Second sight versus straight up hallucinations

October 16, 2012 by di | Filed under Pagan Culture.

Low res original Brazilian film poster scanned for use in wp:en article Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Second sight involves seeing things other people can’t see. Generally you perceive the most details with your mind’s eye. Hallucination involves … seeing things others can’t see.

Last week I caught a wicked virus – thus the cough medicine recipes – and for the last few years viruses have hit me a lot harder and taken a lot longer to recover than they do the normal person they launch themselves upon. It is a testament to my finally finding a doctor that cares that I am having a normal cold, running it’s normal course, and responding to my admittedly altered approach to treatment now that I know where my underlying disorder triggers lay. Because this is my universe, which seems to be the result of an unholy threesome between a maze-based video game, one of Moliere’s farces, and a rather surreal soap opera, this suddenly managed condition couldn’t just sit. There had to be a new challenge.

The new challenge: the virus I caught combined with my day-to-day medications, and I had full-on hallucinations. I knew they were full on hallucinations because they were way, way easier to distinguish from what I see with my naked eye thanks to the Second Sight. I drove home in a fog that no one else could see – even while I saw the very real sun shining. I saw the same fog across my door. When I put my hand in it (who knows how many Veil-folk have had me cop a feel on them this way) and there was no vibration, no life, no nothing. How comforting. I was merely experiencing an event based in neurological disorder – that I can handle. I’m pretty sure I also saw at least two pterodactyls. In my experience. dinosaurs have left no ghosts – so I was pretty sure that was both a hallucination and probably a latent desire to rewatch Torchwood.

Hallucinations (Photo credit: Sudhamshu)

The day after, where I was appropriately high as a kite on cold medication, I had a friend ask me about mediumship et. al. To be clear, I’m not a medium. I don’t have the training, I have yet to meet a guide or partner advanced enough for me to trust with that degree of vulnerability, and while I understand the mechanics and elemental laws of possession and channeling, I’m not eager to try it out, ever. A lot of people assume I’m “into” that because I’m up front about the “there are dead people with no manners disrupting our conversation” moments. That is not mediumship. Also, a lot of people tend to just assume I’m interested in all paranormal stuff because of this one weird thing about myself I can’t help.

Just because those wires in my brain are on, doesn’t mean I have to use them. I have some ovaries I’ve also taken an opt-out clause on.

What I do have is what I see as a physical condition that can by necessity cause a bit of anti-social behavior. I’ve learned how to manage it over the years, and I try to pick friends who can at least accept that what I’m experiencing is real to me, even if will eventually find out that a chigger from a raspberry patch in childhood got especially ambitious. It isn’t important that the people I care about participate in my beliefs: they can’t experience what I’m experiencing. I can’t experience what they’re experiencing. I accept that, and get frustrated with the many people that don’t. What I can do, and did do, is describe a few things from my experience and make a few distinctions between my day-to-day experience and my hallucinatory experience of the day before.

This is the rough reference I composed:

Hallucination	Second Sight
Usually not cohesive – shadows, figures, etc. random noises. Plays in from your ego and knowledge about you, your fear.	Initially can look like a large piece of astigmatism got out if your eyeball and decided to cling for dear life to the corner of a ceiling
Just makes random sounds most of the time. When voices are heard it either a)has nothing to do with you or b)is designed to make you as paranoid as possible. Your lizard brain, it really wants to be your friend, but there's a reason it's not supposed to talk.	If audio can come through,it is usually a complete, cohesive sentence that has nothing to do with you but clearly marks the situation. The only ghosts that give a shit about you have been spying on you in the shower. The rest only really care about their own stories, unless there’s an ancestral/family bond.
Tends to hang out solely in peripheral vision, which is part of what increases the paranoia. Frequently comes with random olfactory or taste sensations.	Can be more clear in peripheral vision, but most people with second sight can see something by looking directly at the source of movement. Best with comparison: random olfaction has happened to me, and it was usually demonstrated to be relevant either to spiritual work I had been doing prior or to an encounter with a personality attached to that scent.
If you have any degree of psychometry: put your hand in it. If there’s no sense of vibration, texture, or heat, it’s just a hallucination.	If there is a sense of vibration, texture, or heat, it’s not a hallucination. Test does not apply in cases of lasting head trauma and neurological disorder.