Charles Bonnet Syndrome

Dear sir,

More specifically, I see beautiful people in Eastern dress. I see children with huge, gleaming teeth. It's not like a dream, it's like a movie. A boring movie, but a film all the same. I've lived ninety-five years and this is my first hallucination.

It is curious to me for two reasons. It is first because these people have waited most of my life to introduce themselves to me. When I say most of my life I mean my adult life, for no one questions the illusions of a child. No one calls a child schizophrenic, but rather prone to meeting imaginary friends. The second reason this is curious to me is that I have been blind since the age of forty-three.

The last time I saw anything at all (apart from those I have mentioned just now), I was going to school in Paris. I was living with a friend and going out drinking every night and dancing on the weekends for cash. My friend and I would use this cash for cigarettes, mostly. We would sit on the fire escape and inhale and exhale with the cigarettes perched between our lips. I always allowed the smoke to absorb into my eyes. I liked the feeling of pain and the feeling of seeing through the smoke. This was obviously very damaging. I was blind within four months of living in Europe and had to be deported back home to my mother.

The figures I see now: I do not recognize them. I had been fascinated with Freudian determinism but I assure you I have never in my life met this population of illusions. The only person I have ever seen and recognized is that of myself in a bathrobe and tobacco pipe. The mirror image of myself was then divided into four other people and at that very moment I shut my eyes because I did not wish to experience this horror any longer.

I wish to  be very clear, sir. The only reason I am seeking help now is that I have become very bored and tired of meeting these people over and over. They do not age. They do not develop as characters. They do not even change clothes. If they acted as real people I would be most excited to entertain them in my life, but not so. I would much rather be blind again.

Regards.