"I see things..."
We see with the eyes but we see with the brain as well.Seeing with the brain is called imagination. We are familiar with the inscapes of our imagination because we have lived with them all our lives. Then, there are hallucinations. They are not part of our creation. They are not under our control. They seem to come from outside and mimic perception.
It was summers of 2012. I was spending vacations with my aunt in Portsmouth. One fine day my aunt received a call from a friend that she was attending a conference nearby so wanted to visit. My aunt welcomed her and informed us that a visitor is coming over and then she said and i quote,"You might find her a little different but don't worry".
Aasia was in her early 40s. She was tall,grey haired and very simply dressed. A doctor by profession, never married. We started talking. Discussed anything and everything. She was intelligent. Owned a house in Glasgow. Loved her job. Not for a single minute did it occur to me that there was something weird about her. Well, not until then.
After finishing the daily chores and getting done with the dinner, we all gathered in the lounge for late night gossips. Aasia to me, seemed way more talkative than a general human which initially i thought was probably normal to some people. As the conversation progressed, i felt she wanted to tell things. She wanted someone to listen because everything she said she knew was not possible. But she was positive that it all existed.
She was seeing things, unlikely stuff. Things unheard of, characters so made up,all works of her imagination. She claimed seeing tall men, tall enough to touch the ceiling, approaching her. One of her patients as per her claim, was not pregnant when she visited her. After a while she saw the baby bump. Just like that. When she used to call back home,she had started to believe that the person on the other end of the call was not her brother. Aasia was insistent about that and wanted us to believe too.
The craziest outcome of all the sightings was she had started blaming people around her. She was blaming a neighbor for making animals' sounds everyday 4 in the morning,waking her up so early. She was adamant that people were messing with her by calling her on her number and not replying when she picked up. Also. Aasia thought people at her workplace were lying to her. Simple stuff like they would give her yellow colored sheets when she had asked for white ones. She believed they lied when they said there were no white sheets left. She pretty much very openly declared that she wanted to kill one of her friends because she wasn't answering her calls.
During the whole conversation, the expression of fear on her face remained constant. Later, her gestures depicted anger too. The hallucinations happen suddenly. The one minute you picture something, the other minute it's only air. The mind does its best to organize and to give some sort of coherence to this but not terribly successful. When they were first discovered, people thought that they could be interpreted as dreams but patients believed the images and faces had nothing to do with them. They couldn't associate, as was the case with Aasia.
Troubled Aasia left us the next morning,leaving us questioned. We were worried and decided to contact her family or get some help locally. We did, but never heard from her again. Aasia's hallucinations were most probably a product of schizophrenia.She had lost the ability to differentiate between the real and unreal and was no more thinking logically.
I hope wherever she may be, she is in good hands today.
It was summers of 2012. I was spending vacations with my aunt in Portsmouth. One fine day my aunt received a call from a friend that she was attending a conference nearby so wanted to visit. My aunt welcomed her and informed us that a visitor is coming over and then she said and i quote,"You might find her a little different but don't worry".
Aasia was in her early 40s. She was tall,grey haired and very simply dressed. A doctor by profession, never married. We started talking. Discussed anything and everything. She was intelligent. Owned a house in Glasgow. Loved her job. Not for a single minute did it occur to me that there was something weird about her. Well, not until then.
After finishing the daily chores and getting done with the dinner, we all gathered in the lounge for late night gossips. Aasia to me, seemed way more talkative than a general human which initially i thought was probably normal to some people. As the conversation progressed, i felt she wanted to tell things. She wanted someone to listen because everything she said she knew was not possible. But she was positive that it all existed.
She was seeing things, unlikely stuff. Things unheard of, characters so made up,all works of her imagination. She claimed seeing tall men, tall enough to touch the ceiling, approaching her. One of her patients as per her claim, was not pregnant when she visited her. After a while she saw the baby bump. Just like that. When she used to call back home,she had started to believe that the person on the other end of the call was not her brother. Aasia was insistent about that and wanted us to believe too.
The craziest outcome of all the sightings was she had started blaming people around her. She was blaming a neighbor for making animals' sounds everyday 4 in the morning,waking her up so early. She was adamant that people were messing with her by calling her on her number and not replying when she picked up. Also. Aasia thought people at her workplace were lying to her. Simple stuff like they would give her yellow colored sheets when she had asked for white ones. She believed they lied when they said there were no white sheets left. She pretty much very openly declared that she wanted to kill one of her friends because she wasn't answering her calls.
During the whole conversation, the expression of fear on her face remained constant. Later, her gestures depicted anger too. The hallucinations happen suddenly. The one minute you picture something, the other minute it's only air. The mind does its best to organize and to give some sort of coherence to this but not terribly successful. When they were first discovered, people thought that they could be interpreted as dreams but patients believed the images and faces had nothing to do with them. They couldn't associate, as was the case with Aasia.
Troubled Aasia left us the next morning,leaving us questioned. We were worried and decided to contact her family or get some help locally. We did, but never heard from her again. Aasia's hallucinations were most probably a product of schizophrenia.She had lost the ability to differentiate between the real and unreal and was no more thinking logically.
I hope wherever she may be, she is in good hands today.
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