Over the last year I’ve been having something odd occur and over the last couple of months it’s been happening more frequently, I’ll try my best to explain it, what it boils down to is that I’m seeing things that aren’t there, well, I’m seeing something and my brain is telling me it’s something else.

Typically this happens at work (I work outdoors) when out of the corner of my eye I see a shadow move or the sunlight coming through the trees. Now as soon as I see this movement my brain immediately tells me it’s a person coming at me (or a car if in the road), this sometimes makes me jump!
What I think is happening is that my brain is jumping straight to making something up, it’s doing it quicker than the time it takes me to process what my eyes are actually seeing and for my brain to go ‘shadow’ does that make sense?

WTF?

I used to take a lot of acid back in the 90`s and this sounds familiar. Can help any more than that sorry.

Do you see the dark shadow in your house as well etc?

If so “something” might following you, i.e. the invisible beings, therefore be extra vigilant.

“When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” ― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

p/s: sometime it might go away after a period of time but it is very difficult to say as we don’t know if it is a positive or negative shadow (dark ones most likely negative). Be alert to your surroundings happening.

No acieeeeeed… Though probably AD’s slowing the brain down

Narcolepsy? A mate had it and would talk about peripheral shadows etc.

out of the corner of my eye I see a shadow move or the sunlight coming through the trees

Is this a hallucination of sorts?

Ni.

Are you / do you get a lot of floaters? (Eyes not poo)

If so go to a opticians or doctors immediately. Rapid increase in floaters is a sign of detaching retina.

But my brain, for a fleeting moment is telling me that the shadow is a person or car

Interesting about the narcolepsy, I don’t think I have it, but I am tired a lot and since getting a garmin watch with sleep tracking I see I don’t have much deep sleep and do have a lot of REM sleep…. How accurate it is I don’t know

I was getting flashes in the corner of my eye a while back. Optician sent me to eye clinic to check for detached retina

Erm, TheBrick, yeah in fact I’ve been noticing a few very recently :0/

You are David Vincent and I claim my $5.

I’ll spend it in a deserted diner.

It doesn’t sound to me like hallucinations. More like a heightened state of imagination. Your mind working overdrive, if you like.
I get hallucinations, visual and audible from the Kemadrin I take to offset the side effects of Quetiapine. They are much longer lasting and are very real. Definite voices when nobody is around and people and things, sometimes horrifically frightening things, that are visual for 10 seconds or more. I really ought to stop driving. Not that I drive much anyway and the visual sights are mostly late at night or very early in the mornings.
I digress. I’d strongly suggest a heightened state of mind. Are you particularly anxious?

Stressed?

That sucks monksie, all the best….. Yeah suffering with anxiety long term at the moment

Talk to an optician, if that is all clear, talk to your GP re meds.

I get this occasionally. I’m wondering if it’s my anxiety acting up – tbf, it’s up to 11 with Covid going on. I’ve had to stop solo night rides as I was getting so scared, I’m ok riding at dawn as it gets light?

That happens to me all the time.

I always associate it with dementia as my mum used to be able to see all sorts of things that weren’t there.

(Either that or she really could see ghosts)

Yeah more than likely brain just playing up due to depression/anxiety, but will give the GP/Opticians a shout

I think what the op is describing is a visual hallucination. People often describe it as “a black cat moving in the corner of my eye, almost out of sight”. I’ve had it myself in the past, it’s a sudden movement just at the very edge of your vision and it can trigger a bit of a burst of adrenaline, especially if you’re in a reasonably dangerous environment when you’re always on the lookout for stuff.

The most usual cause is stress, anxiety or just plain tiredness, there’s plenty of that around at the moment.

It’s not just a joke, if (like me, but shhhh, don’t tell anyway) you took your fair share of Disco Biscuits in the past, it can cause it even decades later, but you’d had to have been a proper wreckhead back in the day. Booze can also cause it.

Far less likely is dementia and brain tumours.

Thanks P-Jay, better description than mine. No mitsus here

My dad had hallucinations with Parkinson’s disease.
If it’s any comfort, they were completely different sounding.
Slow moving characters in the centre of vision, out of reach, like in the back garden, but he could definitely focus and “watch” them. It was scary sometimes how long he could see them for.
If I was you I’d be checking with an opticians and prob gp, but no panic.

**** hell that sounds horrible. I’m at my wit’s end with anxiety and depression but I haven’t started hallucinating yet. I think that level of disruption would tip me into total meltdown.

Go and see your GP or at least book a phone appointment.

OK it’s time to own up.
I’ve been hiding in the bushes and watching you work.
Thought you’d caught me a couple of times but managed to duck back down before you got to close.

😂 now I know I’ll start dressing more seductively for you 😘

globati it isn’t that bad, just makes me jump every now and then (then laugh at myself and call myself a ****)

I’ve had something similar when I was under a lot of stress and suffering from poor sleep. For me it was spiders i’d see, probably because I’m a bit of an arachnophobe.
The good news is that when the stress reduced and I started sleeping properly it went and never returned.

Sounds like an illusion as it’s related to some form of visual stimulus, hallucinations occur without. What you are describing is called a pareidolic illusion – brain forms a familiar object from something indistinct eg seeing a face in a cloud. Not usually caused by something nasty but made more likely by worrying about it (hightened emotions can make illusions more likely) but you should get your eyes checked out to be on the safe side.

I’ve had detached retina (twice)-I thought I was being attacked by giant crows
Get an eye hospital to check this out asap
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/detached-retina-retinal-detachment/

I have had similar when very very tired – buffalo jumping out of the bushes at the side of the road sort of thing. IIRC I had a couple when doing the ‘puffer

Get it checked out but 99% nothing to worry about – just a mix of anxiety, stress and tiredness

Probably your eyesight getting worse + a vivid imagination. I’d go to the opticians.

buffalo jumping out of the bushes

In Edinburgh?

Or a prompted stimulus
Maybe there was something there once , or maybe twice and now everytime you see a shape out the corner of your eye your brain joins the dots and the old neandathol cave man thinks ‘Sabre Tooth Tiger’ . Quick bit of adrenalin and then you realise its your jumper you hooked on a tree.

Peripheral cue is something similar I think, seeing something thats not directly in front of you that might be a sabre tooth tiger or not.

OP,
Now that many possibilities have been suggested you just need to eliminate those possibilities one by one.
That is the rational way to find the root cause of the problem.
Go check with the GP etc because that could be an early sign of thing to come.

Sounds like you have a trusty dealer lol

But my brain, for a fleeting moment is telling me that the shadow is a person or car

I met someone once who suffers from Synchronicity.

A lot of our processing of the world is done by the subconscious and especially when something sudden or surprising is happening your subconscious deals with it (releases adrenaline, tenses muscles, swerves the car or whatever) and your conscious mind doesn’t find out until about half a second later and basically takes the credit. But theres an approx 1/2 second lag between the subconscious reaction and your conscious mind getting the information. Your experience of life is a story your conscious brain tells you after its happened – we all ‘live’ a fraction of a second in the past

Sychronicity is where info leaks from the subconscious to the conscious in that half second. To him it was quite a horrible experience – if a surprising (typically bad) thing happened the sensation was as if the thought of the event was in his head just moment before he perceived it to happen. That made him feel like he actually made those bad things happen by thinking them.

Oddly I notice that lag when I’m driving vans – now and then when a stone kicks up and hits the wheel arch its a loud gunshot-bang in vans that aren’t lined / have no bulkhead. When it happens I’ve noticed myself grip the wheel and flinch – I even feel the adrenaline that comes from the surprise – before I hear the noise.

For you maybe you’re aware, a little, of your subconscious trying to decode visual noise – as your brain is always looking for familiar patterns -and you’re getting wind of the things your subconscious thinks the shapes and shadows could be  before it has decided that its not a given recognisable thing and not something it needs to inform you conscious thoughts about.

An interesting extreme example of this conscious / subconscious devision is there are people who are totally, clinically blind. They have functional eyes/optic nerves but their brain is unable to process the signals from them as ‘sight’. But for some people its only their conscious brain that is blind – their subconscious brain still responds to vision. So they can’t genuinely can’t see you but if you wave something at their face they blink – they’ll avoid a sudden obstacle when walking even though the can’t see it.

H folks. I think this is a good thread to ask this question ive always wondered.

When im relaxed and eyes closed (like when about to sleep/tired) I can see small, sometimes colourful shapes in front of me. If I concentrate I can see through these shapes to more colours. The best I can describe it is like a galaxy / windows 95 screensaver. On “the other side” of this image I can sometime see landscapes or just shapes. If I try and concentrate further then I get a headache and it goes to black. Ive been able to do this from being quite young.

Does anyone else have this? Why or what is causing it (afaik my parents wernt microdosing lsd when I was a kid)

its most likely your brains fight or flight system being a little too attuned and over active. it’s hardwired into us over millennia and used to be useful survival tool for when the chances of that shadow we can see out of the corner of our eye being a tiger coming out the bushes to get us being far higher than they are now. anxiety and stress mess with / are inextricably linked wit your fight / flight response

New specs recently? The current fashion is for polishing the edges of the lenses rather than leaving them ground means I get more things catching my eye from peripheral vision than ever, especially when wearing my rimless pair. Doesn’t happen with thick plastic pair that cover the lens edge.

Was thinking either excess caffeine or alcohol use, or stress, but then I see that you mention anxiety. Sounds like your fight or flight response is being triggered by visual artefacts that usually your brain would filter out.

Anxiety is a horrendously debilitating condition, I know from personal experience. Worth a chat with your doctor about this.

But my brain, for a fleeting moment is telling me that the shadow is a person or car

Sounds like an over active amygdala, brought on by anxiety / depression, which is triggering your flight or flight response at a very low threshold. I had similar-ish when I was very ill with anxiety – not shadows, but just my nervous system being at DefCon 3 24/7 and lots of really trivial things freaking me out like I couldn’t sit anywhere where someone could walk behind me as that freaked me out.

devbrix is correct.

Hallucinations in narcolepsy do not occur when you are busy working.

I’m grateful for this thread. It’s brought about some motivation to discuss my Kemadrin prescription. I think the cure is worse than the side effects of my Quitiapine and my wife can’t take much more and I don’t think I can, either.
This may ease your worry a little, Houns although I don’t mean to make light of what your experiencing. This morning’s delight was:

As real as my hand in front on my face. Around 3:00am. I woke up suddenly. The bedroom was as bright as a hot, cloudless summer day. At the bottom of my bed stood a huge man. Similar to Robbie Coltrane’s character in Harry Potter (I don’t know the names- I’ve not watched any of them). His long unkempt beard was actually a crawling nest of large wasps. He slowly opened his eyes which were eye sockets without eyes. He gently blew out and the wasps swarmed into the air. His face, now empty of wasps was pock marked and full of small holes with white grub things beginning to crawl out.

My wife said it took at least 10 seconds after crying out, I didn’t realise I had, to end it. Yes, enough is enough.