A note from my recent stay in Stanford Hospital: into the emergency room on Friday 1/30 in the afternoon, returning home late in the afternoon on Thursday 2/5. Not about the afflictions that brought me there, but about an odd experience during the long time waiting on a gurney in a very small room in the emergency department while tests were made and a hospital room sought. I had company all through the day: my daughter Elizabeth and grandchild Opal, who patiently enjoyed a card game together and played some interesting music softly for me.
Hallucination: the curtain. This tiny room had a curtain that could be drawn to make it private from the hallway outside: a pleasant beige color with somewhat glossy horizontal strips of a slightly darker tint.
But for me it was, startlingly, much more than that: what I saw inside those strips was the (unfortunately illegible) text of a substantial article that I was writing to post on this blog. I was entirely aware that this material was a hallucination, visible to me but not to Elizabeth or Opal, though I described it for them. Fascinating, in no way disturbing. But I was unable to dismiss or erase the text from my visual field — it persisted for more than an hour, with no way for me to un-see it. And then I was moved to a different room, with a different kind of curtain, so no more hallucination.
This sort of cognizant hallucination — my ad hoc label for hallucination (in this case, visual) with full awareness on the part of the experiencer — is, apparently, not unusual, though not much seems to be known about the triggers for it. They are common in the moments when people are dropping off to sleep and, especially, when they are wakening.
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