As far back as I remember … I have been subject to mild hallucinations.… Just before falling asleep, I often become aware of a kind of one-sided conversation going on in an adjacent section of my mind, quite independently from the actual trend of my thoughts. It is a neutral, detached, anonymous voice, which I catch saying words of no importance to me whatever — an English or a Russian sentence, not even addressed to me, and so trivial that I hardly dare give samples.… This silly phenomenon seems to be the auditory counterpart of certain praedormitary visions, which I also know well.… They come and go, without the drowsy observer’s participation, but are essentially different from dream pictures for he is still master of his senses. They are often grotesque. I am pestered by roguish profiles, by some coarse-featured and florid dwarf with a swelling nostril or ear. At times, however, my photisms take on a rather soothing
Faces are especially common in hypnagogic hallucinations, as Andreas Mavromatis emphasizes in his encyclopedic book
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).
