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Hallucination, religious experience
Sat, 08/15/2009 - 16:11Comments
Re: Hallucination, religious experience
Submitted by rmh-hbg on Fri, 2009-10-02 - 14:47
Good Afternoon Tadzio,
Thanks for the very detailed response. You're by far more knowledgeable than me on the finer nuances of this complex disease; I'm fortunate in that my symptoms are largely kept in check by my meds and so I guess I haven't taken the time to study up.
At the risk of forcing you to play diagostician: Would it be your guess then that I had most probably experienced a temporal partial seizure while sleeping and awoke into a prolonged and relatively coherent ictal state? More details on the event: I was aware enough to put my contact lenses in; drive the 5 minutes to my ex's house; sit outside and debate the pros and cons of going in and waking her and our girls up; decide against it and drive back home and get back in bed; re-experience the sensation of being told by God that I was going to die that night and had to say my farewells; distintly recall that I think I levitated above my bed; re-dressed and drove back, this time went inside and woke up my ex and convinced her that I was convinced that I was having a heart attack. She could see that I wasn't but called the EMTs anyway. I was also able to convince the EMTs that I thought I was having a heart attack, all the vital signs to the contrary. Probably due to my insistence that I was dying in the face of clear evidence that nothing was wrong, they decided to take me to the ER anyway. It was during the ride to the ER that I became convinced that the EMT was Jesus and that he recounted my life to me, telling me of things that somebody who'd never met me before could not have known. While I was clearly making no sense at that point, the EMT's notes make no mention of a seizure. At the ER I was still certain that all of the events since originally waking up were all of a grand, spiritual design; I also believed that the attending ER physician was God. Naturally, his name is Dr. DeAugustine -- to go along with Saul the EMT. You can't make this stuff up. My bloodwork having come back clean, eventually they kicked me out, chalking the experience up to nothing more than chest pain and anxiety; I think they were reluctant to call it a seizure so as to avoid the issue of license suspension.
What none of the above captures is the "escatic" nature of the experience. That came mostly in the beginning; the best way I can describe it is just being possessed by a certain knowledge that there really is a God, and a Heaven, and that I no longer had to fear death or dying. I also remember being filled with an incredible sense of appreciation for everything I've been given in life, especially my children, and I voiced out loud to God my thanks, over and over again. It was quite the spectacle. Fortunately it was my ex's weekend with our kids, as had they been with me it would have scared the wits out of them. I haven't been able to re-create that overall feeling of joy and happiness since that night and have been on a search for answers ever since. I'm not necessarily convinced that epilepsy, or more to the point seizures, can't act as one kind of doorway to spiritual enlightenment; as my ex says, God works in mysterious ways. Don't tell maBenzi I said that.
Thanks again Tadzio for all of your thoughtful insights; you're a true asset to these forums.
Good Afternoon Tadzio,
Thanks for the very detailed response. You're by far more knowledgeable than me on the finer nuances of this complex disease; I'm fortunate in that my symptoms are largely kept in check by my meds and so I guess I haven't taken the time to study up.
At the risk of forcing you to play diagostician: Would it be your guess then that I had most probably experienced a temporal partial seizure while sleeping and awoke into a prolonged and relatively coherent ictal state? More details on the event: I was aware enough to put my contact lenses in; drive the 5 minutes to my ex's house; sit outside and debate the pros and cons of going in and waking her and our girls up; decide against it and drive back home and get back in bed; re-experience the sensation of being told by God that I was going to die that night and had to say my farewells; distintly recall that I think I levitated above my bed; re-dressed and drove back, this time went inside and woke up my ex and convinced her that I was convinced that I was having a heart attack. She could see that I wasn't but called the EMTs anyway. I was also able to convince the EMTs that I thought I was having a heart attack, all the vital signs to the contrary. Probably due to my insistence that I was dying in the face of clear evidence that nothing was wrong, they decided to take me to the ER anyway. It was during the ride to the ER that I became convinced that the EMT was Jesus and that he recounted my life to me, telling me of things that somebody who'd never met me before could not have known. While I was clearly making no sense at that point, the EMT's notes make no mention of a seizure. At the ER I was still certain that all of the events since originally waking up were all of a grand, spiritual design; I also believed that the attending ER physician was God. Naturally, his name is Dr. DeAugustine -- to go along with Saul the EMT. You can't make this stuff up. My bloodwork having come back clean, eventually they kicked me out, chalking the experience up to nothing more than chest pain and anxiety; I think they were reluctant to call it a seizure so as to avoid the issue of license suspension.
What none of the above captures is the "escatic" nature of the experience. That came mostly in the beginning; the best way I can describe it is just being possessed by a certain knowledge that there really is a God, and a Heaven, and that I no longer had to fear death or dying. I also remember being filled with an incredible sense of appreciation for everything I've been given in life, especially my children, and I voiced out loud to God my thanks, over and over again. It was quite the spectacle. Fortunately it was my ex's weekend with our kids, as had they been with me it would have scared the wits out of them. I haven't been able to re-create that overall feeling of joy and happiness since that night and have been on a search for answers ever since. I'm not necessarily convinced that epilepsy, or more to the point seizures, can't act as one kind of doorway to spiritual enlightenment; as my ex says, God works in mysterious ways. Don't tell maBenzi I said that.
Thanks again Tadzio for all of your thoughtful insights; you're a true asset to these forums.
Re: Hallucination, religious experience
Submitted by 3Hours2Live on Sun, 2009-10-04 - 03:51
Hi Richard,
In middle-school, I would know the night before that I was going to have clusters of "events" the following day (I didn't know I had epilepsy back then). Just as I was about to go to sleep, the strong sensation of a dreaded event would wake me back up, and by then, I knew, to reduce the number of times this happened, to try to stay awake as long as possible. Once sleep would overcome me, I would often be wakened a couple times more with feelings of bliss, then a very rough night's sleep. The next day, clusters of seizures would give me various aura, and would frequently mess-up my speech/other events(once, while out looking for rocks in the middle of no-where, I regained consciousness while running away for dear life, and I had to follow my tracks back to find my equipment and back-pack). The clusters hit me about once a month, but isolated minor partial seizures were many a day, but often so slight as to only interfere when they happened when I would be trying to do something specific(mainly verbal), and often just the aura of ictal emotions.
Some of the sensations of divine bliss were much stronger than any strong dose of tinctures of opium (one Dr. tried to stop my bout with epigastric-like seizures with opiates in 1972, that didn't work). Many Near Death Experiences (NDE) descriptions come the closest in describing very pleasant seizure experiences. Attempts of explaining the mechanisms of NDE often cite Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE) as providing clues to the chemical mechanisms involved, and the often after-effects (are there withdrawal effects from TLE similar to opiates???); many of these attempts contradict each other, and often also use opposing terminologies. Some of the books I've looked at are:
The Near-Death Experience: A Reader, by Lee Worth Bailey, Jenny L. Yates, 1996, esp. around page 273:
Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology For The 21st Century, by Edward F. Kelly, Emily Williams Kelly, 2006, they're more critical about Dostoevsky's "The Idiot" and Dostoevsky's type of epilepsy:
Epilepsy: A Comprehensive Textbook, by Jerome Engel, Timothy A. Pedley, Jean Aicardi, Marc A Dichter, 2007, this is massive and includes many molecular, cellular, chemical details (such as "tle and opiates" as brief example):
A brief, more Limbic System interpretation and enkephalin explanation is at:
http://www.cosmicdust.org/self/hyperreligiousness/
Sometimes, Limbic Seizures are regarded as Temporal Lobe Seizures, and sometimes not.
Tadzio
Hi Richard,
In middle-school, I would know the night before that I was going to have clusters of "events" the following day (I didn't know I had epilepsy back then). Just as I was about to go to sleep, the strong sensation of a dreaded event would wake me back up, and by then, I knew, to reduce the number of times this happened, to try to stay awake as long as possible. Once sleep would overcome me, I would often be wakened a couple times more with feelings of bliss, then a very rough night's sleep. The next day, clusters of seizures would give me various aura, and would frequently mess-up my speech/other events(once, while out looking for rocks in the middle of no-where, I regained consciousness while running away for dear life, and I had to follow my tracks back to find my equipment and back-pack). The clusters hit me about once a month, but isolated minor partial seizures were many a day, but often so slight as to only interfere when they happened when I would be trying to do something specific(mainly verbal), and often just the aura of ictal emotions.
Some of the sensations of divine bliss were much stronger than any strong dose of tinctures of opium (one Dr. tried to stop my bout with epigastric-like seizures with opiates in 1972, that didn't work). Many Near Death Experiences (NDE) descriptions come the closest in describing very pleasant seizure experiences. Attempts of explaining the mechanisms of NDE often cite Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE) as providing clues to the chemical mechanisms involved, and the often after-effects (are there withdrawal effects from TLE similar to opiates???); many of these attempts contradict each other, and often also use opposing terminologies. Some of the books I've looked at are:
The Near-Death Experience: A Reader, by Lee Worth Bailey, Jenny L. Yates, 1996, esp. around page 273:
Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology For The 21st Century, by Edward F. Kelly, Emily Williams Kelly, 2006, they're more critical about Dostoevsky's "The Idiot" and Dostoevsky's type of epilepsy:
Epilepsy: A Comprehensive Textbook, by Jerome Engel, Timothy A. Pedley, Jean Aicardi, Marc A Dichter, 2007, this is massive and includes many molecular, cellular, chemical details (such as "tle and opiates" as brief example):
A brief, more Limbic System interpretation and enkephalin explanation is at:
http://www.cosmicdust.org/self/hyperreligiousness/
Sometimes, Limbic Seizures are regarded as Temporal Lobe Seizures, and sometimes not.
Tadzio
Re: Hallucination, religious experience
Submitted by 3Hours2Live on Thu, 2009-10-01 - 04:06
Hi Richard, One of my "heart attack like" seizures occurred in my Social Psychology class at the University. I tried to ignore my seizure, as I slowly learned to often do over my lifetime of partial seizures, but there were enough external signs that my classmates and the professor became upset and were about to call emergency when the seizure started to end. Later, when I asked the professor about the verbal behaviour problems I had encountered in informal job interviews, he mentioned the possibility of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Most of the signs and symptoms of my seizures matched TLE, with partial simple seizures to partial complex seizures (back then, my secondary tonic-seizures were rare, and mainly occurred with clusters of partial seizures coinciding with severe colds/flu). Once simple seizures spread, keeping the classifications of seizure focus origin accurate is difficult, and as soon as they become complex, origin determination becomes more of a guess. My simple partial seizures have ictal manifestations of subjective sensations that point to them being most likely temporal, with a much smaller chance of them being frontal, and I hardly ever experience "Forced Thinking" (which indicates a mostly frontal seizure, but different research says different things). "Forced Thinking" is not "Forced Normalization." Forced Normalization is a concept involving a much longer time span, with the increased control of seizures being correlated with the increased likelihood of pseudo-psychosis without any seizures, and vice-versa. "Heart Attack like" seizures are usually taken equally as indicating temporal or frontal (along with respiratory, flushing, pupil dilation, visceral signs and symptoms, while enuresis (incontinence of urine), salivation is taken as mostly frontal). "Psychic" ictal manifestations are usually taken as temporal, while clearly understandable ictal speech is taken as indication of the non-dominant side of the brain origin in TLE. Seizures are most always less than 5 minutes, but closely spaced clusters of, and/or status epilepticus, seizures easily confound this rule-of-thumb. Strangely, my simple, and a majority of my complex, partial seizures seem to benefit my memory, while secondary tonic-clonic seizures greatly damage my short-term memory. Many physical incidents, compounded with epilepsy, can result in great change in seizure characteristics/patterns/incidents, and can be a signal of great alarm, easily missed because of epilepsy always taking the blame, especially for transitory events. With one of my tonic-clonic seizure migraines, I waited and waited for the severe migraine to leave, until after another cluster of seizures hit about a month later, and my migraine continued, until both sides of my body started to go numb. Then emergency was called, and ER said I had about 3 hours to live without emergency surgery for a frontal subdural hematoma. Tadzio