Vor ein paar Tagen dachte ich über Halluzinationen nach (wann hatte ich sie, wie und warum) und las dazu wieder einmal diesen vier Jahre alten Text von Oliver Sacks. Er war Teil seines Buches „Hallucinations". Sacks berichtet darin über seine Experimente mit LSD, den Samen der Trichterwinde oder Opium und wieweit sie ihn aus der Wirklichkeit getragen haben. Besonders eindrücklich ist die Episode über seine Stunden mit dem Anticholinergikum und Parkison-Medikament Artane:

"I was in the kitchen, putting on a kettle for tea, when I heard a knocking at my front door. It was my friends Jim and Kathy; they often dropped round on a Sunday morning. “Come in, door’s open,” I called out, and as they settled themselves in the living room I asked, “How do you like your eggs?” Jim liked them sunny side up, he said. Kathy preferred them over easy. We chatted away while I sizzled their ham and eggs—there were low swinging doors between the kitchen and the living room, so we could hear each other easily. Then, five minutes later, I shouted, “Everything’s ready,” put their ham and eggs on a tray, walked into the living room—and found it empty. No Jim, no Kathy, no sign that they had ever been there. I was so staggered I almost dropped the tray.

It had not occurred to me for an instant that Jim and Kathy’s voices, their “presences,” were unreal, hallucinatory. We had had a friendly, ordinary conversation, just as we usually had. Their voices were the same as always—there was no hint, until I opened the swinging doors and found the living room empty, that the whole conversation, at least their side of it, had been invented by my brain."

Eine klassische Halluzination und keine Pseudo-Halluzination wie bei LSD und Psilocybin, bei denen man immer weiß, dass man sich die verschobene Welt  einbildet. Von Oliver Sacks erfährt man, was wahre Halluzinationen sind und was nicht und vieles mehr. Ein Text, der nicht alt wird.