One of the first descriptions of a migraine aura comes to us from the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates who said of the person experiencing the aura, “He seemed to see something shining before him like a light, usually in part of the right eye; at the end of a moment, a violent pain supervened in the right temple, then in all the head and neck.”
Though Hippocrates recorded this strange sensation some 2400 years ago, the migraine aura is actually quite rare. Only about 8% of us will ever see this “shining” that has been likened by scientists to scintillating zigzags and ghostly hallucinations. Hubert Airy, a nineteenth-century pioneer in the study of migraines, illustrated the progression of the aura this way:

Anne-Laure Autin has experienced these auras. In her series Locked-In, she recounts a particularly fascinating episode in a surreal display of beautiful Van Dyke Brown prints. Her persona is at once paralyzed and pulled apart in a hall of spectral rooms. The fear of the inner girl vies, in a visual contortion, with the anxiety of the outer woman. In the words that follow, Autin guides us along the perilous fault lines of the mind and body.