Fever Visions

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Aug 12, 2008

Filed under: Personal 69 comments

Ugh. Not in any shape to be witty, but I’m getting tired of that Frontalot post that’s been sitting on top of the site for the last 4 days. The following is both relevant and good filler:

When I get a high fever, I tend to see bugs. Any dark spot on a light surface – like a raisin on the kitchen table, or a small screw atop one of the many light-colored devices here in my office – will seem to be a crawling insect in my peripheral vision. The illusion is broken if I look directly, but it’s quite convincing for things on the edges of my field of view. After a few hours of this I get used to it and stop being alarmed, but I don’t stop seeing the creeping movement.

Feel free to share your own fever-driven hallucinations below.

 


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69 thoughts on “Fever Visions

  1. Kevin says:

    I once watched my TV grow actual pink rabbit ears. I had a fever of 104 degrees while suffering from strep throat.

    I was thinking about you today Shamus, figuring you were either ill or under a refrigerator and unable to reach your keyboard.

    Hope you feel better soon!

  2. Jeremiah says:

    No good hallucinations, unfortunately. Just want to offer well-wishes. Get well soon! Reading your posts and keeping up with comments helps fill empty spaces between actually working :)

  3. SolkaTruesilver says:

    Not an actual hallucination, but when I feel really bad, I do not seem to be able to figure out wether I am dreaming or I am awake. Too afraid to actually get up, I often wonder if I am late for work, or if my girlfriend really dumped me…

  4. folo4 says:

    I see my home on fire.

    I’m not joking. I must be really sick that time to imagine such a monstrosity.

  5. hotsauce says:

    Just tell yourself:
    This!
    Isn’t!
    Happening!!

    It also works if you see blood dripping down the walls, or you think your servants are plotting to kill you.

  6. guy says:

    i don’t have hallucinations from fever. had some weird dreams once though.

  7. Deoxy says:

    Well, I’ve had malaria (several times now, actually; it’s like LSD – have it once, and you get to keeping getting it, randomly, for free!), and I’ve apparently seen some rather odd things while under the effects of the high fever and life-alteringly powerful headache, but I (happily, I think) do not remember them. Other people have tried to tell me about what I’ve said, though, and it’s pretty funny (years after the fact).

  8. Dirty Dan says:

    I don’t think it was ever while I was actually sick with anything, but I have experienced thinking a dark spot on a wall or ceiling was an insect until I looked right at it long enough. Then again, I’ve been paranoid of spiders ever since I failed to kill a giant monstrous one — and I haven’t seen the likes of it since, though I imagine I’ve had dealings with its agents….

  9. qrter says:

    I start to hear music, as if someone’s playing a record in an adjourning room, so you think you can hear it through the wall but you never can really recognise what song it is, etc.

  10. Factoid says:

    I get something similar to that when I’m sleep deprived.

    Once, back in high school, we were having a LAN party at a friend’s house. Not so much in the house as in their barn/tractor shed. It was reasonably clean and had ample power, and lots of room. As long as the weather was decent it was a nice place to game.

    We had been awake for probably about 36-48 hours at one point, and we were doing a marathon session of SiN (this was in like 1999 or 2000 I’d guess).

    there are a couple of maps in that game where some birds are perched, and you can blow them up. Just so happened that I looked up at the rafters in the barn and saw a pigeon sitting there. Instinctually I took my mouse and started to try to aim my videogame sniper rifle at this real life pigeon. I started giggling uncontrollably after I realized what I was doing.

    Later that day, when I was setting my gear back up at home (still no sleep) I noticed that the text on my screen was starting to move and shift and run around. I went to sleep after that…it sort of freaked me out a little.

  11. Liz says:

    I’m not prone to hallucinations, but my mom got seriously ill a few years back and saw all kinds of things – elves in the back yard, bugs in her food… She told me in a whisper when I went to visit her that she was sure some foreign corporation was poisoning her food — and that was while she was on an upswing.

  12. Gargathor says:

    Codeine hallucs are the best. Back in high school I got killer headaches about once per year. I rememeber wanting to die. My mom was a nurse, and scored some Tylenol 5 (codeine) for me. A tablet was so small I have no frame of reference; smaller then the head of a drywall screw, larger than the head of a pin. she gave me HALF of one of those, and it was off to the races for my addled brain.

    This was back in the ’80s, when Saturday night was “James Bond night” on ABC. So there I am, listening to the sounds of Thunderball drift up the stairs, while a two-man construction crew assembled a vast network of sewage pipes in my bed with me. The pipes were all different colors and made of plastic. Trippy.

  13. Oleyo says:

    Not fever related, but I once took an Ambien sleep medicine to fall asleep (my family has insomniac tendencies) I woke up to 2-4 seconds of rotting mummies descending from my bedroom ceiling.

    Of course, I had been watching a History Chanel show on mummies before I went to bed, so the trigger was clear at least.

    Needless to say I haven’t taken Ambien again. Not a big fan of taking medicines in general if it can be helped, and this firmed up my belief.

  14. Maddy says:

    When I’m short on sleep, I see bugs out of the corner of my eyes. It’s not that I’m seeing real things and imagining that they’re moving; it’s more like I’m imagining black dots that are moving. They scatter away when I try to look at them. (Either that, or there are special psychic bugs who know when we need sleep.)

    If I take a sleeping pill and try to read, the words get wiggly and wavy. It’s quite pretty, but not great for reading. If I’m watching TV, I see two of everything, but it looks like just one picture.

  15. Jonathan Grimwauld says:

    I’ve had toxic chemical (arsenic and iodine once, and nitrite/trate with bacterial infection the other time) poisoning twice, resulting in high fever, physical incapacitation and hallucinations (among other life threatening issues ;) )
    I’m also prone to watch stargate (from first to last season) two or three times every 18 months…
    The hallucinations, while during, I can intellectually rationalize and recognize it as being “not real” is very convincing, usually involves struggling for physical control within the delusion, along with the weirdest rationalizations for why I’m feeling as I do, rationalizations that have nothing to do with the fact that I’m ill.
    And the one that involved my (ex)-fiancee was absolutely chilling.
    I’ll trade you for your crawling-peripheral vision problem? ;)

  16. scragar says:

    If I don’t sleep for a couple of days things all start to look like they are moving, even when they are still, which leads to me continually leaning on things out convinced that the floor is moving.
    I also cannot go under anything in that state, I become convinced that things will fall on me, it makes it impossible to read, or even watch TV when it gets bad(around 3 days is the no TV mark), which does force me to relax and sleep eventually.

    Interestingly I have never been ill and experienced anything even remotely close to this, the closest to it I have experienced was when I was around 15, when I couldn’t gather the strength to even roll over in bed for what felt like an eternity(I was in the full set of said state for 2 days(I was sleepy before that, but the loss of strength was very quick, I felt fine the morning 2 days later), but lacking the strength to move makes things boring very quickly), after the first day I started seeing a few patterns and such everywhere I looked, I was however completely aware of the fact that they were not there.

  17. scarbunny says:

    Ive had a few “chemical” induced visions, the most memorable being a cigeret climbing out of the packet growing arms, legs and glowing red eyes. It then said “you better not even think of smoking me!!” it then hopped of the table and ran behind the sofa!

    Another time while in hosptial on morphine and entonox (N2O or laughing gas) i could see things climbing the walls in my periferal vision kinda like lickers from RE2, but i couldnt run away as my leg was about 8″ shorter then it should have been.

  18. Neil says:

    Once with a bad fever when I was very young, my hands and feet got HUGE. I mean the size of tubas huge. And if I moved them one bit, they would smash anything they touched. I had to be very careful not to move so my mother wouldn’t get mad at me for smashing up my room.
    Thank God I don’t get sick much.

  19. Dix says:

    Just plain old fever, here. I have no idea how high it was, but the doves that kept fluttering around the room might remember.

  20. Maniac says:

    I’ve always been a little different. Sharp. Creative. Non-conformist. Not particularly punctual, but I figured I made out the deal.

    After all-night coding sessions, I typically hear music when I lay down to sleep. Not annoying song stuck-in-your-head type music, but weird experimental music I’ve never heard before that sounds like it’s playing on the other side of the wall.

    And a few times in my life under stress and sleep dep, I have jumped out of bed after seeing a writhing ball of spiders coming down at me from the ceiling just about 45 minutes after I fall asleep.

    Anyway, as a warning, if these things happen to you, it may indicate your brain chemicals are out of whack. I found out when I was 30 that I’m bipolar. :)

  21. Mart says:

    I made the mistake of watching Powerpuff Girls on cable when I was starting to get feverish.

    For the next 24 hours, I keep getting irritaing visions and dreams of those 3 bug-eyed girls.

  22. Zerotime says:

    About the worst I get during a fever is dreaming in numbers (or hex, if it’s particularly bad) and the out of proportion body parts that Neil mentioned. Sleep deprivation, though – while on a train, I managed to see all four sides of a three-sided sign that, if I wasn’t hallucinating, would only have been able to see one side of.

  23. Deltaway says:

    My internal clock becomes faster. I once got a high fever, and lied down for three days. When I got up, four hours had past. I should try to break some speed records next time.

  24. MRL says:

    I don’t tend to get visual hallucinations, but I do get weird motion-related effects.

    My sense of balance slowly gets skewed – I feel like I’m on an incline even if I’m lying down on a flat bed, and let me tell you, it’s REALLY disconcerting to feel like the room is turning underneath you while staying perfectly still. It’s gotten bad enough that I actually felt like I was on a wall, once, and couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t falling down – fever of 104.something that time, I think.

  25. Spider Dave says:

    My last high fever was so long ago I don’t remember. However, I was subject to some hallucinations and paranoia earlier this year, due to the crazy pain medication I was on after having my wisdom teeth taken out. My friend told me that watching Willie Wonka on the drugs would be insanity, but, strangely enough, that movie was one of the more normal experiences I had while tripping.

    Youd think, now that it’s 2008, they’d be able to make your pain go away without giving you hallucinogenics.

  26. Ben says:

    When I was small I saw the Thundercats in my bedroom when i had a fever once. They were sort of in the walls… like a moving picture… but 3d at the same time.

  27. Deoxy says:

    Unrelated to this post, but regarding the next post (Stolen Pixels #12)…

    um, isn’t that Stolen Pixels #11? That’s what the Escapist site says, and your last posting on Stolen Pixels was #10…

    Oh, maybe it IS relevant to this post after all. :-)

  28. Mari says:

    Not a fever hallucination, but under the influence of Nyquil and Sudafed together (don’t do that, trust me) I once saw bears in the road while driving. If there had been actual bears I’m sure it would have been very impressive how I maintained control of the car through the skid that followed the hard swerve. Of course, since there weren’t, it’s probably for the best that it was very late at night and nobody saw me and reported me for DWI.

  29. ThaneofFife says:

    That sucks any way you slice it. Get well soon, Shamus.

  30. Deltaway says:

    This is “New Game Fever”, isn’t it, Mr. Young?

  31. Tens of parallel marching lines of low-res red-and-blue ants.

  32. BlackJaw says:

    My worst fever dreams are all texture and no visual or sound.

    They creep me the heck out. I don’t like existing without visual and audio input, and the only thing I can sense are tangled sweaty sheets. Worse still, some sort of crazy emotion filled dream-logic narrative is assigned to to the dream anyway, so as I toss and turn in my bad dream, my hands run along the sheets resulting in progression of textures…

    I really hate those dreams.

    But I don’t recall experiencing any waking hallucinations.

  33. Dreamer says:

    I’ve been relatively halucination and fever free through most of my life…

    My cousin, however, had an interesting one. He was having strange fever dreams that he was doing everything backwards, and it would freak him out all night – Later, he’d wake up, go about his bed ridden day as normal, then go back to his backwards dreams. One night, everyone in the house woke up to hear him stomping up and down the stairs (Backwards, of course) and screaming, “I’m pooping backwards!”

  34. edcalaban says:

    If I stare at shadows and dark spots they start to expand and deepen. It’s kind of creepy, especially later at night. Not as bad as bugs though.

  35. Chuk says:

    Once after surgery I hallucinated large spiders in the room. Didn’t bother me, I was just noticing it and telling my parents about it. Also I saw my sister even though she wasn’t there.

  36. Viktor says:

    I’m not sure if this counts as a hallucination or a dream, but when Dead Rising was my primary game and I was reading a Fantasy novel, I got sick. I started thinking I was asleep in the mall, surrounded by zombies, sick, and hallucinating that I was living out the fantasy novel.

    Yes, I was sick, and hallucinated that I was somewhere else, sick, and hallucinating that I was somewhere else. I had a lot of fun trying to explain that to my family when they asked me what I’d been rambling about.

  37. Doug says:

    4 words…snakes under the carpet.

  38. RPharazon says:

    I’ve never hallucinated due to drugs, or sleep depravation. Weird, since I’ve gone through two surgeries, several types of painkillers (morphine, codeine, the usual suspect, in larger quantities than previous stories) but I’ve never hallucinated due to them.

    Sometimes, about once or twice a year, I get sleep paralysis in a weird way. I think that there are enormous quantities of… things in my room and out of the room, and I have to count and move them all, but I can’t. They seem to keep coming, and I can never count them all. My conscious mind is watching on and I’m terrified, but I can’t do anything on purpose.

    It’s a really amazingly scary feeling of not being able to control my mind and that these quantities of things keep coming and I have to keep counting, one by one.

    Oh, and one time, I played Rollercoaster Tycoon obsessively. I stopped once I started hallucinating. I was trying to construct walkways up to my bed, even though it was only half a meter from the ground. I knocked over the side table!

  39. Kbrook says:

    If I miss enough sleep, I start to see neon blur trails following my hand when I pet our white cat. That’s usually my sign to hie my arse to bed already! Never had fever hallucinations, tho…

  40. Derek K says:

    I get motion ones too – room spinning, things moving. When I get migraines, it always feels like my bed is swinging wildly across the room. If I stand up, I usually do so at an angle, without meaning to at all.

    Mostly I just get the staring at the wall thing, though – I’ll suddenly realize that I’ve watching the same patch for wall for 15-20 minutes, and that it’s been moving towards me and away from me for that whole time. That’s usually when I say “Yeah, I’m sick, I’m going home.”

  41. General Karthos says:

    I don’t have hallucinations per se, but like many others, I have trouble figuring out what actually happened and what I dreamed. Oh, and my sense of time goes completely out of whack. I have spent days lying in bed while thinking it was only an hour, and vice-versa.

    Oh, and Maniac…. If you’re hearing music coming from within the walls, it means your a Cylon. Haven’t you been watching Battlestar Galactica?

  42. gabs says:

    A few weeks ago, I was watching the Tour de France while having high temperature. At one point, I was 100% convinced that one of the bikers was pulling another biker from his team via a rope between the two bikes. Only found out that it didn’t happen when I asked others whether they’d seen it too.

  43. Zukhramm says:

    Fever visions? Sorry, I simply don’t get sick.

  44. Aergoth says:

    At least when I don’t have my glasses on (I’m near-sighted, thank god. No reading glasses.) things like cracks in the walls and bits of dust can look like spiders. I’m arachnaphobic (self diagnosed, but pretty damned sure of it. I’ve frozen up at the sight of insects.) so that much is making sense. Fever hallucinations, nope. Don’t get much in the way of fevers so I wouldn’t know.

  45. Blackbird71 says:

    Well, I get the whole “peripheral spots are bugs” thing sometimes when I get migraines, or when I really overexert myself and I’m short on breath.

    As for other hallucinations, sometimes, particularly when I’ve been really tired, it takes me a few minutes or so to really wake up. I can sit up, walk around, see things, communicate, but I’m still partially in a dream state, continuing whatever dream I’d had prior to waking. This tends to confuse anyone around me, as I will say and do things that make no sense to them, but somehow fit perfectly in my dream. I’ve often told my wife that she has to disregard anything I say within 10 minutes of my waking up, as I’m basically talking in my sleep.

    Unfortunately, as dreams often go, the memory of what I said or did fades fairly quickly after the dream has passed, so at the moment I can’t recall any specific stories to share. I’ll have to ask my wife to remind me of a few of the better ones.

    I share this odd condition with my father. I recall one time after waking him up, he took a swing at me because he thought I was a bear!

  46. Lee1255 says:

    Only had it happen once. I had a nasty fever and kept envisioning a giant puzzle in my head. I had to finish the entire puzzle before I could sleep. It was exhausting, but my brain finally put together the puzzle, and sure enough, I fell asleep thereafter.

  47. Plasma says:

    One day, a few weeks ago, I opened up a sealed foil package of two Pop-Tarts and was horrified to discover them crawling with hundreds of tiny reddish ants. I threw it in the garbage, threw out the box it came from and the other contaminated pop-tarts within, sealed it all up in a garbage bag and took it outside. Only then did it occur to me that I could have checked with somebody else to see if I was hallucinating. No reason for me to have been hallucinating, I wasn’t feverish or anything, it’s just a constant possibility that I might be going mad, is all. Anyhow, I don’t think I really want to know either way.

    That is all.

  48. McNutcase says:

    I occasionally get weird colour fringing and shifting text when a migraine is coming on. The last really weird thing that was illness-induced was when I was about 4 and had chickenpox – I was seeing in monochrome. I distinctly remember thinking how weird it was that I was seeing everything in monochrome. I sometimes wonder if that was at all responsible for the fact that I can’t distinguish shades of yellow or purple, or even for my synaesthesia…

  49. GM West says:

    When I was a kid, I remember hallucinating about elephants on the ceiling and the walls every time I got a fever. Weird, pink ones, if I remember right.

  50. Wonderduck says:

    As a young duckling of around age 11 or 12, I had a very high fever. I was in bed, blanket over me, when I heard the faucet dripping in the bathroom down the hall. Each drip sounded like a bass drum. I threw back the covers, which billowed slowly and gigantically like sails.

    When I returned to my bed, a perfectly round, perfectly smooth, perfectly white, perfectly silent ball rose out of the floor of my bedroom… and it was spinning very, very rapidly. You may ask how I knew it was spinning if it was perfectly round, smooth, white and silent. If you do, I’ll ask you to get your own hallucination. It hovered in the center of my room for what seemed like days before it lowered itself back through the floor.

    To this day, some 25-ish years later, cue balls and ping-pong balls make me nervous.

  51. AlphabetFish says:

    When I was sick with pneumonia, I had a major fever the first night or so.

    I dreamt that my entire body was covered with colorful crystals, and when they collided it was extremely uncomfortable and unsettling.

    I didn’t get a lot of sleep, and it wasn’t until the next day that I understood why I had had such a crazy hallucination all night. I wound up being ill for nine days until I finally saw a doctor–don’t be like me, people. Get to a doctor if you have shortness of breath, fatigue, and a fever. It wasn’t a cold after all.

  52. skeevetheimpossible says:

    Now a word about hallucinating. As far as hallucinations go from fever I can’t much. Now when it comes to self induced, I can say with confidence that I have some experience. The thing I find interesting is the apparent difference between the to types of closed eye visuals. (for the record dreams ARE hallucinations)When a person consumes Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or Shrooms they experience effects that warp or change the world around them. I.E trees will bend and curl to the ground, faces will stretch pull and twist, or rooms and surfaces will askew and change shape. The thing is that even though the tree is bent or “Daves” face is elongated you still perceive and understand them for what they really are. Now when someone is hallucinating from a high fever or the effects of heavy sedatives, they will actually believe that they are seeing the things that aren’t there. For example: Shamus’s raisin on the table. To someone in the depths of a mushroom binge might see the raisin as a larger flat off color raisin, but it is still a raisin. Someone with a high fever will see it as a bug like Shamus did. When they come to the realization that it is not (a bug) they are often confused and disoriented, and somewhat anxious that it wasn’t what they initially perceived it as.
    This all brings me to my final point. Fever hallucinations often leave the person in question, filled with confusion and a sense of self doubt and mistrust. LSD hallucinations produce quite the opposite effect. A person under these conditions is very often filled with high levels of confidence and assurance. (whether or not this confidence and trust is misplaced is somewhat irrelevant)
    I would like to finish by saying this. I do not think I am cool because I have experimented with these drugs in my life. I do however have no convictions for doing them either. The “adventure” of hallucinogenics is not one that is necessary to the human experience but is one that I feel is important. The use of these drugs has been dated back through the centuries as a means of expanding the mind and stimulating the conscious. (the third eye if you will)
    Some of the greatest music, art, and novels were written under the effects of these drugs. So while I do not encourage the use of this drug I do condone it.

  53. Zaxares says:

    Hmm, I must have been lucky so far. Despite having been seriously ill a couple of times, I’ve never had any hallucinations. Just feeling absolutely awful and wondering if I was going to die.

  54. froogger says:

    Gee, seems like I’m missing out on a weird world just sleeping through all my fevers. However, I’ve had several recurring dreams while knocked out. The strangest by far haven’t visited me in many years, but it goes like this:

    A hovering platform in a complete void with two balls on it. They are made of something that looks like all the colours of playdoh knead together, all brown and lumpy. A sound fills the void that is a deep humming of sorts. The balls are circling each other on the platform and once in a while the largest ball will jump at the little one which always darts away. All the while the platform is spinning slowly, or my view of spectacle is turning. It’s a rather uncomfortable way to spend your sweating hours, I’ll tell you that.

    Perhaps it’s not returning since I’ve learned to take control of my dreams, or I just haven’t been sick enough. Either way I’m not missing it much.

    Get well soon, Shamus!

  55. Vao Ki says:

    Great subject! I have 2 experiences to share on this one…

    First, when I was young I was quite sick, high fever, bedridden for at least one night. That night in particular I zoned out. My bedroom turned into a jungle right before my eyes. I experienced a sense of vertigo, as if I were moving through the jungle, though I knew deep down I was still in my own room. It was very vivid, making me feel as if I could reach out and touch the trees around me if I had wanted, but it felt more like being inside of a movie as I watched my surroundings change.

    The other one happened many, many years later when I was in the hospital for kidney stones. Don’t ever get those if you can help it. They’re not fun. Anyway, I was hit with a fever again. They had me using ice packs up under my armpits just to lower it. Also I had a horrible infection. A stone had gotten lodged. I’ll spare you the full details. While I was there watching TV one night (in the old folks ward because there was a lack of room) I was watching a less than great rendition of a Stephen King movie when I realized that every time I closed my eyes I would see the most horrible images, and I couldn’t control it.

    Now I’m a big fan of horror flicks and I don’t scare easily. My favorite “holiday” is Halloween. This one, while not scaring me, annoyed the crap out of me since I couldn’t just make the images go away so I could rest. Sometimes it is unfortunate that I have a wild imagination. Most times it’s great but when I’m sick it kinda takes over.

    Now if we start talking about dreams…I could write a book. I even had a couple come true.

  56. Serafina says:

    No fever illusions, but things that make me realise I am absolutely shattered and exhausted to the bone (and, apparently, brain too): having the impression that people talk close to my ear. It’s not really like hearing voices, more a very vivid perception of hearing them speak? It can be lines from a movie, a song, or a genuine conversation I had.

    Also I noticed that when being bone-tired I start seeing patterns in random stuff – like face patterns in gravel on pavement or between the leaves of trees. It always makes me wonder whether that’s the same type of process that causes other people to become paranoid, when it’s not just restricted to periods of exhaustion… *shivers*

  57. Ambience 327 says:

    I don’t generally see anything, but I do hear things sometiems when I’m really sick or really tired. I remember as a child that I used to hear a little man walking inside my pillow. I knew I was really only hearing my heartbeat, but for some reason, it was pressed into my head that it was a little man – even though I knew it wasn’t. Am I making any sense here? :)

    I also get the crazy moving bed/sofa deal when I’m really out of it. If I close my eyes, I swear I turn complete circles!

    The one that really gets me though, is when my sleep schedule gets highly disrupted, and I’m alone (i.e. my wife isn’t in the bed with me), I’ll often experience sleep paralysis. I just lie there seeing my room, sometimes hearing noisy things going on in the (usually empty) house that aren’t really happening, and I can’t move no matter how hard I try. If I become aware enough to realise what is going on, I can use my force of will to get my eyes to open up for real, at which point the whole episode ends and I can either go back to sleep (which may result in another round of S.P., or I can get up and shake it off – but I’m left with an odd feeling for up to an hour afterward. It doesn’t really scare me, but it definately annoys me and weirds me out a bit.

  58. Daath says:

    I’ve only had proper fever delirium going on once, and it was pretty nightmarish. I was completely convinced that there were little people on my eyeballs with some heavy-duty drilling equipment, and I was going to go blind any second. Sounds pretty absurd now, but I really wasn’t laughing back then.

  59. -Chipper says:

    During a fever, one of my kids hallucinated big pink crabs in the room. I grabbed some deodorizing spray & told them it was anti-pink crab spray. I sprayed it around & she stopped fearing them & went to sleep.

  60. bigpumpkin says:

    I quite regularly have crawling bugs / spiders / monsters hallucinations when I’m half-way between wake and sleep.

    I first became aware of this in my late teens, when I was convinced that a giant spider had dropped down onto my bed and only realised that I was hallucinating when I found myself whacking rather ineffectually at my bed with my pillow. However, my aunt often tells me a story of the time that I, aged two and staying with her while my mum was in hospital giving birth to my brother, had disturbing fever dreams of ‘monkeys’ crawling around the walls. These things are seated deep into our collective unconscious, obviously…

  61. Alleyoop says:

    I’ve seen giant squirrels perching and also pythons squeezing up the corner of the room while ill. Also a very odd sensation of rising off the bed and somehow folding into facets…best I can explain.

    Worst was auditory. Food poisoning, Whitney Houston wailing AND IIII EEE IIII WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOUUUUU every time I heaved, and I heaved all night and into the next day…horrific. I preferred the squirrels.

  62. Wonderduck says:

    Just this past winter, I had another hallucination incident. Nothing as dramatic as a giant cueball from hell, though.

    No, I just hallucinated that my legs were made out of wood. Not 2x4s or prosthetics, just wood like tree trunks with a thin layer of skin on top of ’em. VERY weird feeling. Glad that one ended fairly quickly.

  63. NobleBear says:

    This isn’t related to anything, I just wanted to wish you good health and a speedy recovery, Shamus.

    I wanted to show you something that would cheer you up, perhaps but im not entirely certain that that would be so i went for a more universal approach:

    or maybe this’d be more up your ally:

    http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff271/NobleBearAW/Chickensoupforgeeks.gif

    And I figure you’re not a drinking man but a shot or two of Wild Turkey between naps has killed a lot of bugs for me.

    Any way, godspeed.

  64. Illiterate says:

    This thread has had Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” stuck in my head….

    Anyways, I have periodic bouts with something bacterial, I’ve got antibiotics for next time so maybe I won’t get the full treatment, but here’s what generally happens.

    I start shivering. I’m too cold. I cover myself in blankets and wear long clothes and I’m too cold. Two months ago, it was 90 degrees outside and I was driving home desperately wanting to get there before my head got too foggy, and I had the heater in my car blasting. I was still cold.

    I usually have some sort of hallucination or fever dream when this hits me. Having trouble remembering any of them….

    One I do remember from when I was younger, I had been stuck with a horrible chest cold for a few days. It just hurt and hurt. I had a waking/sleeping (the distinction blurred there) dream in which there were little sand creatures inside me, building a pyramid. Like cheesy sci-fi I was shrunk down to enter my own body and negotiate. They agreed to leave, but they apologized for not being able to remove the biological component of my illness, or they were going to replace what they left with something biological…
    The next day I started coughing up large balls of phlegm, and started feeling better. The negotiations were indeed successful.

  65. Greg says:

    It’s a shame we can’t replicate this theory in games. I mean sure we could make shadows on the edge of the screen have moving insects that dissapear and become shadows again once they center the view on them – but you couldn’t guarantee that the player was looking at the center of the screen rather than focusing on the edge of it (especially after they’ve seen the trick once)

    Maybe one day.

  66. Vao Ki says:

    @Illiterate:

    Sometimes to get warm you have to cool down. This is exactly what happened to me when I ended up in the hospital for that kidney stone that got stuck. The stone caused a backup, which caused infection, which caused a fever, which made me freezing cold. I couldn’t get warm for anything…until they cooled me down.

    If you pile on more blankets, turn up the heater, etc, all you are doing is adding to the problem when you have a bad fever. The best thing to do seems to be to turn the heat down, throw off the covers and place an ice pack against some blood vessels that are close to the surface to spread the cold quickly throughout your body, such as under the armpit or the groin area.

    I thought the doctors were nuts at first, until it started working. It’s worth the initial extra cold (especially if nothing is warming you up anyway) to get warm again. I’ve never been so cold in my life. That experience taught me the true value of a warm sunny day.

    Hopefully this helps someone.

  67. potemkin.hr says:

    I too constantly have this illusion like something is moving, but like you said, it’s an illusion if observed directly. Interesting phenomenon. One interesting dream I have is when i dream walking and falling in some endless pit, and every time waking up. F**ked up if you ask me.
    Sometimes I hear voices when listening music, like someone is calling me, when infact nobody isn’t….

  68. mario says:

    my bugs have alot of legs and that what catches my eye i think im going crazy man

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