Tandanori Yokoo
From TLS, a discussion of Oliver Sack's new book on hallucinations:
In the 1960s, Sacks extended his neurophenomenological explorations by taking
a variety of recreational drugs; not only amphetamines but also pot and, of
course, LSD. The results were occasionally ecstatic, sometimes merely
strange and often terrifying. Conversations with a friendly spider – with
whom, after an opening exchange of pleasantries, he discussed whether
Bertrand Russell had irreversibly damaged Frege’s system of thought with his
famous paradox – and studying key moments from the battle of Agincourt
enacted on his dressing gown sleeve, were not atypical episodes in the
pharmacological dramas unfolding in his head. He fought off panic by
carefully transcribing the “craziness” inside himself, writing “for dear
life” as “wave after wave of hallucination” rolled over him. These were not
quite as crazy as the experience of the student Daniel Breslaw, a subject in
a formal study of LSD, who, entering an elevator, passed “a floor every
hundred years” and, when back in his room, swam “through the remaining
centuries of the day. Every five eons or so a nurse arrives (in the aspect
of a cougar, a differential equation, or a clock radio) and takes my blood
pressure”. As if this were not enough, Breslaw experienced
synaesthesia, or a fusion between the senses, reporting such gems as “the
smell of a low B flat, the sound of green”.
The varieties of hallucinations are protean. While vision predominates,
hearing, smell, taste, touch, memory, altered body image and strange
emotions seeking an object, often figure. Phantosmia (hallucinations of
smell), analogous to the Charles Bonnet syndrome, may occur in people who
have lost this sense. Auditory hallucinations, in addition to those
bothersome, frightening voices, take many forms. The unremitting mental junk
of tinnitus is a huge source of suffering, but musical hallucinations
following damage to the brain may be just as distressing. Imagine hearing
Bing Crosby, friends and orchestra singing “White Christmas” for days on
end: a thousand times worse than the musical phrases or “earworms” that
stick like limpets to the normal mind. Tactile hallucinations can be
compelling, as in the case of one of Sacks’s subjects on drug treatment for
Parkinson’s disease. The surfaces of objects seemed to be covered by a film
of peach fuzz, cotton candy, or spider’s webs, and the film sometimes became
very “lush” as if the items were submerged under a pile of “stuff”.
Hallucinations can sometimes be multisensory. When ninety-year-old Rosalie
became ill and thought she was dying, she had visions of her mother and
heard her welcoming her into heaven. These were completely different from
her usual hallucinations: as well as being multisensory, “they were
personal, addressed to her, and steeped in warmth and tenderness”. The most
“respectable” hallucinations are those we are all prone to on a daily or
more usually nightly basis – associated with sleep. They, too, however, are
not without their terrors, as Sacks describes. Hypnagogic hallucinations,
seen on the threshold of sleep, may take the form of faces or presences
charged with malign intent. And hypnopompic hallucinations, which occur on
waking, are often seen with open eyes, the terrified gaze populating the
darkness with evil faces, spiders, snakes and devils. For some people,
“night hags”, sometimes associated with abnormal propensity to dream sleep –
narcolepsy – may interfere with their waking life. Occasionally they become
a dark secret they dare not share with others.
