The sensation was so real that when I would see myself in a window or full-length mirror, it was quite a shock to realize that I was still my normal height of under five feet.Īnother case is that of a 38-year-old woman whose hallucinations gave her “a very peculiar feeling of being very close to the ground as I walk along. When walking down the street I would think I would be able to look down on the tops of others’ heads, and it was very frightening and annoying not to see as I was feeling. This sensation would pass with the migraine but would leave me with a feeling that I was very tall. It was at these times that I experienced the sensation that my head has grown to tremendous proportions and was so light that it floated up to the ceiling, although I was sure it was still attached to my neck.
In a third case, a 23-year-old secretary described her hallucinations in a letter to Lippman:Ībout every six months I would have a major attack that lasted for weeks and required hospitalization. This feeling of ear distortion did not bother the patient, however, because she, too, “could see in the mirror that it did not exist.” from childhood,” who “complains frequently of her left ear “ballooning out 6 inches or more” a few hours before onset of a mild migraine headache. Very occasionally she has an attack where she feels small - ‘about one foot high,’ she says she knows the distortion isn’t real because she looks in the mirror to see.”Īnother is that of a woman in her 90s who “stated that she had had classic migraine headache with nausea and vomiting. “With these symptoms often occurs a sensation of the neck extending out on one side for a foot or more at other times her hip or flank balloons out before, with, or after the headache. “Some hours before the attack of one-sided headache and vomiting, and often during and after attack she may teeter or reel as though drunk,” Lippman reports. One case is that of a 38-year-old housewife whose headaches began during, and had recurred ever since, her second pregnancy, at the age of 19. The American neurologist Caro Lippman noted, in a 1952 paper published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, that “the great variety” of hallucinations experienced during the migraine aura were still “little known to the medical profession.” He incorrectly claimed that “there is no description in the migraine literature of hallucinations of the sense of body image,” adding that “over a period of eighteen years of intensive migraine studies I have collected many histories of such hallucinations from both men and women,” and he then went on to describe seven cases. This article is adapted from Mohen Costandi’s book “ Body Am I: The New Science of Self-Consciousness.”
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