I wake from a calm sleep and perhaps a fairly normal dream with a shock, and there before me is a creature that even Hollywood couldn’t create. The hallucinations fade in about ten seconds, and I can move when I have them. In fact I usually jump about a foot into the air and scream.… The hallucinations are becoming worse — now about four a night — I am now becoming terrified of going to bed. The following are some examples of what I see:
A huge figure of an angel standing over me next to a figure of death in black.
A rotting corpse lying next to me.
A huge crocodile at my throat.
A dead baby on the floor covered in blood.
Hideous faces laughing at me.
Giant spiders — very frequent.
Huge hand over my face. Also one on the floor five feet across.
Drifting spider webs.
Birds and insects flying into my face.
Two faces looking at me from under a rock.
Image of myself — only looking older — standing by the bed in a suit.
Two rats eating a potato.
A mass of different colored flags descending onto me.
Ugly-looking primitive man lying on floor covered in tufts of orange hair.
Shards of glass falling on me.
Two wire lobster pots.
Dots of red, increasing to thousands like spattered blood.
Masses of logs falling on me.
It is often said that hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations are more vivid and most easily remembered in childhood, but Mr. Fish’s hallucinations have been lifelong — they started when he was eight, and he is now over eighty. Why he should be so prone to hypnopompic hallucinations is a mystery. Although he has had thousands of hypnopompic hallucinations, he has been able to live a full life and function consistently at a high creative level. A graphic designer and visual artist with a brilliant imagination, he sometimes finds inspiration in his surreal hallucinations.
While Mr. Fish’s hypnopompic imagery is extreme in its frequency (and very distressing to him), it is not atypical in character. Elyn S. wrote to me about her own hypnopompic images:
The most typical one would involve me sitting up in bed and seeing a person — often an old lady — staring at me at some distance from the foot of my bed. (I imagine that such hallucinations are thought to be ghosts by some people — but not by me.) Other examples are seeing a foot-wide spider crawling up my wall; seeing fireworks; and seeing a little devil at the foot of my bed riding a bicycle in place.
A powerfully persuasive form of hallucination, not explicitly sensory at all, is the feeling of the “presence” of someone or something nearby, a presence that may be felt as malevolent or benign. The sense of conviction that someone is there can be irresistible at such times.
For me, hypnopompic experiences are usually more auditory than visual, and they take a variety of forms. Sometimes they are persistences of dreams or nightmares. On one occasion I heard a scratching sound in the corner of the room. I paid little attention at first, thinking it was just a mouse in the walls. But the scratching grew louder and louder and began to frighten me. Alarmed, I flung a pillow into the corner. But the action (or, rather, the imagined action) of flinging fully awakened me, and I opened my eyes to find that I was in my own bedroom, not the hospital-like room of my dream. But the scratching sound continued, loud and utterly “real,” for several seconds after I woke.
I have had musical hallucinations (when taking chloral hydrate as a sleeping aid) which were continuations of dream music into the waking state — once with a Mozart quintet. My normal musical memory and imagery is not that strong — I am quite incapable of hearing every instrument in a quintet, let alone an orchestra — so the experience of hearing the Mozart, hearing every instrument, was a startling (and beautiful) one. Under more normal conditions I experience a hypnopompic state of heightened (and somewhat uncritical) musical sensibility; whatever music I hear in this state delights me. This happens almost every morning when I am awoken by my clock radio, which is tuned to a classical station. (An artist friend describes a similar enhancement of color and texture when he lies in bed after first opening his eyes in the morning.)
Recently, I had a startling and rather moving visual hallucination. I cannot recollect what I was dreaming, if indeed I was dreaming, but when I awoke I saw my own face — or, rather, my face as it was when I was forty, black-bearded, smiling rather shyly. The face was about two feet away, life-sized, in faint, unsaturated pastel color, poised in midair; it seemed to look at me with curiosity and affection, and then, after about five seconds, it faded out. It gave me an odd, nostalgic sense of continuity with my younger self. As I lay in bed, I wondered whether, when young, I had ever had a vision of my present, almost eighty-year-old face, a hypnopompic “hello” across forty years.
