As a child, my
overactive imagination was prone to some very real
hallucinations. What I saw were not
dreams, low-res
mirages or
sparkles or
monsters out of the corner of my eye; these were things my brain
subconsciouslessly added to my vision during the processing of
optical data, and they seemed as real as the other
objects surrounding me. For example, several times per day, I felt that I was able to see all
bacteria floating through the air. These visions, instead of
frightening me, usually left me in a state of
awe. I even played games with myself, "catching" passing
microbes.
There were two visions, however, which seriously affected me in a negative way, so much so that I still vividly remember them today. The first was waking up to see the walls of my room covered with spider egg sacs. Baby spiders were hatching out and ballooning all over my room. Meanwhile, several dozen very large spiders (apparently the mothers) were attending to the (several hundred) sacks. I am not particularly vulnerable to arachnophobia, but this was too much. I ran out of my room crying.
The second nasty vision involved snails. In short, every surface in my house was overflowing with crawling snails. The walls, the floors, the furniture - no place was immune. One solitary snail is hardly frightening, but for some reason the idea of thousands of gastropods surrounding me terrified me like I had never been terrified before. I ran, feeling the sickening crunches under my feet, determined to get away and alert others to the infestation. I yelled at my sister, my mother, and my father, but they were unable to see the snails. I went on seeing the mollusks for about one hour. In the end, I curled up on the loveseat in my living room and closed my eyes, convinced that I was going insane. When I opened them again minutes later, the house was snail-free.