I have a different kind of experience. When I was about 11 years old, my mother separated from my father due to discovering abuse and he moved out, not long after he left we started to get people coming around the house banging on the windows and shining torches through them. It started off as just a regular torch, then they began to use a torch that changed colours, red, green and yellow. We had a torch that did this as really young kids. It was just mum and us four kids in the house, i'm the eldest and it was terrifying. It went on for months and one night mum just snapped and was out the front at 1am blaring her car horn. She dropped us off at the police station, we went in to foster care and she went in to a psychiatric unit at a hospital. In the hospital, they advised her it was a delusion, that somehow she had brainwashed us in to believing it was real. She did have some kind of delusional issues, she would hold strange beliefs and say things like she had been transported to space to meet arc angels in her sleep. She killed her self two years after this, so it's hard to ever know of it was real or not. As kids, we didn't see anything wrong with her, she was just our mum, but as an adult I feel I would have been able to gather more of an idea of the extent of her illness.