Not quite Off Topic this.I like reading Paul Devereux's writings and found a very interesting piece in Fortean Times this month.
It's an article entitled 'Eye Spirits'and deals mainly with the eye condition known as macular degeneration but could as easily be about a number of degenerative eye diseases.
Charles Bonnet was an eighteenth century Swiss philosopher who first recognised visual hallucinations in psychologically normal people. His grandfather had been going blind from his advancing cataracts and began to describe seeing birds and buildings that were not there.
The condition was thought to be fairly rare until research in the 1980's suggested that it was probably far more widespread than was at first thought.The hallucinations can last from a few minutes to several hours and can be disturbing and disorientating.
I have to admit that I have a personal interest in this perplexing syndrome because for a period of around six months before he died my father suffered from this condition. Dad was an academic who had employed logic and reason all his life but with the advanced Glaucoma that had destroyed his eyesight the visions and hallucinations became too convincing for him to explain away. He was sure that there was a Nun in the house. She was quite friendly and he used to talk to her. But there were more disturbing images too. Unpleasant apparitions and physical disorientation including windows and doors that were not there became common.
Shortly after Dad died I saw a programme on the TV about the historian Lord Hugh Trevor Roper, who was also losing his eyesight. He too suffered the hallucinations and had to exert all his willpower to overcome a belief in this alternative reality.
Other sufferers have reported monsters, angels and visions of recently deceased people that the sufferer had known.Whole scenes can be created making it imposible to operate normally in the 'real' word.
But Devereux points out that the Syndrome is only the symptom not the explanation to what is going on.Medical literature is not too helpful. In fact nobody really knows the cause but the most common explanation is that the brain, as it loses it's familiar stimulus from the eyes makes up the gaps by introducing elements from the subconscious.I presume this could relate to hypnogogic imagery that 'pops'up from the subconscious once the brain loses it's visual information.Devereux suggests dreams could fall into this category too. It certainly is reported that subjects enduring sensory deprivation do report hallucinations.
Where Paul Devereux deviates from normal explanations however is his thoughts on what these visions really are. Is it possible that they could include spirits or even some level of perception that lies between subjective hallucination and spirits of the dead?
Devereux goes on to question what constitutes 'reality'. He asks if what we take to be concrete reality could be no more than a kind of hallucination sustained by cultural conditioning, and paranormal phenomena just glitches in that illusion?
I feel that at the very least the stimulus that the brain receives from the eyes dictates our perception of what 'reality is'. Once this most powerful of stimuli is taken away other perceptions, quite different, are wont to take over.
Written by Toby - Paranormal Researcher