There is a Monster Under My Bed!

Visual Hallucinations are a common symptom of Dementia.

Mum often suffered from visual hallucinations in the early days of the Dementia journey. There were obvious chickens clucking away in her bed or a snake on the blanket. These were very real to her and very frightening. No amount of persuading her that there were no real chickens would calm her anxiety. To her, these chickens were invading her bed!

 We tried all sorts of strategies.

“Come on chick !Chick, chick, chick.” This was the way in which they had called chickens on her farm growing up. We thought it was chickens in her hallucinations because chickens had been such an integral part of her childhood, growing up on a farm.

We tried “coaxing” the chickens out, all to no avail.

 The chicken hallucination had just calmed down and mum started to tell me there was a monster under her bed. Oh no!

Here we go again, I thought. It was so traumatic for everyone involved. It invaded mum’s every waking hour. Again, we tried all our usual tricks and strategies but nothing helped. This time she was quite convinced there was a monster under the bed.

 One day, I was calmly walking past her room in our house in a leafy suburb of Sydney, there from underneath the bed appeared the head of a blue tongue lizard, its tongue darting in and out of its mouth. I, somehow by some miracle, calmly said “MUM STAY ON YOUR BED!”

I shouted for my son who was home from university in a panicked voice. He came running!

There was, in actual fact, a monster under the bed!

My son sprang into action! A quick google on how to coax a monster blue tongue lizard out from under a bed. A mince meat trail, a card board box and a barking Labrador puppy later, lizard was happy to be released into our leafy North Shore suburb.