“The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” – Oliver Sacks

Day by day, week by week, the dreams, the visions, came often and grew deeper. They were not occasional now, but occupied most of the day. We would see her rapt, as if in a trance, her eyes sometimes closed, sometimes open, but unseeing, and always a faint, mysterious smile on her face. If anyone approached her, or asked her something, as the nurses had to do, she would respond at once, lucidly and courteously, but there was, even among the most down-to-earth staff, a feeling that she was in another world, and that we should not interrupt her. I shared this feeling and, though curious, was reluctant to probe. Once, just once, I said “Bhagawhandi, what is happening?”

“I am dying” she answered. “I am going home. I am going back to where I came from – you might call it my return.”

Another week passed, and now Bhagawhandi no longer responded to external stimuli, but seemed wholly enveloped in a world of her own, and though her eyes were closed, her face still bore its faint, happy smile. “She’s on her return journey”, the staff said. “She’ll soon be there”. Three days later she died – or should we say “arrived” having completed her passage to India?

Chp: “The Dog Beneath the Skin”

Stephen D., aged 22, medical student, on highs (cocaine, PCP, chiefly amphetamines.)

Vivid dream one night, dreamt that he was a dog, in a world unimaginably rich and significant in smells. (“The happy smell of water…the brave smell of a stone.”) Waking, he found himself in such a world. “As if I had been totally colour blind before, and suddenly found myself in a world of full colour.” He did, in fact, have an enhancement of colour vision (“I could distinguish between dozens of brown where I’d seen just brown before. My leather-bound books, which looked similar before, now all had quite distinct and distinguishable hues”) and a dramatic enhancement of eidetic visual perception and memory (“I could never draw before, I couldn’t “see” in my things in my mind, but now it was like having a hidden camera lucida in my mind – I “saw” everything, as if projected on the paper, and I just drew the outlines that I “saw”. Suddenly, I could do the most accurate anatomical drawings”.) But it was the exaltation of smell which really transformed his world: “I had dreamt I was a dog – an olfactory dream – and now I awoke to an infinitely redolent world – a world in which all other sensations, enhanced as they were, paled before smell.” And with all this there was a sort of trembling, eager emotion, and a strange nostalgia, as of a lost world, half-forgotten, half recalled.*

“I went into a scent shop” he continued. “I had never had much of a nose for smells, but now I distinguished each one instantly – and I found each one unique, evocative, a whole world.” He found he could distinguish all his friends – and patients – by smell: “I went into the clinic, I sniffed like a dog, and that in that sniff recognised, before seeing them, the twenty patients who were there. Each had his own olfactory physiognomy, a smell-face, far more vivid and evocative, more redolent, than any sight face.” He could smell their emotions – fear, contentment, sexuality – like a dog. He could recognise every street, every shop, by smell – he could find his way around New York, infallibly, by smell.

He experienced a certain impulse to sniff and touch everything.

…Somewhat intellectual before and inclined to reflection and abstraction, he now found though, abstraction and categorisation, somewhat difficult and unreal, in view of the compelling immediacy of each experience.

Rather suddenly, after three weeks, this strange transformation ceased – his sense of smell, all his senses, returned to normal; he found himself back, with a sense of mingled loss and relief, in his old world of pallor, sensory faintness, non-concreteness and abstraction. “I’m glad to be back”, he said “but it’s a tremendous loss too. I now see what we give up in being civilised and human. We need the other – the “primitive” – as well”

…The need for such inhibition cannot be reduced to the Freudian, nor should it be exalted , romaticised, to the Blakean. Perhaps we need it, as Head implies, that we may be men and not dogs.

The second time they were seated in a corner together, with a mysterious, secret smile on their faces, a smile I had never seen before, enjoying the strange pleasure and peace they now seemed to have. I crept up quietly, so as not to disturb them. They seemed to be locked in a singular, purely numerical converse. John would say a number – a six figure number. Michael would catch the number, nod, smile and seem to savour it, Then he, in turn, would say another six figure number, and now it was John who received, and appreciated it richly. They looked, at first, like two connoisseurs wine-tasting, sharing rare taste, rare appreciations.

…Had the numbers any meaning?

…As soon as I got home I pulled out tables of powers, factors, logarithms and primes. …I already had a hunch and now I confirmed it. All the numbers, the six figure numbers, which the twins had exchanged, were primes – i.e., numbers that could be evenly divided by no other whole number other than itself or one.