For over 50 years, a woman in the Netherlands lived with a terrifying secret she couldn’t explain. Whenever she looked at someone’s face—friends, family, coworkers—it would slowly warp into something unrecognizable.
Black scales. Elongated snouts. Giant, glowing eyes in shades of red, green, or yellow. Their faces would transform into dragons. Not once in a while. Every day.
She kept quiet for most of her life. As a child, she thought everyone saw the same thing. As a teenager, she realized they didn’t. By adulthood, the hallucinations had grown so disruptive that they interfered with basic social interaction.
Conversations were exhausting. Eye contact became unbearable. Still, she managed to graduate, raise a daughter, and work as a school administrator, even as her reality began to unravel around her.
This Rare Brain Disorder Made a Woman See Dragons Instead of Faces
It wasn’t until she was 52 that she finally went to a psychiatric clinic in The Hague. Doctors ran the usual tests—blood work, neurological exams, and an EEG—and everything appeared normal. However, an MRI revealed small lesions in the white matter near the lentiform nucleus, an area of the brain responsible for memory, attention, and facial recognition. The damage wasn’t new, but it was enough to short-circuit how her brain processed faces.
Doctors diagnosed her with prosopometamorphopsia, a rare neurological condition that distorts facial features. Most cases are temporary and triggered by migraines, epilepsy, or head trauma. Hers was lifelong and deeply embedded. Experts believe her visual cortex may have developed abnormally, possibly due to oxygen deprivation around the time of birth.
The dragons weren’t the only thing. She reported seeing faces in empty rooms, motion in the corners of her vision, and even large insects crawling on her hands. But she had full awareness that these were hallucinations—she didn’t know what to do about them. She eventually reached out to famed neurologist Oliver Sacks, who connected her with the Dutch research team that published her case in The Lancet.
Initial treatment with valproic acid helped, but caused severe sleep disruptions. A switch to rivastigmine reduced the hallucinations enough for her to function normally. For the first time in her life, the dragons began to fade.
She’s remained in the same job for years now, and her world no longer feels like it’s coming apart at the seams. But the hallucinations haven’t disappeared entirely. Sometimes, when faces linger too long, they still shift.
She sees them, acknowledges them, and moves on.
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