Hallucinations

Philosophers like to speak of “embodiment” and “embodied agency,” and there is no simpler place to study this than in the nature of phantoms and their embodiment in artificial limbs — prosthesis and phantom go together like body and soul. I have wondered whether some of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical notions were suggested by his brother’s phantom arm — thus his final work, On Certainty, starts from the certainty of the body, the body as embodied agency.

6. Wade Davis describes this in his book Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest.

7. Nonetheless, Nelson regarded his phantom as “a direct proof for the existence of the soul.” The survival of a spiritual arm after a corporeal one was annihilated, he thought, epitomized the survival of the soul after bodily death.

For Captain Ahab, however, this was a matter for horror as much as wonder: “And if I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now so long dissolved; then, why mayst not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery pains of hell forever, and without a body? Hah!”

8. This story, “The Man Who Fell Out of Bed,” is related more fully in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

9. Several people have written to me with similar stories of sensing a presence just as they are going to sleep or waking. Linda P. observed that once, as she was drifting off to sleep, she felt “as if I was being held on my right side, as if someone had put their arms around me and was stroking my hair. It was a lovely feeling; then I remembered that I was alone, and [the feeling disappeared].”

Acknowledgments

I am most grateful, first and foremost, to the hundreds of patients and correspondents who have shared their experiences of hallucinations with me over many decades, and especially to those who have allowed me to quote their words and tell their stories in this book.

I owe an enormous debt to my friend and colleague Orrin Devinsky, who has stimulated my thoughts with his many published and forthcoming papers and referred many of his patients to me. I have enjoyed and benefited from discussions with Jan Dirk Blom and from reading his wonderfully comprehensive Dictionary of Hallucinations and Hallucinations: Research and Practice. I am deeply grateful for the friendship and advice of my colleagues Sue Barry, Bill Borden, William Burke, Kevin Cahill, Jonathan Cole, Douwe Draaisma, Henrik Ehrsson, Dominic ffytche, Steven Frucht, Mark Green, James Lance, Richard Mayeux, Alvaro Pascual-Leone, Stanley Prusiner, V. S. Ramachandran, and Leonard Shengold. And I am grateful to Gale Delaney, Andreas Mavromatis, Lylas Mogk, Jeff Odel, and Robert Teunisse for sharing their own experiences (and sometimes patients) with me.

I must also thank Molly Birnbaum, Daniel Breslaw, Leslie Burkhardt, Elizabeth Chase, Allen Furbeck, Kai Furbeck, Ben Helfgott, Richard Howard, Hazel Rossotti, Peter Selgin, Amy Tan, Bonnie Thompson, Kappa Waugh, and Edward Weinberger. Eveline Honig, Audrey Kindred, Sharon Smith, and others at the Narcolepsy Network kindly introduced me to many people with narcolepsy and sleep paralysis. Bill Hayes, a friend and a writer whom I much admire, read each chapter with his own writerly eye and made many valuable suggestions.

For their support and encouragement, I thank David and Susie Sainsbury; Dan Frank, who has patiently reviewed draft after draft of this book (as with many previous ones); Hailey Wojcik, invaluable research assistant, typist, and swimming companion; and Kate Edgar, my friend, editor, and collaborator for thirty years, to whom this book is dedicated.

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