Delirium at The Old Operating Theatre

Event information

'Delirium' is a series of songs about hallucinations in intensive care, written by Victoria Hume and based on interviews with people who have been through this extraordinary experience, and with the staff who care for them.

It is estimated that up to 80% of people being treated in intensive care experience delirium – the bulk of these will hallucinate. Hallucinations are not dreams: for those who live them they are real – and have a powerful impact, hard to reconcile with reality, and remembered vividly sometimes decades later. Many hallucinations are persecutory, some are calm, but all offer metaphors for the individual in crisis, whether comforted or threatened. Yet this is an area we know little about unless we have experienced it ourselves or through our work.

Victoria has worked in the NHS for fifteen years, for much of that time as an arts manager, continuing to write and record music throughout that time. The project derived from an interest in the way the mind creates stories to fill gaps in perception and to comprehend traumatic situations.

The songs – incorporating recordings of the interviews – will be performed by Victoria with Quinta and Chris Reed. Delrium has been funded through Women Make Music, an initiative of the PRS for Music Foundation. A blog featuring interviews and commentary is at http://victoriajhume.wordpress.com/

'I found that as I lay in bed, as the nurses would come and see me, or the doctors, all I would see was the skeleton. I couldn’t see the face.
And I thought ‘am I alive or dead?’ Because that was how I felt – you know – ‘am I really alive?’

He’d set a lot of wires up under my bed, with explosives on, which he kept on trying to detonate, but every time he tried to do something, somebody came into the room, so he never succeeded, but I can remember him getting very close, I can remember him trying to choke me once, and of course I couldn’t talk…'

'I was put on a spaceship with a row of patients… there was a doctor in with us, but he was malevolent. [We] were actually way up above the earth, spinning round.'

'I remember getting into the ambulance. Don’t remember anything else much after that …but I remember this vision of some matchsticks or candles – all different colours, all alight. My granddad, who had passed away, was going ‘come with me – it’s all alright, everything’s fine’, and I was going ‘no, I don’t want to come with you’…