Hallucinations полностью

I hallucinated that my body floated up to the ceiling towards the end of my bed, and then all of a sudden my body quickly dropped through the floor to the first level of the house and then dropped through that floor and into the basement. I could see everything in each room. The floors did not seem to break when I went through them. I just passed through them.

There was little physiological understanding of sleeping, dreaming, or sleep disorders until 1953, when Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman at the University of Chicago discovered REM sleep — a distinctive stage of sleep with characteristic rapid eye movements, as well as characteristic EEG changes. They also found that if their subjects were woken during REM sleep, they would always report that they had been dreaming. It seemed, then, that dreaming was correlated with REM sleep.³ In REM sleep the body is paralyzed, except for shallow breathing and eye movements. Most people enter the REM stage ninety minutes or so after falling asleep, but people with narcolepsy (or those with sleep deprivation) may fall into REM at the very onset of sleep, plunging suddenly into dreaming and sleep paralysis; they may also wake at the “wrong” time, so that the dreamlike visions and the loss of muscle control characteristic of REM sleep persist into the waking state. Even though the person is wide awake, he may be assaulted by dream- or nightmare-like hallucinations, made even more terrifying by an inability to move or speak.

But one does not have to have narcolepsy to experience sleep paralysis with hallucinations — indeed, J. A. Cheyne and his colleagues at the University of Waterloo have shown that somewhere between a third and half of the general population has had at least occasional episodes of this, and even a single episode may be unforgettable.

Cheyne et al. explored and categorized a huge range of sleep-paralysis-related phenomena, based on reports from three hundred student subjects as well as a large and varied population who responded to an internet questionnaire. They concluded that isolated sleep paralysis (that is, sleep paralysis without narcolepsy), being relatively common, “constitutes a unique natural laboratory for the study of hallucinoid experiences” but stressed that such hallucinations cannot be compared to ordinary hypnagogic or hypnopompic experiences. The hallucinations accompanying isolated sleep paralysis, they wrote, are “substantially more vivid, elaborate, multimodal and terrifying,” and therefore more likely to have a radical impact on anyone who experiences them. These hallucinations may be visceral, auditory, or tactile as well as visual and are accompanied by a feeling of suffocation or pressure on the chest, the sense of a malignant presence, and an overall sense of absolute helplessness and abject terror. These, of course, are the cardinal qualities of the nightmare, in its original sense.

The “mare” in “nightmare” originally referred to a demonic woman who suffocated sleepers by lying on their chests (she was called “Old Hag” in Newfoundland). Ernest Jones, in his monograph On the Nightmare, emphasized that nightmares were radically different from ordinary dreams in their invariable sense of a fearful presence (sometimes astride the chest), difficulty breathing, and the realization that one is totally paralyzed. The term “nightmare” is often used now to describe any bad dream or anxiety dream, but the real night-mare has dread of a wholly different order; Cheyne speaks of “the ominous numinous” here. He suggests that the term for the night-mare proper be spelled with a hyphen, and this convention has been adopted by other workers in the field.