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Oliver Sacks – Hallucinations

My friend Liz, following the collapse of a love affair, found herself heart- broken and despondent.

About to swallow a handful of sleeping tablets and wash them down with a tumbler of whiskey, she was startled to hear a voice say'

"No. You don't want to do that," and then "Remember that what you are feeling now you will not be feeling later'"

The voice seemed to come from the outside; it was a man's voice,  though whose she did not know.

She said, faintly, "Who said that?" There was no answer, but a "granular" figure (as she put it) materialised in the chair opposite her – a young man in eighteenth-century dress who glimmered for a few seconds and then disappeared.

 A feeling of immense relief and joy came over her.

Although Liz knew that the voice must have come from the deepest part of herself,  she speaks of it, playfully, as her "guardian angel”