Hallucinations полностью

55. In a prefatory note to a later edition, Waugh wrote: “Three years ago Mr. Waugh suffered a brief bout of hallucinations resembling what is here described. . . . Mr. Waugh does not deny that ‘Mr. Pinfold’ is largely based on himself.” Thus we may accept The Ordeal as an autobiographic “case history” of a psychosis, an organic psychosis, albeit one written with a mastery of observation and description—and a sense of plot and suspense—that no purely medical case history has.

W. H. Auden once said that Waugh had “learned nothing” from his ordeal, but it at least enabled him to write a richly comic memoir, a new departure quite unlike anything he had written previously.

56. The Reverend Henslow was a son of the botanist John Stevens Henslow, who was Darwin’s teacher at Cambridge and was instrumental in getting him a position aboard the Beagle.

57. Feeling that hypnagogic hallucinations could extend and enrich the imagination, Poe would jerk himself suddenly to full wakefulness while hallucinating, so that he could make note of the extraordinary things he saw, and he often brought these into his poems and short stories. Poe’s great translator, Baudelaire, was also fascinated by the unique quality of such visions, especially if they were potentiated by opium or hashish. A whole generation in the early nineteenth century (including Coleridge and Wordsworth, as well as Southey and De Quincey) was influenced by such hallucinations. This is explored by Alethea Hayter in her book Opium and the Romantic Imagination and by Eva Brann in her magisterial The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance.

58. Hypnopompic hallucinations are far less common than hypnagogic ones, and some people have hypnagogic hallucinations upon awakening, or hypnopompic ones while falling asleep.

59. Spinoza, in the 1660s, described a similar hallucination in a letter to his friend Peter Balling:

When one morning, after the day had dawned, I woke up from a very unpleasant dream, the images, which had presented themselves to me in sleep, remained before my eyes just as vividly as though the things had been real, especially the image of a certain black and leprous Brazilian whom I had never seen before. This image disappeared for the most part when, in order to divert my thoughts, I cast my eyes on a book or something else. But as soon as I lifted my eyes again, without fixing my attention on any particular object, the same image of this same negro appeared with the same vividness again and again, until the head of it finally vanished.

60. Bill Hayes, in his book Sleep Demons, cites an even earlier reference to irresistible, overwhelming sleepiness and probable cataplexy—“It falls upon them in the midst of mirth”—from a little-known 1834 book, The Philosophy of Sleep, by the Scottish physician Robert Macnish.

61. A key figure in the narcolepsy world is Michael Thorpy, a physician whose many books on narcolepsy and other sleep disorders have grown out of a lifetime of experience directing a sleep disorders clinic at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.

62. This simple equation had to be modified later, when it was found that dreams—albeit of a somewhat different kind—could also occur in non-REM sleep.

63. Many of H. G. Wells’s short stories also involve guilt hallucinations. In “The Moth,” a zoologist who feels himself responsible for the death of his lifelong rival is haunted and finally driven mad by a giant moth that no one else can see, a moth of a genus unknown to science; but in his lucid moments, he jokes that it is the ghost of his deceased rival.

Dickens, a haunted man himself, wrote five books on this theme, the best known of these being A Christmas Carol. And in Great Expectations, he provides a dramatic account of Pip’s vision after his first, horrified encounter with Miss Havisham:

I thought it a strange thing then, and I thought it a stranger thing long afterwards. I turned my eyes—a little dimmed by looking up at the frosty light—towards a great wooden beam in a low nook of the building near me on my right hand, and I saw a figure hanging there by the neck. A figure all in yellow white, with but one shoe to the feet; and it hung so that I could see that the faded trimmings of the dress were like earthy paper, and that the face was Miss Havisham’s, with a movement going over the whole countenance as if she were trying to call me. In the terror of seeing the figure, and in the terror of being certain that it had not been there a moment before, I at first ran from it, and then ran towards it. And my terror was greatest of all when I found no figure there.