Thursday, April 18, 2019

Parahypnic Hallucinosis?

Remember this episode:
http://xuexixs.blogspot.com/2018/08/blinking-plants.html

That was my bout with what I termed 'gardener's hallucinosis', where I spent all day pulling clear weed and etc from the gardens, and wound up with vivid blinking hallucinations. I likened it to the 'eyes open' geometric hallucinations I sometimes had back in my migraine days.

Well I've noticed a few times lately something similar happening under a specific circumstance. The circumstance is: I fall asleep in my daughter's room as I read her to sleep. I wake up a couple of hours later, stumble to the bathroom to brush my teeth, and I go get in my bed.

It doesn't happen every time, but sometimes - and last night very vividly - on waking in this way I have vivid and complex geometric hallucinations. Fine-grained, colorless - much of the content is just of very, very fine beads or dots, flickering and moving - but mixed into it are larger-scale features. Last night, the features were like a high-pass Kandinsky painting: discs and long, smoothly-curving lines, all moving and twisting around randomly, but no particular surface colors except for grayness, or darkness.

I could see it all fairly clearly with eyes opened, until I turned on the bathroom light and then the experience faded.

Maybe not coincidentally, I have been having minor headaches lately, and I think there was one yesterday. My brain must be in a state?

Tuesday, April 16, 2019

Two Things

Got two emails last night, one right after the other:

1. I get to give my 'color across the visual field' talk at ASSC 23. Gonna put my mouth where my money is! I wonder how they'll take it.

2. I was actually awarded a NEI travel award by the VSS! When's the last time I won something? Yeah, I don't know either!