RAAM: Shusanah Pillinger 'saw goblins' during 3,004-mile race

[Han]

This article is mainly about the race, I wish they had asked more about the "Goblins":

BBC Sport - RAAM: Shusanah Pillinger 'saw goblins' during 3,004-mile race

 

[Burnt State]

On this radio show she describes how her sleep deprivation produced these recurring hallucinations of seeing big chinned goblins morphing out of leaves in the trees at night along with monarchs in their crowns. She said the first time it happens you're quite startled; they are mean and evil, but as you see them more often you get used to them - that's interesting - both the recurrence of a similar hallucination and the ability to accept it. Sleep deprivation hallucinations are more bizarre than LSD for their ability to easily alter basic visual reality in spontaneous ways vs. taking goblin acid that just transforms everyone you see into a squashed ugly goblin.

Interview with Pillinger starts at 2:36:00:BBC Radio Cambridgeshire - The Dotty McLeod Breakfast Show, 07/07/2015
Press on the triangle in the main box to get a timeline.

Here's a more elaborate discussion on her recurring episodes of hallucination and how her personality altered while hallucinating - is this the default brain mode attempting to communicate?
Four legs good | Crew for Shu Pillinger in the Race Across America

 

[Han]

Thanks Burnt, I will listen with interest.

 

[Wade]

So is there any reason to think this "phenomenon" exists on a survival basis or anything like that. What I mean is that i sometimes hear about a weird mechanism the body might do when under duress and think it's an unintended consequence because of being deprived of something when it actually might be a survival/preservation thing.

 

[Burnt State]

So is there any reason to think this "phenomenon" exists on a survival basis or anything like that. What I mean is that i sometimes hear about a weird mechanism the body might do when under duress and think it's an unintended consequence because of being deprived of something when it actually might be a survival/preservation thing.

Perhaps if there were images or messages coming through that was telling the person to get off the bike and go to sleep I could see it as a survival mechanism. But for me these kinds of moments on the fringes of human experience exposes more of the limitations of the our sensory apparatus and the random nature of how and why different kinds of images, narrative fragments, sounds etc. spontaneously appear when that sensing-mind-image system gets stressed.

We are a sensory flesh and blood mechanical image factory that has its own misfires, limitations and boundary parameters that will produce these kinds of hiccups more often than not. That similar hallucinations recur for individuals gives us some insight into possible reasons for why some people have recurring experiences that make them feel that they are in contact with non-human intelligences, see the same ghost, same gnome etc. over and over again at very select and heightened moments in their lifetime - just like the cyclist and her recurring encounters with goblins when sleep deprived at various points in her life.