Calluna Running: "Seeing Things" or Seeing Things?

“I am having a hallucination now, I don't need drugs for that.” ― Thomas Pynchon

Hallucinations are more common than people realize.[1] Many of us have hypnagogic hallucinations — seeing geometric patterns or scenes– that appear as we are wait to fall asleep. These types of patterns or scenes may be faint, or they may be very ornate, rapidly changing and intensely colored.

At the other end of the sleep cycle are hypnopompic hallucinations. These, I think, are freaky. Hypnopompic hallucinations can be seen with open eyes, upon first waking. The most common hypnopompic hallucinations include an amplification of colors or you might hear someone calling your name. Some hypnopompic hallucinations can also be terrifying like seeing a giant spider or a dark humanoid shadow looming over you.

If you have experienced sleep cycle hallucinations, you are not going insane nor are you developing dementia. The vast majority of hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations are benign. They are perfectly normal. Most of us have experienced them from time to time during the sleep process or while suffering a high fever.

While hallucinations during the sleep cycle are common, experiencing hallucinations during the waking hours are not. Generally speaking, experiencing hallucinations while awake may be due to physical or mental illness. An exception to this is the hallucination experienced by ultra-runners. It is well known that ultra-runners experience hallucinations.[2] Thirty percent of Badwater Ultramarathon runners said that they’d hallucinated – seeing giant beetles, a ship cruise by, mutant mice, etc. - at some point while running during the 135 mile race. Run 50 or 100+ miles, and some really weird things can happen to your mind and body!

I am not an ultra-runner, just a regular, ordinary “recreational” runner. The closest I come to hallucinating while running is stumbling across bizarre things mid-stride. All along the streets, trails, and sidewalks are weird and out-of-place things that make me wonder if I AM hallucinating! Everywhere I run, I see things that shouldn’t be there.

On residential sidewalks: men’s underwear; a hunting knife; head rest from a car and a HUGE, dead rat in the driveway of a mansion.

On a divided four-lane bridge: pink, satin pillow sham; an unopened bottle of Bud Light; lottery tickets; and a half-used bar of soap.

On trails: a shower cap; a wrench; an unopened loaf of rye bread; and a pewter tankard all just sitting in the middle of the woods.

And everywhere on the planet: the ubiquitous single shoe – never a pair, always one, lone shoe.

... a coat, on a hanger, suspended with fishing line slung over a tree limb and tied to the fence. This took some effort! It has been like this for a month, rain or shine!

... a sofa on the beach ... this took some effort, too!

... headless sea creature ... trying not to imagine the effort it took ... creepy

While my sleep cycle provides me with plenty of opportunities to “see things” through hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations, running provides me with opportunities to see things that are strange, weird and bizarre. I have been asked many times how I keep from getting “bored” while running. Are you kidding? All I have to do is look around – I see things!