I’ve mentioned in general terms before about the visual hallucinations I experience at times without going into any great detail. I’ll attempt to rectify that now.
It usually (but not always – even after 35 years they can still surprise me sometimes) starts with barely perceptible departures from reality – seeing insects and rats is common – and gradually increases to a full on acid trip experience. Not that I’ve ever taken acid, but from descriptions I’ve heard from people who have, my visions are of a similar film-like nature. I’ve been offered acid in the past, but as I take medication to STOP the kind of hallucinations it induces, it would seem perverse to accept the offer, however well intentioned it may be.
From seeing the odd insect, it builds up to seeing great swarms of them, covering the walls, floor and ceilings. Sometimes, a host of cockroaches will form on the wall or ceiling, combining themselves into abusive words and phrases, like “you are a worthless cunt”, “die, you arsehole”, “wanker” and… you get the idea.
One of the most disturbing aspects is how people morph into characters from “The Evil Dead”, their faces becoming those of grotesque, semi-rotten corpses. It’s really difficult to have a conversation with someone who looks like they’ve just been eating a maggoty sandwich and has putrid flesh dripping from them. When it gets really bad, I have to withdraw from the world, as seeing people like that is unbearable. Interestingly, however bad the visions (or paranoid delusions) got, Mandy was never included in them – she always looked beautiful. It brings to mind the story of Kurt Gödel, the mathematician, who came to develop a fear of being poisoned, and would only eat food prepared for him by his wife. When she was ill in hospital, he refused to eat and died of starvation – his love for her triumphed over his psychosis, something I can relate to.
I also perceive colours differently – they become incredibly vivid, like those early Technicolor films where colours look like Daliesque exaggerations . Skies are impossibly blue as if painted by an over imaginative child and people look like someone's turned the colour control up full on the TV. Things look different – not wrong, but not entirely right either.
I could go on for ages about them, but I don’t want to get boring. Maybe I’ll sell the movie rights and retire to a sunny offshore tax haven. Who knows?
