I am blind, but that does not mean I live in darkness, and I’m not just talking metaphor here. These days the visionscape confronting me sparkles and undulates, with greater or lesser intensity, constantly, veiling the world beyond with simple and complex hallucinations.
The brilliance of my visionscape is not less intense in a dark room than in a brilliant sunny outdoors, only there are maybe more facets to it: there is darkness around the edges that gets washed out in a white out of a brilliant day. The pixelated cosmos in which I dwell sometimes takes on a color scheme, as if the whole thing were lit by stage gels. Sometimes I wake up and find my day washed neon pink, other days are teal. Sometimes the palette divides into contrasting colors, red occupying much of the upper left quadrant and green the lower right, or other times it is orange and cobalt.
My recent forays into the wonderful world of aromatics has proved to be a way to take control of what had heretofore been quite out of my control. Apparently I’m not very original in my synesthetic reactions but it’s fun to open a bottle of lavender essential oil and see my world turn violet, or peppermint and watch it turn electric blue.
Beyond or behind all the shimmering and swirling, I get glimpses of the world some people might call the objective reality of sight. That objective reality reveals itself to me now as blobs of light covered over by a fabric of swirls and pulsations.
For me there is no dark. No black. Never.
There is brightness and then there is more brightness. The light of a lamp lingers on my destroyed retinas for minutes, so that even if I have seen the lamp on–verified its onness by rolling my eyeballs to place the lamp in one of the chinks of far peripheral vision that still remain to me, when I turn it off, a blast of light remains to trick me, and sometimes, I must use my hand to verify that the bulb is not still making heat. But even when the physical light remnants disappear completely, there is the overwhelming perception of a pulsating kaleidoscope of pixelated light, leaving the dark room anything but dark.
The tears in the fabric of disease that remain to me to allow actual, external light to enter my visionscape are sometimes a help and sometimes a distraction. Oftentimes I can see points of light in my far periphery, lightbulbs in the distance that can help guide me in the right direction, but I cannot see the furniture that stands directly in my path. As I mentioned in my previous essay, my poor eyesight has never had anything to do with blurry vision. Always it has been a lack of information.
Much of what I see, especially in my peripheral vision, is undulating hallucinations that resemble the wavy floaters of the normal eye (as I remember them). They skitter randomly as sickle-shaped phenomena that are unrelated to external reality, and do not change much from day to night, light to dark, open or closed eye. In their crowdedness, and in their geometric breathing, they remind me of staring at wallpaper on acid way back when. I haven’t done any psychedelics for many years, I promise, but my visions have gotten pretty trippy!
One time, maybe five or six years ago, I was laying on my bed in the daytime in a hungover state, and suddenly a lurid parade of eighteenth century ladies jittered across my visionscape with painted lips formed into ironic smiles. They looked in my direction as they passed–an endless train of cartoonishly garish ladies moving across my field of vision. I remember feeling a vague sense of uncertainty but no fear. The vision lasted a minute or two at most, presenting (I understand now) my bored visual cortex with some much-needed stimulation. I had more vision then than now, but that was around the time that I think of myself as moving from being visually impaired to blind, so that although I could still see the bright window quite clearly behind the hallucination, and maybe a bit of the mirrored vanity beyond, I did not spend a great deal of my life looking at stuff.
I did not name this a hallucination or recognize it as such until my buddy Benjamin asked me if I hallucinated–that he’d heard on NPR about a condition that affects people that lose their vision late in life. That’s when I remembered the ladies in my bedroom and named it a hallucination. Since then I’ve had many more such experiences and have read Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks. “Silent Multitudes” is the first chapter of that book and is dedicated to the phenomenon.
Sacks begins the chapter by describing Rosalie, a woman blind for many years, who suddenly starts experiencing hallucinations and fears for her sanity. To his question “what do you see?” she answers:
“‘People in Eastern dress!”…In drapes, walking up and down stairs … a man who turns towards me and smiles, but he has huge teeth on one side of his mouth. Animals, too. I see this scene with a white building, and it is snowing–a soft snow, it is swirling. I see this horse (not a pretty horse, a drudgery horse) with a harness, dragging snow away … but it keeps switching…. I see a lot of children; they’re walking up and down stairs. They wear bright colors–rose, blue–like Eastern dress.'”
Sacks assures her that she is not losing her mind, but that she is experiencing Charles Bonnet Syndrome, named for a Swiss naturalist, who first described his father’s late-life visions and then experienced them himself when his own vision failed.
Sacks distinguishes between simple and complex hallucinations, which I have come to understand in my own experience. Under normal waking conditions, the simple hallucinations of undulating and pixelated designs breathe and skitter around with such constancy that I do not think about them unless I’m trying to put something into my periphery where I still can perceive some light and movement–when they seem to be in the way of my perception.
My complex hallucinations (as Sacks calls those that have recognizable content, such as people or animals–nameable objects and exhibit the crowding suggested by the chapter title “silent multitudes”) usually come on in the early morning hours after a night of insomnia. They appear without any mental prompting and seem to have nothing to do with my psychological state, if the wakeful tiredness be excepted. When they pop up, it is as if a switch turns on and the whole of my visionscape shifts for a few moments into an outrageous circus of jerky, cartoonish acrobats, jugglers, horses, and countless other abstract big top-inspired shapes and unnamable creatures that tumble with great rapidity into the center of my vision and back out again, as if they are in a tangled loop that keeps repeating with subtle and complex differences. The quality is of a cartoon or of an old-school video game.
One creature that makes an occasional appearance in both the insomnia-inspired complex hallucinations and in my everyday jumble of simple hallucinations is a red Space Invaders critter that marches from my far left periphery towards my nose.
This is so frustrating to write about because it seems weirder and more bombastic than it feels. It’s easier to simply say, “I can’t see.” But onward.
Like the everyday hallucinations, the early morning complex hallucinations are also not affected by my eyes being open or closed, though, if the sky is lightening, a sliver might show behind without changing any of it), and I can look around the scene to examine the vibrating tableau, as you might scan a computer screen if it were placed too close to your face.
As Sacks writes:
“I observed with Rosalie (as with many other patients) that while she was hallucinating, her eyes were open, and even though she could see nothing, her eyes moved here and there, as if looking at an actual scene. It was that which had first caught the nurses’ attention. Such looking or scanning does not occur with imagined scenes; most people, when visualizing or concentrating on their internal imagery, tend to close their eyes or else to have an abstracted gaze, looking at nothing in particular. … one does not hope to discover anything surprising or novel in one’s own imagery, whereas hallucinations may be full of surprises. They are often much more detailed than imagery, and ask to be inspected and studied.”
I find this distinction between mental imagery and hallucinations very helpful, as I have struggled to describe the difference to friends. I also have very intense mental imagery, often arising from internal reflection or prompted by outside stimuli–a novel or movie soundtrack can stimulate this imagery, but this does not present at all like the hallucinations. And yet both keep me tethered to the visible world, to my visual self.
I’m so stuck being a visual person that it is difficult for me to write anything very interesting without seeing it with my inner eye. Yet my inner eye has been so disconnected from actual sight for so long, it may be that I and others ought not to trust it. This is the struggle I find in my writing, which is why I write this now: I doubt my ability to tell you what I see. Have I had any success?
*This is essay 2 of #52essays2017, written with all four senses and remembered sight. Check out essay 1 “In the Beginning Were the Eye Doctors” here*
This is fascinating and lends some context to what my pastor, who is visually impaired, tried to explain to us about what he can see. Do you feel like seeing hallucinations is more frustrating or fascinating?
Good question! Being blind can certainly be frustrating, as can be trying to explain what i see/don’t see, but i do find the hallucinations fascinating, and cannot imagine living in a “dark” world. Thanks for reading!