Hallucinations
One night earlier this year, I woke to see an elderly man in our bedroom. My spouse and I’d fled on the deaths racking up throughout the coronavirus outbreak in New York to the comparative security of the countryside, in which his family has a creaky, tumbledown home built in the 1890s. “Who is that?” I whispered. “That?” He responded. “That is me when I am older.” Then he immediately fell back asleep. In the morning he had no recollection of our conversation.
It wasn’t the first time I had seen ghostly figures. A few years back, in a 500-year-old villa in a Moorish city in the west shore, I awakened out of my bed to discover a little girl staring at me. In my former apartment in Sydney, I often saw disembodied hands coming from your window, giant spiders crawling over my pillow or heard voices calling me from outside, which led me, like hypnotic sirens, to the balcony to answer them where I awakened with a start. After, in a historical hotel in Denmark, I watched a dachshund jog across the floor; its entire back-half — instead comically when it hadn’t looked so gruesome — had been sawn off; its own rump was a tender bloody wreck.
Once I confided to other people about these dreams, I received distinct responses: a good percentage of friends thought I was mad or, even if not certifiably mad, then it was a sign of anxiety and stress; those who believed in the paranormal explained that I had the gift of seeing the dead — a present I ought to either exploit or exorcise. A doctor thought I might have nocturnal epilepsy. Eventually, I came across another explanation: hallucination.
Hypnagogic hallucinations occur before falling asleep: in a 1996 study, 37 per cent of respondents were found to experience them as often as twice a week. Many more of the population are believed to possess them, but with hallucinations too low-key to be consciously recalled.
The first recorded instance of what is now believed to be hypnagogic hallucination, combined with sleep paralysis (in which a individual temporarily finds themselves unable to move when falling asleep or upon waking up ) was in 1664.
Dutch doctor Isbrand Van Diemerbroeck published the event of a”fleshy, powerful” 50-year-old woman. At night, however, when entering sleep,”she believed the devil put upon her and held her down, sometimes that she was choaked [sic] with a fantastic dog or burglar lying on her breast, so that she could barely breathe or speak, and when she endeavoured to throw off the burthen, she was not able to stir her relatives ” However, as Fuseli’s painting and Van Diemerbroeck’s descriptions show, hallucinations are a lot more immediate than pictures conjured up with imagination or memory: they’re seemingly external, they seem to audience in from the outside, and can feel utterly genuine.
In his publication Hallucinations, the late neurologist Oliver Sacks listed one patient who described her hallucinations as an identical experience to going into a movie. Rosalie, a blind woman in her 90s, would see people in Eastern dress”in curtains, walking up and downstairs” or scenes of”a white construction, and it’s snowing — a snow, it’s swirling. I visit this horse… with a harness, dragging snow”
Rosalie, as Sacks explains, endured from Charles Bonnet syndrome: affecting around ten percent of those with diminished eyesight, hallucinations occur when the visual parts of the brain overcompensate for what the eyes can’t see. The syndrome is named after the 18th-century Genevan naturalist Charles Bonnet whose grandfather, Charles Lullin, while perfectly sane, saw vivid hallucinations after starting to lose his sight.
Sometimes Lullin’s hallucinations were absurd: at one point he watched a flying handkerchief. At other times they had been uncanny. When Lullin’s two granddaughters came to visit him one dayhe announced:”What handsome gentlemen you have brought with you! Why didn’t you inform me that they were coming?” His granddaughters were perplexed; they were lonely — and had no such companions.
Hallucinations can range from becoming bothersome to dangerous (patients with schizophrenia may be affected by vocal hallucinations that bark orders at them). One blind man in Sacks’ book saw petrifying hallucinations during the night; upon seeing a man carrying a bloodstained knife, he cried :”Get out of this, in the title of the blood of Jesus!”
Donald Fish, another individual who features in the publication, endured chronic hypnopompic hallucinations, which occur upon waking. Fish explained seeing a”figure of an angel standing over me alongside a figure of Death in black. A rotting corpse lying next to me. A huge crocodile at my throat. A dead infant on the floor covered in blood. Hideous faces laughing at me. Giant spiders — very regular. Huge hand over my face.” Psychologist Caroline Watt, a founding member of the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at The University of Edinburgh, that investigates belief in the paranormal, assigns many sightings of ghosts to hallucinations. “If you’re in the shower or hoovering you might hallucinate hearing your doorbell ringing or your own telephone ringing — because your brain is trying to make sense of an unusual noise,” she told me in an interview. “The Exact Same process operates
With visual senses.”
Though the contemporary western world sees hallucinations as portending madness or something wrong with the brain — leading many to pay up their visions for fear of been dismissed, laughed at, or deemed emotionally unwell other civilizations”esteem hallucination, like dreams, as a special, privileged state of awareness — one that is sought through religious practices, meditation, drugs, or solitude,” writes Sacks.
Sacks implores his readers not to disregard hallucinations, in particular the impact they have had on the development of cultural narratives, faith, and artwork.
“Do the geometric patterns seen in migraine and other ailments prefigure the motifs of Aboriginal art?” he asks. Do the frightening hallucinations of the nightmare, being ridden and suffocated by a malign existence, play a role in creating our notions of witches and demons or cancerous aliens?
Truly, Edgar Allen Poe relied upon hypnagogic hallucinations to feed his creativity, forcing himself to fully wake when hallucinating so he can write what he saw.
Poe relished these shadowy visitations of the night. I do not. While I hallucinate, I am aware that it is in my mind; that should I sit up and turn on the light — as I often do — then those images blink away, dissolving slowly into the shadows. However they still disturbs me.
Sacks’s patient Rosalie put it a different way. After she’saw’ threatening figures of men in dark suits and hats encircle her, she thought they were harbingers of her own death.