Benign hallucinations?

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I've kept this secret for a long time, because I thought that everyone would brand me crazy if I told, but I recently found an article about 'hallucinations in the sane' while wikipedia-surfing which corresponds exactly to my experiences.

I hallucinate. I know when I have hallucinated, so there is no blurring of reality. The voices I hear have never commanded me to kill. I don't believe a massive government conspiracy is responsible. So I'm not psychotic.

I almost always see and feel things right before I fall asleep, after vigorous exercise, or when I'm really, really bored. This is apparently called hypngogia. My hypnagogia consists of nonsensical half-dreams and auditory perceptions of professor-types telling me their weird theories. Sometimes I have a sudden, unprovoked, terrifying sensation of falling while lying half-awake in bed, a sensation that goes away right after I realize I'm feeling it and become startled (this usually takes two seconds).

A common childhood problem was that I would hear my mother calling my name from another part of the house when she hadn't, and I would promptly bewilder her with my presence. This still happens, but I am now a better judge of when it isn't real.

I have always had brief periods of smelling rotten eggs for no reason, and adolescence has brought the occasional invisible bugs on the arms and legs.

When I was embarrassed about being interested in WWII (long story), I had a rash of visual hallucinations relating to it. During my "pathological sexual repression" phase of adolescence, I had some Freudian tactile hallucinations I would rather not talk about. If I try to repress something, I start hallucinating about it. My brain tells me in no uncertain terms when I'm being neurotic.

I have only had two major hallucinations in my lifetime, both of them very pleasant. When I was seven, daffodils talked to me in computer language and I experienced a brief period of spectacular synthesesia (in everyday life I have some touches of minor synthesisia). This Sunday at church I saw my chest bloom with pinkish-red threads of light that connected to the hearts of everyone in the sanctuary (for more read 'The Tendrils and the Strings' in the Haven). Both of these occurred when I was highly emotionally suggestible.

This can all probably be attributed to my creative temperament, my sensory integration dysfunction, and my thinking-is-seeing autistic brain. Does anyone else have persistent, benign hallucinations? I hear that's more common than we think.

i do not think this is an AS feature and may be more schizophrenia you are reffering too.
i do however have those falling dreams moments anf get woken up with a jolt, i didnt think this was As and i have observed many people on public transport/ lecture theatres doing this.

You're right that it's not part of AS, but it doesn't necessarily mean schizophrenia. There's no "thought-insertion" or other paranoia, and she knows when it's not real.

I haven't experienced this much beyond the normal range (hearing your name, phantom ringtones, that type of thing). Except when really tired, then I hallucinate and it makes it harder to sleep, but eventually I force myself because I know that the longer I go without sleep the worse it's going to get. But I rarely get that tired anymore.

Sounds rather like the OP may have something of a susceptibility to schizophrenia.

If she's happier remaining undiagnosed and it causes no distress, then there's little to be gained from seeking a psychiatric diagnosis.

This is normal. Visual and auditory hallucinations are also common in sleep paralysis, which is probably related to hypnagogia.

The rest is, well, less normal. Unless the hallucinations are really taking over your life and distressing you, it's probably not worth doing anything about them.

They usually ask questions about seeing and hearing things that aren't real during autism screening specifically because autism and schizophrenia have a lot of similar symptoms, but seeing and hearing things that aren't there would have put you in the schizophrenic camp. Not that there's anything wrong with being schizophrenic, but the treatment options are a lot different.

The rotten eggs thing? Get that checked out, seriously. That one is a classic temporal lobe seizure smell. And olfactory hallucinations are way not normal for what psychiatry considers to be psychosis, but they are very normal if you have something like epilepsy (often simple-partial seizures will only be a smell (or other sensation) and nothing more, but may lead up to a complex-partial seizure or some kind of generalized seizure as well).

Hypnagogic or hypnapompic hallucinations are considered normal, although some sleep disorders make them more intense. Hallucinations of someone calling your name are also considered normal. (Even in the DSM chapter on schizophrenia they say specifically not to count any of those towards it.)

I'd second getting a check-up just in case that it's a warning sign of something worse, but it doesn't sound terrible.
This makes me think of when somebody on Radio 4 mentioned that what hallucinatory voices are saying is connected to how the person's feeling. So a schizophrenic who feels pretty good about himself isn't likely to hear the stereotypical hateful noises. I mean, as hearing voices can be a pretty scary thing, I'd imagine it would be a downward spiral for most, but still.


Notice how I threw Radio 4's name in there? That's so it didn't sound so much like balderdash. Anyway, I think it's true, but you may want to get a second.

I think you have to turn your hallucinations into some kind of conspiracy theory or at least let yourself believe them before you have schizophrenia. However, I have family susceptibility to almost everything in the DMS-IV, and should be careful not to take illicit drugs, go to war, or do anything else that could trigger some kind of break with reality.

The epilepsy thing makes me wonder. I've always been a bit twitchy. I guess I should ask somebody about that.

According to the DSM, hallucinations can be a sufficient condition if:

Otherwise, you generally need to satisfy more criteria related to gross disorganization and thought disorder and all that jazz.

Ok, you got my attention. I still get that one all the time. I'm used to it and it doesn't frighten me at all any more. It's just annoying.

And now that I think of it, I did hear voices. It happened three times, when I was a teenager. Just a person I knew, calling my name exactly once, when I knew that the person was nowhere near me. That one bugged me for a while.

Another type of hallucination is what I call the "will-o-the-wisp." For example, I was driving on a back road at night when my headlights on a signpost caused a moving shadow. The shadow became a person who was jumping in front of my car. After slamming on the brakes, I realized within seconds that it wasn't real and looked for the cause. It took a while to calm down, but I knew it wasn't real.

Bedtime stories: (I don't know if this is related.) When my kids were little, sometimes I was tired and would fall asleep for a few seconds. Sitting up, eyes still open, mouth still going, the words on the page drifted into a dream, and I said nonsense words outloud. The kid would look at me like, "Huh?"

The thing with smells is new. For most of my life, I had a very weak sense of smell.
The new stuff started around the age of 50, immediately after I started taking drugs from my shrink. The drugs were useless and I only took them for a few months, but this new smell thing has continued a couple of years later.
The first one was with the dog's new flea collar. It was extremely strong, and I wondered how the company could stay in business selling something so awful.
And the smell stuck with me. It filled the house and lasted for at least a week. It followed me even out of the house, everywhere I went. I showered, I cleaned out my nose several times... It just wouldn't go away. It faded slowly, I don't remember exactly when.
Other smells since then (unrelated to the dog) have stuck in a similar way for days on end.
The last one, a couple of weeks ago, started when the dog jumped on the couch and farted near my face. I couldn't get away from it for about three days. My kids found this humorous.

Hmmm... new buzz words to check out.

Since I was a kid, I've always had odd little neurological symptoms that sort-of resemble a mini-stroke, but I've given up complaining about it because none of the doctors know what to do with me. I'm sure it's stress-related. From elementary school through college, I would get one, big, blow-out episode a few times a year. As an adult, it's more spread out so that I now get mild bits and pieces all the time.

That one is actually a form of sleep start. (Other forms they can take, are a popping sound that sounds as if it's coming from somewhere really weird inside your skull, or twitching as you're falling asleep, etc.)



Were you sleep-deprived at all? It seems normal under some amount of sleep deprivation (how much varies by person) to turn ordinary stimuli into animals or human beings who then disappear when you look directly at them, or who only appear for a split second anyway. My guess is that's designed to keep us alert for danger when we're otherwise groggy.



Stuff like that can be part of migraines too. Also TIA (which really is sort of a mini-stroke, and which can completely mimic migraines).

(If anyone's wondering why I know all this, it's because I have migraines and seizures, both of which have been misdiagnosed as other things, and in some cases other things have been misdiagnosed as them, so I've had to become pretty acquainted with them.)

Most people have some hallucinations sometime during their lives anyhow, especially associated with sleep, fevers, and high levels of stress. I remember having a fever of 104 and seeing the room melting...

Unfortunately, this is untrue.
Schizophrenics are schizophrenic regardless of the degree of psychosis present (or lack thereof).
It's a 'hardware' issue.

Not accurate. That's what people are told by psychiatry, but some people actually recover. Either just as they get older, or because something gets fixed. (For instance, a woman whose book I read, who had lifelong hallucinations, delusions, catatonia, etc., in a very severe form, and when she got dialysis for some other reason, all those things stopped completely for the first time ever and she's been fine ever since.) There are people who were 'psychotic' under stress, long enough to be diagnosed with schizophrenia, but the situation resolves and never comes back. (The DSM even has categories for this.)

The woman on dialysis was obviously not schizophrenic.
And schizophrenics are not the only people to suffer psychosis.
Neither case serves your point.