I’ve often wondered if some element of cuckoo was necessary to create astonishing works of art, staggering pieces of writing or masterful musical compositions. This is why I’ve decided to delve a little deeper into hallucinations that have impacted a creators’ work. Hallucinations can be caused by many things aside from dropping acid or drinking mushroom tea. If you asked Freud, he’d tell you that hallucinations are the projection of our unconscious desires, wishes and thoughts. Hallucinations can also be the product of particular mental disorders, sleep deprivation as well as psychosis.
Robert Schumann
Famous music composer, Robert Schumann, spent the end of his life experiencing auditory hallucinations. Auditory hallucinations usually manifest themselves through one or more voices in the sufferer’s head and are often associated with psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia. Schumann’s diaries state that he suffered perpetually from imagining that he had the note “A5” sounding in his ears. The musical hallucinations became increasingly complex. One night he claimed to have been visited by the ghost of Schubert and wrote down the music that he was hearing. Thereafter, he began making claims that he could hear an angelic choir singing to him. As is his condition worsened, the angelic voices transmogrified into devil voices. Much of the music created during his “madness” was rumored to have been destroyed by his wife Clara and their close friend Johannes Brahms. However, some years later Brahms published Opus 23, a piece for four hands called Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann in honor of the composer.
Jim Morrison
Indians scattered on Dawn’s highway bleeding,
Ghosts crowd the young child’s fragile eggshell mind
If you’ve seen the Oliver Stone movie or Wayne’s World 2, than you are no doubt familiar with a recurring theme in much of Jim Morrison’s lyrics and poems. That of the family of bleeding Indians he saw in an accident on the side of the highway as a child. Interestingly, his family does not recall it happening in the way he told it. In one of Morrison’s biographies No One Here Gets Out Alive, his sister is quoted as saying “He enjoyed telling that story and exaggerating it. He said he saw a dead Indian by the side of the road and I don’t even know if that’s true”. The incident occurred in 1947, when Morrison was only four years old. He claims it was the most formative event of his life and that the spirit of an Indian, a shaman, had entered his soul. Throughout the rest of his short life, he would continue to have a strong attachment to Native American culture and his work was heavily influenced by this traumatic memory.
Lewis Carroll
A guy writes a kid’s book about a little girl who chases white rabbits, time running backwards, tea parties with Mad Hatters and evil card queens obsessed with chopping off people’s heads and everyone assumes the writer was on drugs. Okay, so opium was rampant at the time Lewis Carroll (really Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was writing the book. But some medical researchers suspect that Carroll’s widely imaginative story was not necessarily the product of month-long benders, but brain conditions called micropsia and macropsia, coined the “Alice in Wonderland Syndrome” in 1955, after the book. Sufferers of this condition see objects around them growing or shrinking.
Some have concluded that Carroll was a lifetime sufferer from this condition. Author Sadi Ranson, who has written widely about Carroll, suggests that he may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy in which the person won’t fall completely unconscious but their reality can become very altered. Many of the author’s symptoms mimicked experiences in Alice in Wonderland.
William Blake
William Blake claimed to have experienced visions his whole life. They were often associated with beautiful religious themes and imagery. Blake believed that he was personally instructed and encouraged by Archangels to create his artistic works, which he claimed were actively read and enjoyed by those same Archangels.
Salvador Dali- Paranoiac Critical Method
Unlike those who couldn’t escape their visions, Salvador Dalì was inducing hallucinations in order to create art. Freud’s theory of the subconscious became the basis of his “paranoiac-critical method” of painting. Dalì hallucinated images of his own subconscious desires and libidinal urges to create these sensational, twisted alternate universes on canvas. Dalì called the paintings of this period “hand-painted dream photographs”. These photographs were painted representations of the images he would see in his paranoid state. Though was not a true paranoid, he claims to have been able to simulate a paranoid state. Well done.
Joan of Arc
I include Joan of Arc because her visions most definitely triggered her actions and her lifetime’s work. Claimed to have been sent by ‘the King of Heaven’ to raise the siege at Orleans and have Charles crowned King, Joan of Arc accomplished her callings at the young age of seventeen showing unparalleled courage and strength on the battlefield. Joan claimed to hear the voices of Saints whom were the force that guided her. She was resolved on obeying these messages as she believed they were sent directly from the Big G himself. She first began hearing voices when she was thirteen, and soon after had visions of St. Francis, St Catherine and St Margaret. When put on trial, she told the courts she had even kissed their feet, and stated how good they smelled (the Saints, not the feet). Though no one can deny her incredible almost miraculous feats, in more recent times, medical researchers have claimed that she could have suffered a panoply of different diseases that caused her to see such holy vivid images including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, bovine tuberculosis and temporal lobe epilepsy.
Famous Hallucinating Machine: The Dreamachine
I came across the dreamachine in researching Naked Lunch author William S. Burroughs, to see whether his work had been influenced by hallucinations. If you’ve ever read Naked Lunch, or seen the film adaptation, you’d think no one in their right mind could have thought up something that messed up. However, it seems that using what is called the “cut-up technique” [watch Burroughs on cut-ups] and years and years of using morphine and heroin, may be more telling of the book’s utter bizarreness. The dreamachine was created in 1958 by artist Brion Gysin, a colleague and friend of Burroughs. Many have used the dream machine in order to induce altered perceptions of reality including both men and others in their artisitc circle. Rumor has it that when Kurt Cobain was found dead, he had locked himself in a room for 72 hours with a dreamachine. The machine had apparently put him into some sort hypnotic trance that drove him to kill himself. The whole thing turned out to be a hoax, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
In case you’re wondering how it works, one sits in front of the dreamachine with their eyes closed while the pulsating light stimulates the optical nerve and alters the brain’s electrical oscillations. The dreamachine is made from a cylinder with slits cut in the sides. The cylinder is placed on a record turntable and rotated at 78 or 45 revolutions per minute. A light bulb is suspended in the center of the cylinder and the rotation speed allows the light to come out from the holes at a constant frequency, situated between 8 and 13 pulses per second. The “viewer” experiences increasingly bright, complex patterns of color behind their closed eyelids. The patterns become shapes and symbols, swirling around, until the viewer feels surrounded by colors. It is claimed that viewing a dream machine allows one to enter a hypnagogic state. This experience may sometimes be quite intense, but to escape from it, one needs only open one’s eyes.
