Hallucinations полностью

It was a relaxed summer night. I awoke around 2 am, as I sometimes do in the middle of the night, and next to me, standing six and a half feet tall, was an imposing Native American. A huge man, muscles chiseled, black hair and black eyes. I realized, seemingly simultaneously, that if he wanted to kill me there was nothing I could do, and that he must not be real. Yet he was standing there, like a statue yet very alive. My mind flashed about—how could he have gotten into the house? . . . Why was he motionless? . . . This can’t be real. Yet his presence frightened me. He became diaphanous after five or ten seconds, gently vaporizing into invisibility.⁵⁹

Given the outlandish quality of some hypnopompic images, their often terrifying emotional resonance, and perhaps the heightened suggestibility that may go with such states, it is very understandable that hypnopompic visions of angels and devils may engender not only wonder or horror but belief in their physical reality. Indeed, one must wonder to what degree the very idea of monsters, ghostly spirits, or phantoms originated with such hallucinations. One can easily imagine that, coupled with a personal or cultural disposition to believe in a disembodied, spiritual realm, these hallucinations, though they have a real physiological basis, might reinforce a belief in the supernatural.

The term “hypnopompic” was introduced in 1901 by F. W. H. Myers, an English poet and classicist who was fascinated by the emerging study of psychology. He was a friend of William James’s and a founding member of the Society for Psychical Research, where he sought to connect the abnormal and paranormal with normal psychological function. Myers’s work was highly influential.

Living in the late nineteenth century, a time in which séances and mediums were all the rage, Myers wrote extensively of ghosts, apparitions, and phantoms. Like many of his contemporaries, he believed in the idea of life after death, but he tried to place it in a scientific context. Although he felt that experiences likely to be interpreted as supernatural visitations were especially apt to occur in hypnopompic states, he also believed in the objective reality of a spiritual or supernatural realm, to which the mind might be given brief access in various physiological states, such as dreaming, hypnopompic states, trance states, and certain forms of epilepsy. But at the same time, he thought that hypnopompic hallucinations might be fragments of dreams or nightmares persisting into the waking state—in effect, waking dreams.

Yet reading Myers’s 1903 two-volume Human Personality and Its Survival After Bodily Death, as well as Phantasms of the Living, the compilation of case histories he and his colleagues (Gurney et al.) published in 1886, one feels that the majority of “psychical” or “paranormal” experiences described are, in fact, hallucinations—hallucinations arising in states of bereavement, social isolation, or sensory deprivation, and above all in drowsy or trancelike states.

My colleague Dr. B., a psychotherapist, related the following story to me, about a ten-year-old boy who woke one morning “to find a woman dressed in blue hovering at the foot of his bed, surrounded by radiant light”:

She introduced herself as his “guardian angel,” speaking in a soft, gentle voice. The child was terrified, and turned on the light beside his bed, expecting the image to disappear. The woman remained suspended in the air, however, and he ran from the room, awakening his parents.

His parents framed the experience as a dream, trying to reassure the child. He was unconvinced, unable to make sense of the event. His family had no religious background, and he found the image of the angel alien. He began to experience a pervasive sense of dread and developed insomnia, fearful that he would awaken to find the woman again. His parents and teachers described him as agitated and distracted, and he increasingly withdrew from relationships with peers and activities. His parents called their pediatrician, who referred the child for psychiatric evaluations and psychotherapy.

The child had no prior history of problems in functioning, sleep disorder, or physical illness, and he appeared to be well-adjusted. He made effective use of therapeutic consultations, where he continued to . . . make sense of what had happened, coming to understand the event as a type of hallucination that commonly occurs following arousal from sleep.

Dr. B. added, “Although there would appear to be a high prevalence of hypnopompic hallucinations among healthy, well-adjusted persons, they are potentially traumatic, and it is crucial to explore the meaning and implications of such phenomena for the individual.”