Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi.
Started a logon here because a long and frustrating search of the internet yielded... so much nothing.
My apologies if this has already been addressed here, and I simply have not found the discussion. If that has happened, could someone point me to the relevant thread?
Is there a connection between sensory disturbances/hallucinations/psychedelia and autism?
I ask because I experience quite a lot of them-- I would not categorize most as "hallucinations" as I know perfectly well they aren't "real", but rather (mostly)visual disturbances: Shiny gnats, rippling floors, halos around objects, persistent afterimages, sound-->visual synaesthesia, geometrics that sort of leap out of the random distribution of things like leaves and sand, "motion" in stationary objects, visual snow, that sort of thing. All the time, since childhood. I am a prodigious reader, but slower than average at it, because the words will not hold still on the page, text tends to shimmer a bit, and there's always a bit of flash and color going on amongst the words.
I've always felt it was part and parcel of the autism, but have failed to find anything in the literature about it, other than some brief studies noting that migraine and synaesthesia are more common in autism than in the general population, and that our senses tend to be abnormally calibrated-- poor sensory filtering, over- and under-sensitivity. But never any specific descriptions that resemble what I'm seeing. Watching the floor ripple gently is specific and memorable enough you'd think someone would have mentioned it. My husband, also autistic, doesn't experience anything like it. The only place I can find anything remotely accurately descriptive is in the drug literature-- people describing their LSD and psilocybin trips. I have never tried any illicit drugs, so this is irritating beyond belief. I would like to be able to compare notes with people who experience similar phenomena, mostly from the practical standpoint of... like, have other people found ways to get to a *less* psychedelic state, so as to be more functional in the physical world? I feel like if I had some control over it, I could be a safer driver, pay better attention to conversations, and be generally less overwhelmed by sensory input. Talking to self-proclaimed psychonauts about this is not helpful, obviously, since they are chasing that experience, rather than looking for ways to muffle it. They are also prone to finding meaning in the experience, whereas for me it is generally a sensory-only thing. I don't find it meaningful any more than most people would find listening to radio static meaningful. It's just noise, it's mostly unwelcome, and it's an obstacle I have to work around to do ordinary things. Like read.
So. I have some questions about that.
1) Do other people with autism experience this kind of sensory disturbance? It'd be useful to know, either way. If it goes with the autism, I'd know where to ask about it. And if it's a completely separate thing, I'll know to keep looking :)
2) If yes, are there any ways to make it... less intrusive? Is there any way to turn the volume down?
So have to start with the usual disclaimer - I a not diagnosed and still swinging between being absolute convinced I am on the spectrum then going the other way and completely doubting myself. So that's out of the way...
Yes to this. I didn't know any of this was unusual as a child but I have always had visual things such as after-trails, halos and closed eye hallucinations (coloured clouds floating around esp when trying to get to sleep). I also now have what I believe to be visual snow (very fine moving dots across all field of vision both eyes - I describe it as visual tinnitus (I also have permanent ~15KHz tinnitus). I used to find getting to sleep to be very difficult as a child - especially if I'd been doing something that evening that was over stimulating, I'd have this thing that was like a dream, but preventing me from getting to sleep quite often where I'd "see" two outlined square objects with curved edges which would get closer and closer and closer, zooming into my vision which when they got to a certain point would translate into a feeling of real discomfort and I'd have to open my eyes and I'd try going to sleep again and the same thing would happen, or I'd have circular "thoughts" (dream like visuals) going round in circles that wouldn't go away.
I get flashed of colours now and again in vision and also shimmering text, esp white text on black background. I find reading to me perfectly manageable but I'm slower than most and my eyes seem to move back and forth rather than just scanning left to right as I read.
I have permanently got "noises" going round inside my head, wither music or my own never-ending internal narrative. I remember being on long bus trips as a child and the noise of the motorway would be turned into music I could hear from the "white noise". I think this is a kind of pareidolia. Colours move about for me, If I have a book or picture that had bright red and blue on it, like blocks of colour and I move it about the two coloured areas seem to move slightly out of sink with the rest of the object. As a child I remember the "magic carpet" they used to have in C&A. It was a pattern of bright primary coloured blocks on a grey background and it used to look really weird to me - like it was 3D. I used to become obsessed with looking at it and stepping on the patterns which amused me to no end.
I don't know if this is exactly what you're talking about but yeah, some of this seems fairly normal to me.
I have loads of weird stuff going on to this day though. I don't know how to describe it. The daytime stuff is not like I'm seeing things, it's like a very visual imagination that in my head gets overlaid on what I am really seeing but I can tell it's not a part of what I'm seeing. I really don't know how to describe it. It's like a sort of heads up display in a way. A recent example of this was starting a new job a few years ago. I'm totally overloaded with new things people are explaining to me all the time. So I'm sat there with my new manager and he's going on about all these systems and I'm "seeing" like some manga cartoon patterns in primary colours zooming in, but it's like not really my vision, it's like I'm having a dream, you know how you see things in dreams but it's not quite seeing them like you see properly... well like that, overlaid on the head up display. I get this sometimes with listening to specific music (I also have some weird finger wiggling hand movements that happen with specific visuals and music or thoughts - again since being a toddler). I don't really know how to even start describing this stuff to people.
Anyway, sorry that was a bit of a waffle, but yeah. Whether this is linked or something else is anyone's guess tbh.
A lot of that sounds very familiar-- and yeah, it's stuff I see, but most of it's like a transparent overlay on the "real" stuff, and I can tell it's not real. Most, though. When the floors ripple, it doesn't look like an overlay. It looks like the floors really are rippling. But I still know it's not real.
Visual tinnitus is a good description for visual snow