Hallucinations полностью

These images and their subsequent changes appear and fade without my control. The experience is fugitive, sometimes lasting a few seconds, sometimes minutes. I cannot predict their appearance. They appear to take place not in my eye, but in some dimension of space before me. The strength of the imagery varies from barely perceptible to vivid, like a dream image. But unlike dreams, there are absolutely no emotional overtones. Though they are fascinating, I do not feel moved by them. . . . The whole experience seems to be devoid of meaning.

He wondered whether this imagery represented a sort of “idling” in the visual part of the brain, in the absence of perception.

What Mr. Utter described so vividly are not dreams but involuntary images or quasi-hallucinations appearing just before sleep—hypnagogic hallucinations, to use the term coined by the French psychologist Alfred Maury in 1848. They are estimated to occur in a majority of people, at least occasionally, although they may be so subtle as to go unnoticed.

While Maury’s original observations were all of his own imagery, Francis Galton provided one of the first systematic investigations of hypnagogic hallucinations, gathering information from a number of subjects. In his 1883 book Inquiries into Human Faculty, he observed that very few people might at first admit to having such imagery. It was only when he sent out questionnaires stressing the common and benign qualities of these hallucinations that some of his subjects felt free to speak about them.

Galton was struck by the fact that he, too, had hypnagogic hallucinations, even though it had taken time and patience for him to realize this. “Had I been asked, before I thought of carefully trying, I should have emphatically declared that my field of view in the dark was essentially of a uniform black, subject to an occasional light-purple cloudiness and other small variations,” he wrote. Once he began observing more closely, however, he saw that

a kaleidoscopic change of patterns and forms is continually going on, but they are too fugitive and elaborate for me to draw with any approach to truth. I am astonished at their variety. . . . They disappear out of sight and memory the instant I begin to think about anything, and it is curious to me that they should often be so certainly present and yet be habitually overlooked.

Among the scores of people who responded to Galton’s questionnaire was the Reverend George Henslow (“whose visions,” Galton wrote, “are far more vivid than mine”).⁵⁶ One of Henslow’s hallucinations started with a vision of a crossbow, then of an arrow, then a flight of arrows, which changed into falling stars and then into flakes of snow. This was followed by a finely detailed vision of a rectory and then of a bed of red tulips. There were quickly changing images in which he reported visual association (for instance, arrows became stars, then snowflakes) but no narrative continuity. Henslow’s imagery was extremely vivid, but it had no quality of a dream or story.

Henslow emphasized how greatly these hallucinations differed from voluntary images; the latter were assembled slowly, bit by bit, like a painting, and seemed to be in the realm of everyday experience, while the former appeared spontaneously, unbidden and full-blown. His hypnagogic hallucinations were “very frequently of great beauty and highly brilliant. Cut glass (far more elaborate than I am conscious of ever having seen), highly chased gold and silver filigree ornaments; gold and silver flower-stands, etc.; elaborate colored patterns of carpets in brilliant tints.”

While Galton singled out this description for its clarity and detail, Henslow was only one of many who described essentially similar visions when they were in a quiet, darkened room, ready for sleep. These visions varied in vividness, from faint imagery such as Galton himself had to virtual hallucination, though such hallucinations were never mistaken for reality.

Galton did not regard the disposition to hypnagogic visions as pathological; he thought that while a few people might experience them frequently and vividly whenever they went to sleep, most (if not all) people experienced them at least on occasion. It was a normal phenomenon, although special conditions—darkness or closing the eyes, a passive state of mind, the imminence of sleep—were needed to bring it out.