Think hallucinations are only for the mentally unstable? Think again. Hallucinations are different than imagination and dreams, but are more common than you might think. Since man has been walking on 2 feet, he has been (yes, or she) seeking ways to alter his reality through drugs, fasting, and sensory deprivation, among myriad other ways to induce hallucinations. People with certain physical disease can be prone to hallucinations, as well as a great number of people who are losing their sight or hearing. You will find that hallucinations are vast and fascinating when you read Oliver Sacks' Hallucinations.
Have you read any of Oliver Sacks' books? I absolutely adore him. He wrote the very famous The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Awakenings - the book that got made into a movie with Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. Sacks offers a fascinating and compassionate look into the human mind, its capabilities and quirks, and presents his books in a very approachable and readable way for the lay person and professional alike.
Contents of Hallucinations include:
Silent Multitudes: Charles Bonnet Syndrome
The Prisoner's Cinema: Sensory Deprivation
A Few Nanograms of Wine: Hallucinatory Smells
Hearing Things
The Illusions of Parkinsonism
Altered States
Patterns: Visual Migraines
The "Sacred" Disease
Bisected: Hallucinations in the Half-Field
Delirious
On the Threshold of Sleep
Narcolepsy and Night Hags
The Haunted Mind
Doppelgangers: Hallucinating Oneself
Phantoms, Shadows, and Sensory Ghosts
An interview with Oliver Sacks
He is best known for his collections of neurological case histories, including The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (1985), Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007) and The Mind’s Eye (2010). Awakenings (1973), his book about a group of patients who had survived the great encephalitis lethargica epidemic of the early twentieth century, inspired the 1990 Academy Award-nominated feature film starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. The New York Times has referred to him as “the poet laureate of medicine.”
Dr. Sacks is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Read Oliver Sacks’s full biography here. - from OliverSacks.com
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