Hacker News Reader

Comment by zabzonk | Hacker News Reader

well, hallucinations are extremely common post-op things - can't speak for the author's specific case. when my mum broke her hip & had it replaced (she had already had similar on her other hip), i remember this with the nurse:

me: she's gone mad!

nurse: calm down, she will be ok.

and she mostly was, but never really the same again, until she died.

then, i fractured my ankle and had to have lots of orthopaedic banging, screwing and hammering done. following that i had some of the most vivid hallucinations i have ever experienced - i could not differentiate the hallucinations from reality. but the nurses treated it as all routine.

this was all courtesy of the NHS - please support the junior doctors (my niece is one)

View on HN

You experienced something different from these cases: "These dreams are distinguished from regular dreams by being especially vivid. When asked to rate the degree of realism of such dreams, most rate them ten out of ten—the highest degree of realism. Patients often report that they are “more real than real.” They occur both during periods of sleep and periods of wakefulness, and they are easily distinguished from hallucinations or bouts of delirium."

> they are easily distinguished from hallucinations or bouts of delirium

how so?

My interpretation, and assuming they are like lucid dreams or out of body experiences in quality: you retain your normal waking consciousness, the environment changes but your emotional and rational capability of processing events doesn't.

You can easily experience this yourself by doing grounding exercises in a lucid dream. “more real than real” is always the first thing that comes to mind.

I compare the "more real than real" to watching cinematic scenes of nature, color corrected, high frame rate, high resolution recordings of unspoiled nature.

I know what you mean, but the intensity is not comparable

"lucid dream" and "easily" don't mix for us. We've been trying for almost a decade with not a single actually-lucid dream. :(

We have only ever gotten close where, during a daydream, we managed to figure out that we could have been daydreaming, but past that, even our daydreams are completely non-lucid as well.

We suspect our autism is the culprit... but as for how to overcome it, we are at such a loss.

-Emily (our HN profile explains our signatures)

I'm curious if the post-surgery cognitive decline is due to the anesthetics, or the trauma.

i did not have a general for my own surgery, just a spinal, so in my experience it is not the anaesthetic. i reasearched this a bit after my mum's last surgery (can't find links now) and it seems there is a theory that fats released into the bloodstream by surgical procedures can be causing the hallucinations.

obviously, this is not an area open to easy research by clinicians.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com