Hallucinations Read Free

Bonnet syndrome in his book
Disturbances of the Mind
. 1
    Unlike Rosalie, Lullin still had some eyesight left, and his hallucinations were superimposed on what he saw in the real world. Draaisma summarized Lullin’s account:
    In February 1758, strange objects had begun to float into his field of vision. It started with something that resembled a blue handkerchief, with a small yellow circle in each corner.… The handkerchief followed the movement of his eyes: whether he was looking at a wall, his bed, or a tapestry, the handkerchief blocked out all the ordinary objects in his room. Lullin was perfectly lucid and at no time did he believe that there really was a blue handkerchief floating around.…
    One day in August two granddaughters came to see him. Lullin was sitting in his armchair opposite the mantelpiece, and his visitors were to his right. From the left, two young men appeared. They were wearing magnificent cloaks, red and grey, and their hats were trimmed with silver. “What handsome gentlemen you’ve brought with you! Why didn’t you tell me they were coming?” But the young ladies swore that they saw no one. Like the handkerchief, the images of the two men dissolved within a few moments. They were followed by many more imaginary visitors in the next few weeks, all of them women; they were beautifully coifed and several of them had a small box on their head.…
    Somewhat later Lullin was standing at the window when he saw a carriage approaching. It came to a halt at his neighbour’s house and, as he watched in amazement, the carriage grew bigger and bigger until it was level with the eaves of the house some thirty feet from the ground, with everything perfectly in proportion.… Lullin was amazed by the variety of images he saw: one time it was a swarm of specks that suddenly turned into a flight of pigeons, another time a group of dancing butterflies. Once he saw a rotating wheel floating in the air, the kind you saw in dockside cranes. On a stroll through thetown he stopped to admire an enormous scaffolding, and when he arrived home he saw the same scaffolding standing in the living room, but then in miniature, less than a foot high.
    As Lullin found, the hallucinations of CBS would come and go; his lasted for some months and then disappeared for good.
    I n Rosalie’s case, the hallucinations subsided within a few days, as mysteriously as they had appeared. Almost a year later, though, I got another phone call from the nurses, telling me that she was “in a terrible state.” Rosalie’s first words when she saw me were “All of a sudden, out of a clear blue sky, the Charles Bonnet has come back with a vengeance.” She described how a few days before, “figures started to walk around; the room seemed to crowd up. The walls turned into large gates; hundreds of people started to pour in. The women were dolled up, had beautiful green hats, gold-trimmed furs, but the men were terrifying—big, menacing, disreputable, disheveled, their lips moving as if they were talking.”
    In that moment, the visions seemed absolutely real to Rosalie. She had all but forgotten that she had Charles Bonnet syndrome. She told me, “I was so frightened that I screamed and screamed, ‘Get them out of my room, open those gates! Get them out! Then shut the gates!’ ” She heard a nurse say of her, “She is not in her right mind.”
    Now, three days later, Rosalie said to me, “I think I know what triggered it again.” She went on to say that she had had a highly stressful, exhausting time earlier in the week—a long, hot journey to see a gastrointestinal specialist on Long Island and a nasty fall backwards on the way. She arrived back manyhours later, shocked, dehydrated, in a state of near collapse. She was put to bed and fell into a deep sleep. She awoke the next morning to the terrifying visions of people bursting through the walls of her room, which lasted for thirty-six hours. Then she started to feel somewhat