Sound

A Delirious Testament to Imagination

Tom Jenkins | Monday 17 June, 2013 14:00

*This is an edited extract from Snipe Vol. 4, Issue 1.

A man lies on his back in a hospital bed. He’s immobile, rendered helpless by an unknown ailment or catastrophic injury. In front of him two fairies dance between the cheap, generic NHS furniture that litters his intensive care cubicle. He’s not sure if he’s asleep or awake, dead or alive. He doesn’t feel pain or sadness, only joy. The fairies have come to heal him. They work manual jobs like him – some work on the railways, some on the canals. They caught the train up to see him. How else would they get there?

‘It’s a testament to our imaginations, the images are so striking and florid and dramatic’, enthuses Dorset-born, London-based singer-songwriter Victoria Hume as we sip drinks in a Dalston café. The bizarre experience that opens this piece is one of many she’s collected through interviews with former Intensive Care (IC) patients for a fascinating forthcoming project entitled Delirium. Hume has been meeting with ten members of a support group linked to a NHS county hospital for several weeks. All are former IC patients who experienced some sort of hallucinatory experience whilst admitted and heavily sedated. She plans to put these experiences to music for a series of shows in London and Bristol in June.

‘Some people’s hallucinations are brief and some go on for days – in their minds anyway. A lot of people talk about it as something that seems to be going on forever, so time gets really messed up’, she says. ‘A couple of people saw skeletons, a couple of people experienced terrorist attacks … two people had the same paranoia about staff trying to poison them – which is probably about IV lines going into your arm – and bombs, that was the other one. I think you can perceive wires around you and that permeates. What happens more often than not is something gets picked up from the immediate environment and it gets – perverted is a strong word – changed into something else.’

Common themes

It’s estimated that up to 80% of people being treated in IC experience some form of delirium, or ‘acute confusional state’, and the bulk of these will hallucinate. It’s a traumatic, vivid experience for many. ‘One woman had had an enormous car crash, she’d broken everything except her back and her neck and one thigh bone’, says Victoria. ‘At one point in the interview I said, “so the hallucinations were actually quite a small part of what you’ve been through” and she said, “no they were the thing that disturbed me the most.”

‘Some experiences are shared; some are unique. The context is always different but there are common themes. Being on forms of transport is one – planes, boats. One person thought it might be motion sickness – sometimes they’re on mattresses that move, it’s a way of stopping bedsores. Sometimes people do actually move around. They’ll be taken from the IC unit to have a scan, but they won’t be completely conscious so they won’t be able to understand what’s going on.’

Down on the farm

Not all Victoria’s subjects experienced entirely negative and nightmarish hallucinations. One woman believed she was resting comfortably in a bird’s nest. Another interviewee, a truck driver by day, experienced something akin to a scene from the earliest days of the industrial revolution, he and his mother travelling down to the (non-existent) family fish farm in Cornwall to quell rioting workers, all of whom were dressed in Victorian attire. In reality, the only connection was a brief spell working on a sheep farm. ‘There were more neutral experiences than I was expecting – I thought everybody had a really awful time’, says Victoria. ‘Most people have one element or one phase that’s really dark and horrible and often associated with nihilistic images of death and loneliness, but that tends to be one episode and then the other episodes aren’t necessarily bad.’

Hume has worked in the NHS for fifteen years. ‘It’s quite disturbing watching people in IC, although I don’t work in it’, she says. ‘God, you’re so vulnerable! Everything is done to you – you cease to have any control over your circumstance. The treatments for health crises can be as traumatising as the crises themselves but it’s very difficult to extract one from the other. I do think hallucinations really trouble people and they don’t have a context for it. Historically, people have been frightened to talk about it. They’re trying to reconcile with normal life in some way or another. That’s one of the reasons I’m doing this, to get people to talk about it more.’

18th century weirdness

Victoria appears to have found the perfect venue for her London dates, which will feature a mixture of songs and recorded speech collages (from the interviewees): The Old Operating Theatre and Herb Garrett in SE1, an 18th century medical facility, part of the old St Thomas’ hospital. ‘They do a lot of events there and they tend to be quite bonkers’, laughs Victoria. ‘Nobody knew it was there – it was rediscovered about 50 years ago. It’s one of the weirdest places I’ve been.’

Victoria Hume plays The Old Operating Theatre, SE1 in collaboration with the PRS, Wednesday 19th and Thursday 20th June. Tickets available here.

---