His hallucinations consisted of perceptions of men, women, birds, carriages, buildings, tapestries, physically impossible circumstances and scaffolding patterns. Even though his health was in good shape and he had an absence of any psychiatric disorders, the source of the hallucinations remained unknown. At forty years old, Charles Bonnet himself suffered from an unrevealed cause of severe vision loss and experienced the hallucinations.In 1936, Jean Lhermitte and Julian de Ajuriaguerra, concluded that visual hallucinations consist of thalamic lesions as well as ocular pathology.In 1967, French-Swiss neurologist, Georges de Morsier, coined the term Charles Bonnet Syndrome in Bonnets honor. De Morsier’s description of CBS implies a concentrated neurodegeneration, usually occurring in the elderly with typical cognition. In psychiatric literature, the most commonly accepted interpretation of CBS is that of Gold and Rabins’. In 1989, they detailed that the hallucinations associated with CBS are not affecting other sensory modalities. They believed that the visual hallucinations are oftentimes stereotyped, persistent, and/or repetitive in nature. Society and culture
The syndrome is discussed in:

Vilayanur S. Ramachandrans book Phantoms in the Brain. Ramachandran suggests that James Thurber, who was blinded in one eye as a child, may have derived his extraordinary imagination from the syndrome. Vikram Chandras book Sacred Games (2006)
David Eaglemans book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
Oliver Sacks 2012 book Hallucinations
The Indian movie Jawan of Vellimala, released in 2012, in which Mammootty is a victim of the syndrome
The Black Canvas (2014), a chamber opera by the Greek composer Spyros Syrmos, is about a celebrated painter whose visions are caused by CBS.
Visual release hallucinations, also known as Charles Bonnet syndrome or CBS, are a type of psychophysical visual disturbance in which a person with partial or severe blindness experiences visual hallucinations. First described by Charles Bonnet in 1760, the term Charles Bonnet syndrome was first introduced into English-speaking psychiatry in 1982. A related type of hallucination that also occurs with lack of visual input is the closed-eye hallucination. Signs and symptoms
People with significant vision loss may have vivid recurrent visual hallucinations (fictive visual percepts). One characteristic of these hallucinations is that they usually are "lilliputian" (hallucinations in which the characters or objects are smaller than normal). Depending on the content, visual hallucinations can be classified as either simple or complex. Simple visual hallucinations are commonly characterized by shapes, photopsias, and grid-like patterns. Complex visual hallucinations consist of highly detailed representations of people and objects. The most common hallucination is of faces or cartoons. Sufferers understand that the hallucinations are not real, and the hallucinations are only visual, that is, they do not occur in any other senses (such as hearing, smell or taste). Visual hallucinations generally appear when the eyes are open, fading once the visual gaze shifts. It is widely claimed that sensory deprivation is instrumental in the progression of CBS. During episodes of inactivity, hallucinations are more likely to occur.