Reptilians, reptilians everywhere. Any face you look at, a lizard face appears, as if they were dragon people. Strange, right? You think it is a dream or more like a nightmare. You look someone in the eyes and their face begins to transform, scales appear, the skin darkens, the face starts to stretch and pointed ears appear. Their eyes begin to change color, red, yellow. Very strange. A very strange feeling.
For years, a woman we will call Rose suffered these visions. They were not nightmares, they were not hallucinations, nor a psychiatric problem like schizophrenia. It was something real for her, but something incredible for science.
No one else saw dragons
Maybe this statement seems logical to you, but it was not for Rose. Since she was a child, she knew there was something different inside her, something did not fit. Normal faces became distorted after looking at them for a short time, only faces, objects all remained intact. For a long time, she felt a lot of shame admitting that she saw dragons, reptilians, or whatever we want to call them. She tried to go on with her “normal” life, but in her daily relationships she could not take it anymore. She did not see faces, she saw dragons.
Did she not have medical tests?
When she finally dared to talk about what she was seeing, doctors investigated everything, and the worst part was that all neurological tests and analyses were within normal parameters, so they decided to perform an MRI. And that was where what no one had seen appeared. She had old lesions in the white matter of the brain, near key areas for facial recognition. They were probably lesions that had been there since birth, due to lack of oxygen at birth or other issues, but she was not making anything up.
The name of the monster: prosopometamorphopsia
The diagnosis was prosopometamorphopsia, an extremely rare neurological disease that causes faces to be perceived as distorted, eyes in different places, stretched faces, strange features. In this case, what she saw were almost demonic reptilian beings. It is so rare that in more than a century only 80 cases have been documented worldwide.
Medication to see better
Doctors started with valproic acid, a drug used for epilepsy, migraines, and neurological disorders, and it worked because the visions began to decrease, but other symptoms appeared, such as auditory hallucinations during sleep, and the treatment had to be adjusted. In this case, they introduced rivastigmine.
Today, after years of follow up, the woman has regained stability and can look people in the face without fear of being frightened. Not everything has disappeared completely, but it is improving.
A textbook case
This case was documented and published in The Lancet, one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world, and not out of morbid curiosity or to make fun of her, but because it raises something very interesting. The brain can radically alter the reality we perceive without affecting intelligence, consciousness, or logical thinking, and without the person being “crazy”.
The human mind is powerful, it is fragile, and not everything we do not understand is imagined. If Rose had gone to the doctor when she began to see these visions, perhaps she would not have spent more than half her life feeling afraid of herself and of what she saw.
Of course, from here we want to remind that rare diseases matter, and that they also deserve attention and research. Who knows when it could affect someone around us?