Has anyone had auditory hallucinations as a child?

Page 1 of 1 [ 9 posts ] 

Saraswathi
Raven
Raven

User avatar

Joined: 26 Apr 2006
Age: 42
Gender: Female
Posts: 107
Location: New Zealand

29 Apr 2006, 7:11 am

This is going to sound crazy, but I'm quite sure I'm not - or at least, that I wasn't at the time - and no-one has ever been able to offer me a rational explanation.
From the age of about 3, to the age of 12, I used to hear voices as though I was at a party. It was hard to tell what they were saying, but they conveyed meaning through tone and it usually started with pleading and ended threateningly. It was usually at night, always when I was alone, but I was always conscious at the time and awake. It sometimes coincided with being able to feel what was like an electrical current - it doesn't make sense, but there's no other way to describe it - running through one wall of my bedroom and everything touching it. I felt that frequently independently of hearing voices. I still do, but very occasionally.

I also had migraines, but those were never in relation to the voices or the electrical sensations. Schizophrenia has never been mentioned as a possible diagnosis in much time spent with counsellors, and I don't believe I am. Are these common to AS? Or should I just never mention them again to anyone ever?



anbuend
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 5 Jul 2004
Age: 43
Gender: Female
Posts: 5,039

29 Apr 2006, 7:58 am

Combining it with the electrical sensations, I wonder if it was/is seizures. Seizures can cause auditory hallucinations, random feelings of threat, etc.


_________________
"In my world it's a place of patterns and feel. In my world it's a haven for what is real. It's my world, nobody can steal it, but people like me, we live in the shadows." -Donna Williams


Saraswathi
Raven
Raven

User avatar

Joined: 26 Apr 2006
Age: 42
Gender: Female
Posts: 107
Location: New Zealand

29 Apr 2006, 8:07 am

I always assumed seizures were something you'd know if you had. I was lying perfectly still. The electrical sensation was only related to touching certain things. I got the same sensation in a perfectly alert, happy state.



anbuend
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 5 Jul 2004
Age: 43
Gender: Female
Posts: 5,039

29 Apr 2006, 10:13 am

There are lots of seizures that you don't always know if you have. They're often called "partial seizures". If interested, Mitzi Waltz wrote an informative and thorough book on the topic.

Actually, you don't always notice if you have absence seizures either, which are a kind of generalized seizure where you blink and stare, but don't notice any time has gone by.

But partial seizures affect only one area of the brain. So they come on suddenly, and can cause sensory distortions, and/or hallucinations, and/or weird smells or sensations, and other stuff like that.

I think the earliest I remember having one, I hallucinated a doll bouncing rhythmically up and down, a voice saying "uh-oh," had a slight sense of unreality, and then I vomited. But a seizure could involve any one of those things alone, or combined, it just depends what area of the brain it hits. And you can be totally conscious throughout some seizures.

Like some people, all they have is a clicking noise, and that's it. And other people might just smell something weird. And other people might just get a sense of unreality that comes on suddenly and goes away suddenly. Or deja vu, or jamais vu (the opposite of deja vu, where familiar things seem unfamiliar). Or a lot of other things like that.

These days, mine start with a sensation of painful dryness on my skin and throughout my body that isn't helped at all by water (but that does get worse if I touch certain things), and time stretches out and feels like it stops entirely, then I sometimes hear a buzzing or clicking sound, and then sometimes I do lose consciousness briefly but apparently often continue doing whatever it was I was doing before, like if I'm holding something I won't drop it. And when it's over I'm often confused and tired. But for most of the seizure, I'm totally conscious.

But then, it's different for every person.


_________________
"In my world it's a place of patterns and feel. In my world it's a haven for what is real. It's my world, nobody can steal it, but people like me, we live in the shadows." -Donna Williams


Saraswathi
Raven
Raven

User avatar

Joined: 26 Apr 2006
Age: 42
Gender: Female
Posts: 107
Location: New Zealand

29 Apr 2006, 10:34 am

Wow, that's a real eye-opener. I had no idea seizures could be like that. My boss had epilepsy due to a head injury and spent a lot of time on the ground until he had a lobotomy that cured it. I assumed all seizures would be obvious like that.
Thanks for the info!



anbuend
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 5 Jul 2004
Age: 43
Gender: Female
Posts: 5,039

29 Apr 2006, 10:53 am

I only get the kind of seizures that significantly affect movement, if I'm on a drug that lowers the seizure threshold. (In my case, both neuroleptics and opiates can do that.) Then, I can get myoclonic seizures (a kind of seizure in which you're conscious but your arms fling out uncontrollably from time to time), and atonic seizures (in which you lose all muscle tone and may or may not lose consciousness, but definitely drop to the ground).

The kind he had are probably tonic-clonic seizures, which are the most famous kind.

I think there's probably places to look all this up on the web, too. Unfortunately, partial seizures tend to have the least resources and be some of the most weird ones. (People have been misdiagnosed as "psychotic" if their seizures involve hallucinations, for instance, and then they're usually put on meds that give them more seizures than they had before, since "anti-psychotic" meds tend to make seizures worse.)


_________________
"In my world it's a place of patterns and feel. In my world it's a haven for what is real. It's my world, nobody can steal it, but people like me, we live in the shadows." -Donna Williams


Sundy
Deinonychus
Deinonychus

User avatar

Joined: 12 Mar 2006
Gender: Female
Posts: 300
Location: South Texas

29 Apr 2006, 11:39 am

When I was a kid I used to have that deja vu feeling too. It was usually accompanied with a feeling of heaviness...I'd see in my head this round ball thing, kind of like those particle-filled stress balls you see nowadays. It would be squishy and heavy and make my body feel weird. I'd hear a loud rushing in my head, kind of like the kind of head rush you get when you're about to faint, but it was different from that. I'd get really sick to my stomach and I remember telling my parents "I'm getting it again..." I used to have this frequently. I only have it about once a year now and I'm 25. I remember it putting me out for most of the day. I wonder if this was a seizure? I had a test for petit mauls (little seizures) when I was about 10, but the test came back so weird that the stupid doc dismissed it as being done incorrectly. It probably came back so weird because of my AS. My mom used to think that maybe I was hypoglycemic and I went through some really awful tests for that (or they seemed bad because I was so young). Then it mostly went away by the time I hit puberty. When I do get the deja vu feeling again, it usually isn't so bad and I don't get so sick.

Weird stuff. I wonder how many other people have this too.



laplantain
Toucan
Toucan

User avatar

Joined: 23 May 2005
Gender: Female
Posts: 290

29 Apr 2006, 3:46 pm

Are you sure that you weren't hearing somebody fighting in another room? I read somewhere that auties brains don't turn off, even when they are asleep. I often wonder if our son can hear us fighting in his sleep.



Saraswathi
Raven
Raven

User avatar

Joined: 26 Apr 2006
Age: 42
Gender: Female
Posts: 107
Location: New Zealand

29 Apr 2006, 6:35 pm

Seizures sound likely, then. I wasn't asleep, and although I have very good hearing I wasn't hearing anyone else, as I could hear my parents snoring in the next room. The other thing I forgot to mention, is that I sometimes had what felt like an out of body experience combined with the auditory hallucinations. I would feel as though I was floating around the room, and the weird thing was that I could see things in close detail - like the tops of the curtain railings - as though I was actually a lot higher than I was. I've worn glasses since the age of 7, and I can see nothing clearly without them, and my vision is not perfect with them, so to see something as though it was less than a foot away when it's two metres away was a strange experience.