When Seeing is Believing

This week, continuing on from last week, I will talk about another symptom of schizophrenia, hallucinations. According to the Mayo Clinic these are defined as '. . . usually involv[ing] seeing or hearing things that don't exist. Yet for the person with schizophrenia, they have the full force and impact of a normal experience. Hallucinations can be in any of the senses, but hearing voices is the most common hallucination.' (http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/schizophrenia/basics/symptoms/con-20021077) There is one story in Aberrant Selected, entitled 'Luna's Grace', where the main character has almost all senses operating in hallucinatory mode. He becomes convinced that he has become involved in a romantic relationship with Luna, the Moon, even to the point of being able to touch her.
     In my own experience the most common hallucination was hearing voices that were simply not present in Reality. These voices and I, though, had a great time, and we spent almost all of our time together in discussing abstruse philosophy and similar intellectual material. At the time it seemed I was, thanks to these voices, becoming privy to the many secrets of life, but as of today I have not the slightest recollection of what it was we actually talked about.  
     Another hallucination that I had decades ago was of creating a bird from nothing whilst in the process of willing to do so. I, of course, wrote a story based on this experience and it appears in the collection under the title, 'Likewise Curious'. I have also created a cloud out of nothing, in a clear sky, one night in Newtown, a bohemian suburb of inner city Sydney. This creation though was not willed.
     Now that I am in a full remission with schizophrenia I have fairly recently come to the conclusion that all of those voices that I used to hear, an androgynous choir of young people, were my own thoughts being routed through my hearing system. The voices, I believe, were the result of nothing more than incorrectly crossed wires. But having said all of this I sometimes miss the voices as they used to keep me very entertained and interested in life. I predominantly heard them during my five years of homelessness and they made the experience actually enjoyable. But still, it's nice having my own head back again.