We use our eyes to see what is outside, and our minds to see what is inside. Or another way to put it: the physical eyes see external stimuli, but the mind's eye sees internal stimuli. Sometimes, though, internal stimuli are experienced as though external. When that happens, it's a hallucination, and a sign of sleep deprivation, drugs, madness, or other epistemic misfortunes.
Rarely, though, certain external stimuli are experienced as though internal. And when your mind's eye starts involuntarily seeing them, flashes of their bone-white faces appearing in your daydreams, don't just turn your attention to something else, because they're not a hallucination.
Just like your eyes have evolved to pick up on dangerous stimuli, so has your mind's eye. And you don't want to ignore its warnings.
Sightless Suckerfish
The sightless suckerfish has changed very little over the course of natural history, and is far more ancient than any living species. These parasitic flying organisms are the source of suckersickness, an illness that would have crippled civilization in its infancy were it not for the enormous nutritional needs of the parasite that causes it. Sightless suckerfish latch on to their prey and survive by sucking a bit of blood from them each day. Over time, this causes anemia, the main symptom of suckersickness, and most victims live with it for the rest of their days.
Suckerfish cannot reproduce until they have consumed a gargantuan amount of blood, and they only lay their eggs once before dying, usually in the corpse of the last victim they parasitized. The most successful specimens are therefore those that snag a long-lived creature early in their life, and stick around until their host's death.
The reason why this otherwise maladapted animal has survived to the present day is that it isn't natural. Like a few other species, all suckerfish that survive their embryonic development possess a supernatural power. These parasites are simply undetectable by physical senses. There is nothing they look like. Their motion through the air is not audible, and the mucus that covers their skin cannot be smelled. As far as physical senses are concerned, they take up no space - it appears to all creatures that they can move their bodies right through a suckerfish's location (though really, what's usually happening is that they're moving around the beast, and hallucinating otherwise). The wound created by their teeth on the skin causes no pain or any sensation at all, nor does it visibly mark the skin in any way. And their spiked tongues lap at the blood without their hapless victim feeling a thing.
Detecting Suckerfish
Luckily, most creatures younger than sightless suckerfish have evolved a workaround. Their brains can process sensory stimuli produced by suckerfish, but only if those stimuli are experienced as though internal. Sing a song in your head, or visualize an apple in your mind. That's the sense with which you can "hear" and "see" sightless suckerfish, except the mental visual and auditory imagery produced when a suckerfish is around is involuntary. To the mind's eye, they look like white, eyeless, three foot long lampreys, with fat heads and skinny tails. Their "swimming" through the air (the mechanism for which is obscure, since it's almost impossible to study their physiology) gives to the mind's ear a "whooshing" sound. Involuntary sensations of mental motor and tactile imagery reveal their physical presence, and those with an attached suckerfish might experience some additional mental tactile imagery while their tag-along feeds.
Suckerfish are rare, but where they can be found, it's usually around the corpses of large, warm-blooded creatures, sapient or not. When you're within about sixty feet of a suckerfish, a mental image of it pops into your mind. At that point, you can either pay attention, or ignore it. Most cases of suckersickness afflict the ignorant, who don't know enough to stay focused when that bizarre image comes to mind. If you do stay focused on it, and are good at conjuring mental imagery, you might be able to pinpoint its location relative to other objects around you by imagining the space around you in as much detail as possible. Your mind will automatically try to place its spontaneous sense of the suckerfish in the right location relative to your imagined mirror of your surroundings. Once located, by staying focused and continuing to mirror your surroundings and bodily actions in your imagination, sightless suckerfish can be killed as easily as any animal (and stats can be as another similar small flying monster with a single bite attack - have the party make checks to keep focused on their mental sense if you like). Unless it bites you. Then things are a bit more complicated.
Suckersickness
Once attached to a host, simply killing the suckerfish is no longer an option. For reasons that are poorly understood (again, since it's nearly impossible to study suckerfish physiology), doing so almost always results in the host's death. The only method of killing the suckerfish that reliably doesn't also kill the host is poisoning it through the host's blood. No one has yet developed a poison that only hurts suckerfish and not other animals, though, so attempts at this kind of cure have to rely on the size difference between the host and the parasite to kill the parasite without overdosing the host. (This is why suckersickness is ferociously hated and considered incurable by smaller races, like gnomes and goblins). This is a risky procedure in any case, so many diagnosed with suckersickness choose not to take the risk, and simply live with it.
Also, once attached to the host, if the host didn't realize they had been bitten, they're much less likely to figure it out after the fact. Sightless suckers have evolved to wait to lick at their wound until the victim is sleeping, and the resulting involuntary mental tactile imagery thus appears in the victim's dreams, where it is usually forgotten. Dreams of having one's skin licked and sucked at is a common sign used to diagnose suckersickness, but sleep deprivation so that the patient can pay conscious attention is required to confirm the diagnosis. This difficulty in diagnosing the illness, especially when mere malnutrition is usually a more likely explanation, leads to most cases going undiscovered for years, even in regions where the illness and its causes are well-known to physicians and monster-slayers.
Suckersickness causes the whole gamut of symptoms associated with hematophagic parasites (though victims almost never lose enough blood enough to outpace the body's ability to produce it, except in the very young or old): fatigue, weakness, paleness, shortness of breath, hypoproteinemia, immune deficiency, and symptoms of cardiovascular strain. Children with untreated suckersickness experience developmental disorders due to the chronic blood loss.
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