates hustled me home. My parents put me straight to bed, because I was violently ill with a very high fever.

Sometime that night I came awake alone in what seemed to be my bedroom. The room was dark except for the feeble light coming through the curtained windows. Then I started noticing things that weren't right for my bedroom. For one thing, the windows now had elaborate heavy hanging drapes. The room seemed larger than my bedroom, but I was in the same relative location (pretty much in the center, with the windows off to my left). There was a vertical obstruction on my left side, and I realized I was lying on a richly upholstered antique-style sofa. The fabric felt like velvet. I could eventually make out other antique furniture all around me, as well as sizeable framed pictures mounted on the walls.

Out of the shadows and into the light from the windows stepped two men, who seemed to be wearing suits. I started to call out to them (thinking they might be family members), but they began speaking and it was clear their voices were unknown to me.

One said he couldn't see, and asked to turn on a light. The other somewhat tersely told him they'd be detected if they did so, and the White House wasn't somewhere they wanted to be found ...

'The White House?!?' I thought, whereupon I began to feel a sense of dread / fear.

They carried on a furtive conversation, from which I understood they'd been involved in a conspiracy to kill MLK. One asked the other what would happen if the President found out about them, and the other said it wouldn't end well for the President if he did.

I lay there, increasingly terrified of being discovered, until one told the other it was time to go and they left the room - passing within arm's reach of me. After they'd left I lay there until I passed out. Some indeterminate time later I re-awoke in my own bedroom. The remainder of that night I experienced nightmares and other (apparently) waking anomalies, but nothing as seemingly 'real' as the White House conspirators scene.
 
If you're walking past a newsagents anytime today, the latest issue of BBC's Focus magazine has an interesting feature on hallucinations.
 
EnolaGaia said:
At age 16, I came down with acute appendicitis while playing a club gig two days after Martin Luther King was assassinated. I became so sick so fast that the gig was curtailed and my bandmates hustled me home. My parents put me straight to bed, because I was violently ill with a very high fever.

Sometime that night I came awake alone in what seemed to be my bedroom. The room was dark except for the feeble light coming through the curtained windows. Then I started noticing things that weren't right for my bedroom. For one thing, the windows now had elaborate heavy hanging drapes. The room seemed larger than my bedroom, but I was in the same relative location (pretty much in the center, with the windows off to my left). There was a vertical obstruction on my left side, and I realized I was lying on a richly upholstered antique-style sofa. The fabric felt like velvet. I could eventually make out other antique furniture all around me, as well as sizeable framed pictures mounted on the walls.

Out of the shadows and into the light from the windows stepped two men, who seemed to be wearing suits. I started to call out to them (thinking they might be family members), but they began speaking and it was clear their voices were unknown to me.

One said he couldn't see, and asked to turn on a light. The other somewhat tersely told him they'd be detected if they did so, and the White House wasn't somewhere they wanted to be found ...

'The White House?!?' I thought, whereupon I began to feel a sense of dread / fear.

They carried on a furtive conversation, from which I understood they'd been involved in a conspiracy to kill MLK. One asked the other what would happen if the President found out about them, and the other said it wouldn't end well for the President if he did.

I lay there, increasingly terrified of being discovered, until one told the other it was time to go and they left the room - passing within arm's reach of me. After they'd left I lay there until I passed out. Some indeterminate time later I re-awoke in my own bedroom. The remainder of that night I experienced nightmares and other (apparently) waking anomalies, but nothing as seemingly 'real' as the White House conspirators scene.

A great example of hallucination. I like them because they are crazy like dreams except you can recall the details long afterwards. A little journey into the Twilight Zone almost.
 
Ringo_ said:
Was the feeling constant or would you only feel it when you thought about it?
It was constant for the three or four days the experience lasted
 
Ringo_ said:
A great example of hallucination. I like them because they are crazy like dreams except you can recall the details long afterwards. A little journey into the Twilight Zone almost.

I've had lots of 'cognitive weirdness' experiences such as (e.g.) deja vu, visual distortions / embellishments, peripherally seen / heard oddities, etc., but reserve the term 'hallucination' for waking direct apprehension of seemingly 'actual' discrete entities that aren't 'there'.

Those among my own experiences qualifying for this strict definition were all related to fever or sleep deprivation.

The only recurring 'hallucination' (so defined ...) I've ever had wasn't scary at all, and it was purely tactile. When I was a young child high fevers would afford me the ability to reach out and feel an invisible substance in the air above my bed. It was cool, soft and smooth upon my palms - most akin to the sensation you get when holding your open hand out a moving car's window. It had no visible features, smell, etc., - it could only be felt. I simply called it 'stuff'.

I could reach up into the air above my head and touch a 'cloud' (as I conceptualized it) of this 'stuff'. Over time I got in the habit of grabbing a handful of it, pulling it away from the main 'cloud', and then manipulating it. I'd rub it into a ball, place it in different locations about me, pull it apart bit by bit, etc. When I'd played a bit of 'stuff' into dissipation I'd reach up, pick off another chunk, and repeat ...

I'd spend long stretches of time lying in my bed playing with 'stuff' - sometimes to the extent of picking apart and exhausting the original 'cloud'. It got to be a regular plaything associated with serious illness / fever. My mother would inquire about what I was doing with my hands, and I'd tell her I was playing with 'stuff'. Her reactions to such disclosures led me to quit mentioning it as a matter of discretion.

If I recall correctly, my capacity for apprehending and interacting with 'stuff' ended at the time of my appendicitis (age 16). The circa 10 days I was then bed-ridden was the last time I recall encountering 'stuff'.
 
I've never had anything like it since, and I sincerely hope it stays that way. It was one of the most horrific things I've ever experienced.

I've had something quite similar in it's own way, when I was very mentally ill cira 2003/04, was more of a sort of tactile or even somatic hallucination for want of a better word but for about a year or so it felt like all of the flesh in my body was rotting and only some sort of supreme and draining act of will was keeping it on the bones, but actually stopping that act of will... was utterly unthinkable, the consequences would be too terrible.

Was never a visual hallucination that I recall, also at the same time had constant chronic migraine, fatigue, dizzyness and was generally about as stuffed in the head as you'd expect someone experiencing all the of the above to be.
 
Roughly the same kind of time, and weird but considerably more pleasant, I once saw a man in a brown trench coat and dark trilby hat walk past my bedroom window. I think he may also have been wearing sunglasses. This would have been fairly unremarkable if my room was on the ground floor, but it wasn't, it's on the first floor. Only ever saw him that once though.
 
Yeas ago I worked permanent nights for a few years, during which time I used to get regular hallucinations, especially when, as I often did, I took the chance for an hours sleep.

I saw trousers flying around the room, a giant mercury fetus, a surfboard sailing overhead, translucent people and my personal favourite a lioness sitting next to my bed.
 
oldrover said:
Yeas ago I worked permanent nights for a few years, during which time I used to get regular hallucinations, especially when, as I often did, I took the chance for an hours sleep.

I mentioned recently on another thread, working nights at a nightclub really knocked me off kilter for a while. I think it's the lack of sunlight or something. Everything seemed unreal and had a waking dream like quality.
 
After a while you do start to realise that you're becoming genuinely nocturnal.
 
I misread that as "genitally tortured"! So I read it again more carefully.
 
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