Hallucinations

Anno 1670, not far from Cirencester, was an apparition: being demanded, whether a good spirit or a bad? returned no answer, but disappeared with a curious perfume and most melodious twang. Mr. W. Lilly believes it was a fairy.

This pleasant vision was described by John Aubrey, a country gentleman, a sort of bush-league Pepys or Plutarch, of 17th-Century England.

Modern psychiatrists would say that the apparition at Cirencester was a hallucination--a sense image created in the mind without external stimulus. Hallucinations are not the same as delusions, which are imaginary conditions or past events. Common delusions among psychotics are that their food is poisoned, that they are pregnant, that they are hundreds of years old or only a few months old, that they can converse with people miles away, that they are dead. Generally speaking, hallucinations are prominent in schizophrenia, delusions in paranoia. A paranoiac may imagine that he is being pursued by 500 enemies in a fleet of green taxicabs, but he does not imagine that he sees them.

Dr. Nolan D. C. Lewis of New York, a top-notch authority on dementia praecox, last week told colleagues of the case of a 65-year-old man whose vision was impaired by cataracts and who had hallucinations that he was engaging in unprintable conduct with young girls. Doctors removed the cataracts. But the hallucinations persisted.

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