Seeing colors and shapes - Autism and hallucinations?

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Hi.

I am trying to figure out something weird that has been happening to me - I experienced it in a particularly enhanced way this weekend and I thought it would be interesting to ask about others experiences/thoughts on it:

I have Aspergers and I'm 23, and a woman. Lately, I sometimes see colors and shapes when I close my eyes and they sometimes persist when they are open. For example, this weekend, I was spending time with my boyfriend and had my eyes closed - my head just began, sort of, "drifting" - I was (it felt like almost literally...) seeing colors and shapes and different places. I remember at one point I was looking at orange-colored, heavy cookware (a la le creuset) in a store that had shelves made of thick chrome wire/pipes. Another point, it was like I was seeing the inside of a swirling ocean that looked a bit like a solution I made at work once (I am a chemist) that was swirls of sage and lavender (the colors, not the smells). Those are just two examples... There was at least 15 or so different colors/places I went - most very abstract, defined by their colors, like the swirling sage and lavender ocean, but some were somewhat dreamlike but strangely real, yet still defined by colors - like the cookware store. The places/colors shifted sometimes in response to touch, and they started fading only when I opened my eyes and really started to disperse when my boyfriend turned on a light. It was an amazing experience... but so very strange.

I do not have synesthesia - I want to preempt that suggestion. I would have noticed that by now, at another point in time.

I have been having experiences somewhat similar to this (but not near as intense as this weekend) for a while - Especially since I moved out on my own about 4 years ago and so have alone time at home - and even more especially since I moved to my current city and my current really stressful job. For example, I have also realized that, when I am in certain moods (particularly after drinking very strong earl grey tea or getting lots of exercise/having a busy day) I can shut my eyes and kind of see a sort of undulating pointcloud sometimes - the little dots can move into shapes and, uh, "landscapes" (they often make valley-like shapes), sort of like those music visualizer things. Sometimes, when reading, I also see letters on the page falling down and stacking. As a kid I also used to tell my mom there were cartoons playing in my head - these abated during middle and highschool, but I think perhaps these seem to have come back college and post-college - now that I live alone and can essentially do what I want. There are many other things also, but I think I mentioned enough for you to get the idea.

Anyway - has anyone had an experience like this? It was so bizarre and I have no idea why I see this stuff sometimes -it's getting much more intense lately, particularly around my boyfriend, whom I feel very at ease around and so "act more autistic around". I have heard theories before that autism is related to elevated basal levels of certain hallucinogenic compounds in your blood - this theory, even though I bet most people think it's bunk because it's so weird - makes perfect sense to me based upon these experiences.

Any thoughts? Any similar experiences?

Thank you for listening.

Were you sleepy at the time? Have you been tested for narcolepsy? There is a stereotype for narcolepsy but that is just a stereotype. It's really not so much about suddenly falling to the ground asleep.

I have these things too when falling asleep. It's a mix of imagination and strong sense memories. Normal people (those without narcolepsy) do not go into dream/REM sleep until almost an hour after falling asleep. To be diagnosed with narcolepsy, you have to go into REM sleep within four minutes on a certain number of instances on their tests. I went into REM at about two minutes. The thing with narcolepsy is that you can slip into one of these sleep things and not be conscious that you are asleep or going to sleep.

Another thing is possibly a seizure type of thing. I have heard that temporal lobe seizure activity can be hard to detect in testing and can also cause hallucination-like things.

Narcolepsy definitely gets worse if already tired and stressed for me and I have heard epilepsy can do the same.

Do you experience any migraines? Epilepsy? Narcolepsy? Eye problems?

Look, I'm in no way an expert in this area, but there are a lot of things that could cause hallucinations like that. Don't know if ASD has anything to do with it. I actually just recently (finished it yesterday) read a whole book on the subject (it's called Hallucinations and it's written by a neurologist called Oliver Sacks if you're interested) and the author gave a whole bunch of examples of what could cause different kinds of hallucinations. It's apparently more common to experience hallucinations than we might think.

Here's an article about it (written by the same guy who wrote the book I mentioned): http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/opini ... us-do.html

Any thoughts?


As a general rule auditory hallucinations can be symptomatic of mental illness while visual hallucinations can be symptomatic of blood toxicity.

I have done some drugs in the past and am familiar with points of light and color and "breathing" of things like walls. I had a very high fever once that produced extremely real and detailed hallucinations.

While things like environmental chemicals and inadvertent chemicals like the green under the skin of old potatoes can produce visual symptoms, consideration should also be given to pathological possibilities like a tumor.

It might not be a bad idea to get a physical check up.

What you eat, can do it too. If you just consumed a portion of something really sweet, for instance, that could've done it----that, and / or, if you have Diabetes.

I have Asperger's syndrome and I am 24 years old. I have had many experiences where I close my eyes and zone out to the white noise, with a visual snow that I get with my vision. sometimes, I noticed that my visuals know as I would call it would decrease when I am in a bright a room and not staring at a certain color, which is usually white or a darker color. If I'm staring at a bright white object, I will not get the visuals and when I stare at my iPad, this is so weird the visual snow disappears, Yet, when I turn on the iPad's camera the iPad screen shows a visual snow, a little bit more extreme than my own, but it kind of goes away a little bit too almost no visuals know if the iPad is not moved but if I move it a little bit it adjust and wanted to adjust it produces a lot of the visual snow and then it goes away. Could it be that the screen of the iPad and my eyes vibrate on the same frequency?

Of the iPad and my eyes vibrate on the same frequency? Also, I noticed that when I look at some old televisions, especially don't want to my moms house which is an old tube TV, when I go near the TV I will notice that the TV is vibrating very fast at the corners of my eyes which is very debilitating and I have to be at far levels from the TV and I definitely like the new were LED TVs because they do not have the visual snow.
Debilitating and I have to be at far levels from the TV and I definitely like the were LED TVs because they do not have the visual snow.
When I close my eyes, and try to zone out to the visual snow I will fall into a deep trance, and it gets deep to the point that I could literally feel the eyes vibrating and everything in my eyes begin to vibrate and it's actually a good feeling, but now it hurts my eyes to do that when I was younger it didn't hurt my eyes to stare for such long periods of time, no it hurts to try to keep my eyes not to move when the vibration starts. It turned out when I was doing could have been a form of yoga, since it usually happens when I am going to sleep on a deep state of meditation.

The white noise, when I'm trying to sleep can actually be very beneficial, or sometimes a distraction if I am in a state of extreme anxiety like high beta awareness.

Sometimes, I will notice objects after staring long enough at the white noise, or the after shadow of light that my eyes.

Sometimes, I will notice objects after staring long enough at the white noise, or the after shadow of light.

I have much weirder experiences that have happened to me, which involve things like being able to see the future which is actually a gift in my family and I wish I was not born with it.

I am able to sense things, sometimes before they happen and sometimes as they're happening over long distances which is very weird.

Dogs have very strong intuitive abilities. On Friday, March 17, 2010, which was the day before the storm hit in Boston in that storm was a multi-day rainstorm that cause a lot of flooding in lead to the raniest March in Boston's history. that day, I came to school from the residence and if any of you want to know the name of the school it was the Boston Higashi School, which is a school for children and young adults with autism which is the school for children and young adults with autiam.

When I arrived at school, my teacher who supposed take me to the job site was not there and I had this weird feeling that you had a car accident, yet you always arrived late to school and for some strange reason I had a very bad pain of just negative emotions and over washy in my gut told me that she had a car accident, but that she was going to be when I arrived at school, my teacher who supposed take me to the job site was not there and I had this weird feeling that you had a car accident, yet you always arrived late to school and for some strange reason I had a very bad pain of negative emotions and over washy in my gut told me that she had a car accident, but that she was going to be fine.

Later that same day I had a Nother feeling and this time this feeling was much worse in it you love someone dying in my family, but I wasn't sure which Part of my family and I was wondering whether it was my mother side or my father side that is the bad feeling was referring to. I was concerned about my grandmother because she has a heart condition.

When I called my grandmother that day, she told me that everything was fine that I had nothing to worry about. After talking to my other job coach, he told me that I have nothing to worry about and I told him, yeah you're right and it's probably just the weather so it's seasonal affective disorder.
Since I went through Friday pretty well, other than the fact that I was thinking that a couple of really bad things happened, that Friday went really well for me because I was hoping for that big storm to hit with all that rain and I was a little bit feeling down due to all the cloud cover.

When Monday came, I asked my teacher Emily why she was out and she told me that you had a car accident and I was so shocked and I told her, I had a feeling you had an accident I and I even told them that you hav when Monday came, I asked my teacher Emily why she was out and she told me that she had a car accident and I so shocked that she had an accident, nearly the same exact way they predicted it made it seem very scary.

A couple days later, I was talking to my father and when I asked him how the cat was , he told me that the cat died and I told him let me guess, The cat died on Friday?

He told me yes, the cat died and I asked what happened, and they told me that the cat jumped on the furniture and slipped on a piece of closet that was on the furniture we couldn't Griffith and fell right down below to the floor with there were some pots that had some long sticks in them and my cat went through one of the sticks, which must have been very painful for the unfortunate cat. In the end, the cat had an accident in the morning and was taken to the vet, and euthanized early in the afternoon when they didn't have the money to pay for the vet's treatment, which was so unfortunate, because I sense that my cat died around the time because I was put down which was in the early afternoon, when the second feeling of bad feeling hit.

I think, that the white noise that some people see in their eyes and summer fortunate enough to loan out to our actually frequency vibrations in their head, which unlike schizophrenia is not a mental illness, versus a sensory issue.