I am curious as to what sets off others’ hallucinations and about others’ hallucinations. I hope this isn’t too personal. Here’s mine:
My visual hallucinations are most prominent and are drawn by darkness. I see demons. I have to sleep with a light on, and I’m scared of the dark. I can’t close the shower curtain because I can’t see what’s on the other side, so I take baths instead. They usually occur when I’m home alone, which is bad since my husband works 12 hour nights every other month and leaves me alone in the dark all night by myself.
My auditory hallucinations also occur when I’m home alone or when I’m awake at night while my husband sleeps. I hear voices that want to hurt me, and I think they are coming from somewhere else in the house. I get a baseball bat, cell and landline phones (both in case landlines are cut or cells aren’t working), and my service dog, and I lock myself in the bathroom, waiting for the voices to go away. Sometimes, I have to stay in there for hours. But just in case the voices get closer and are going to hurt me, I can call 911 quickly because I have the phones. I cannot discern whether the voices are real or not when I am hearing them, only after the fact and after I’ve had a little while to calm down.
My hallucinations aren’t bothered by crowds, thank goodness, so I can go about freely in public without fear of any unusual behavior except… I am scared of people. I am pretty sure they want to hurt me. I watch license plates as they pass me and take note of street intersections so I can let cops know what the car plates are that kidnapped me and where I was last at. I carried a knife with me at all times until my husband took it away because it made me feel safe to hold on to it if someone passed too close to me. I don’t like crowds (I avoid Wal-Mart like the plague!) because it’s so overwhelming and threatening. So my hallucinations aren’t triggered by people, but other things are.
Is anyone else like this? I’ve never really talked to anyone else about their experiences before.
Being home alone, by myself in big crowds (some times), or alone in the dark seems to set mine off at times, though my main hallucination is internal voices. Some times too I feel like I’ll start seeing shadow people with glowing eyes in the dark…though I never saw them with glowing eyes before.
What sets off my auditory hallucinations of crowds mumbling incoherent nonsense is being alone at home, usually late at night, and there being some kind of electronic gadgetry or machinery noise in the background. The voices always stop when the gadgetry or machinery noise shuts off. I don’t always hear these voices in this electronic gadgetry or machinery though. This is why I know they are auditory hallucinations. It is not consistent or persistent. The electronic and machinery noise is a constant. The voices are not.
I can relate. I used to be afraid of serial killers getting into my home late at night and I used to keep a large butcher knife under my pillow at night. I used to walk around my home at night looking for serial killers with that butcher knife in my hand. I used to call the cops to my home telling them that serial killers were in my home. Whenever I went on vacation, I thought serial killer/snipers were everywhere and pointing their high powered rifles at me from long distances away. I thought I was a moving target. I was petrified everywhere I went. I thought killers were lurking around every corner and snipers were everywhere. When I went to Las Vegas one time, I thought I caught the attention of the Mafia, and they were out to kill me too. When I went to pray at a nature retreat center, I thought snipers were hiding in the trees. I thought my ex husband had hired snipers to have me killed. At one point, I thought my brother was out to kill me and had already killed my son. Oh, it went on and on. I was even suspicious of my own mother and my female lover.
I too thought that hearing voices or conversations when I turned on the box fan, ac unit, or when the fridge kicked on, was another form of voices but it turns out that it is very common and very normal, its called ‘Audio pareidolia’ where you can hear convos , radio or music, or game shows in the background electronic noise (fans, ac, white noise,etc)
There is also a common and normal form of ‘musical ear syndrome’ where no background noise is present, but rather, when everything is quiet before going to bed when you first lay your head down to sleep, or when you are alone in a completely dead-silent room.
They describe it as your brain attempting to make patterns.
Interesting stuff.
@Skinnyme1@Schizopains Seriously?! I had no idea! I have been asking my husband for ages if he hears anything when our fan is on in our room, and he always says no. It sounds like buzzy conversations to me. I thought that I was crazy. I didn’t know that it could be an auditory hallucination. I thought I was just imagining it.
When I’m alone. Which isn’t often, because I have kind of a phobia of being alone. It causes my paranoia, which leads to hallucinations. Stress is a factor also. I usually hear voices when I’m stressed doing something I need to get done, or when I have nothing to distract myself. I don’t have hallucintions that I know of on medication though.
I’ve noticed that just the vicinity of homes or cars at any distant whether I’m in the city, or I’m camping will pop them off.
That is to say that they increase and take another direction.
The fact is that I myself am a trigger of my hallucinations. Just the awareness of my being, the experiences of external reality, and my memories trigger them.
At this point I feel like my brain is an idiot blob of molecules that is something like a roommate with me in my head, and I have to put it in check from time to time because it gets out of hand like a wild animal with words and imagery. It’s like a possum crawled in my head, found out what I speak, hear, see, and feel like, then goes crazy with it in order to “pizz me off” similar to how monkeys and chimps do to each other without any other intention.
I’m well aware of what it is logically, but it is very well stupid for producing what it is with the intuition included in the hallucinations that there is more to it than just what it is.
