seem to come up out of the darkness, as a mist, and rapidly develop into sharp delineation, assuming roundness, vividness, and living reality. They fade off only to give place to others, which succeed with surprising rapidity and in enormous multitude. Formerly the faces were wonderfully ugly. They were human, but resembling animals, yet such animals as have no fellows in the creation, diabolical-looking. . . . Latterly the faces have become exquisitely beautiful. Forms and features of faultless perfection now succeed each other in infinite variety and number.
Many other descriptions stress how common it is to see faces, sometimes clusters of faces, with each face highly individuated but unrecognizable. F. E. Leaning, in her 1925 paper on hypnagogia, speculated that such an emphasis on faces “almost suggests that there is a special ‘face-seeing’ propensity in the mind.” Leaning’s “propensity,” we now know, has its anatomical substrate in a specialized portion of the visual cortex, the fusiform face area. Dominic ffytche and his colleagues have shown in fMRI studies that it is precisely this area in the right hemisphere which is activated when faces are hallucinated.
Activation of a homologous area in the left hemisphere may produce lexical hallucinations—of letters, numbers, musical notation, sometimes words or pseudowords, or even sentences. One of Mavromatis’s subjects put it this way: “When dozing or before going to sleep . . . I appear to be reading a book. I see the print clearly and distinguish the words, but the words rarely seem to have any particular significance. The books I appear to be reading are never books with which I am familiar, but frequently deal with whatever subject I have been reading during the day.”
(While hypnagogic images of faces and places are usually unrecognizable, there is a distinct category of hypnagogia which McKellar and Simpson call “perseverative”: hallucinations or recurrent images of something one has been exposed to earlier in the day. If, for example, one has been driving all day, one may “see” a hedgerow or line of trees continually unfurling before one’s closed eyes.)
Hypnagogic imagery may be faint or colorless, but it often has brilliant and highly saturated color. Ardis and McKellar, in a 1956 paper, cited a case in which the subject described “colors of the spectrum intensified as though bathed in the fiercest sunlight.” They compared this, as others have, to the exaggeration of color with mescaline. In hypnagogic hallucinations, luminosity or outlines may also seem to be abnormally distinct, with shadows or furrows exaggerated—sometimes such exaggerations go with cartoonlike figures or scenes. Many people speak of an “impossible” clarity or a “microscopic” detail in their hypnagogic visions. Images may seem finer-grained than perception itself, as if the inner eye has an acuity of 20/5 rather than 20/20 (this hyperacuity is a feature common to many types of visual hallucination).
One may “see” a constellation of images in hypnagogia—a landscape in the middle, a face erupting in the upper left corner, a complex geometric pattern around the edge—all present simultaneously and all evolving or metamorphosing in their own ways, a sort of multifocal hallucination. Many people describe hallucinatory polyopia, multiplications of objects or figures (one of McKellar’s subjects saw a pink cockatoo, then hundreds of pink cockatoos talking to each other).
Figures or objects may suddenly zoom towards one, getting larger and more detailed, then retreat. Hypnagogic images, often compared to snapshots or slides, flash into consciousness, hold for a second or two, then disappear; they may be replaced by other images that seem to have no connection or apparent association to one another.
Hypnagogic visions may seem like something from “another world”—this phrase is used again and again by people describing their visions. Edgar Allan Poe stressed the fact that his own hypnagogic images were not only unfamiliar but unlike anything he had ever seen before; they had “the absoluteness of novelty.”57
Most hypnagogic images are not like true hallucinations: they are not felt as real, and they are not projected into external space. And yet they have many of the special features of hallucinations—they are involuntary, uncontrollable, autonomous; they may have preternatural colors and detail and undergo rapid and bizarre transformations unlike those of normal mental imagery.
