Hypnagogic hallucinations: dreams that seem real

Hallucinations during sleep can be experienced as real. This is a phenomenon known within psychiatry under the term hypnagogic hallucinations. The people who suffer When they wake up, they experience terrifying scenes and are unable to differentiate dreams from reality.

Hypnagocic hallucinations: what are they?

Technically, hypnagogic hallucinations like the ones experienced by the protagonists of “Detrás de tus ojos” are perceptions produced in the half-awake stage, in which the subject sees before him a figure – human or of another type – that carries a message and before which arises a feeling of total immobility. They are night terrors.

The clarity of that presence makes you think you are awake, but in reality you are asleep, or in a kind of hypnotic state, in which images predominate, although commanded by ourselves from our unconscious. However, a number of questions arise in this regard.

What motivates these types of experiences? What psychic function do they fulfill? Are they disturbing or appeasing? Are there common patterns? We explain it to you below.

Hypnagogic hallucinations: how they are experienced

At some point in our lives we have all heard or experienced episodes of this type of sensation, even if they were very fleeting. The son-in-law who, when faced with his father-in-law’s absence at the funeral, says: your father visited me tonight, he was there, in front of me, and he told me that he is fine and not to worry about anything.

There is also who, after inheritance problems left by the deceased, sees his image appear saying: in this house there will never be a lack of money. These apparitions usually have a benevolent character, in which in some way, a wish is compensated and satisfied, lending voice to a character with whom there are pending issues, but which would be resolved imaginarily.

In this sense, they follow the premises that Freud established for the formation of a dream. The fact of having left pending issues during the day becomes the engine of dream creations. The fact that the body is at rest and the stimuli of reality are cut off, facilitates the loading into images.

But What happens with the visits of the devil or some malevolent character by whom we feel persecuted and who are responsible for our immobility?

In these cases we can venture that it is adding a guilt component. The subject, through that ghost, he is issuing a reprehensible value judgment on himself. This intimidating presence is the representative of a social criticism of a moral, behavioral or failure of expectations type that we make ourselves. The feeling of oppression in the chest and of immobilization that they carry, are nothing but the punishment that the sleeper inflicts on himself. His failure seems inexcusable. If in a normal dream the disfigurement of situations, speeches and characters allow us to hide and attenuate the pending issues of our life, to the point of waking up when the story is too hard, In the case of these dramatic hallucinations, the moralizing forces have been exaggerated, and one feels that one cannot escape from them. It is the apparition that seems to have the power.

Believing that you are awake, the feeling of impotence and the sensation of suffocation in the face of this situation is of the highest degree.

Why can’t you tell the dream from reality?

How is it possible for a person to believe that they are in reality, but are asleep? And how is it possible that he does not realize the type of spectrum that is in front of him?
Let’s move, for a moment, to a hypnosis session.

The hypnotist, once he has achieved that the subject enters a trance through his words, introduces the hypnotized person into a certain scenario. He tells her that he is at the beach one summer day and that there is a boat with rows on the shore. He then he starts ordering her around. When I count to three, you are going to open your eyes, you are going to go there, you are going to put your towel on the sand and then you will see that there is a boat. Get on it and start rowing.

We can check how the subject, even with his eyes open, believes he is on that beach and will behave exactly as the instructor has told him. The rower will not stop rowing until there is a new order to do so or until the hypnotist tells him to wake up. It would be useless for some spectator to try to get him out of his reverie because he doesn’t feel asleep. He believes he is in the reality of that other commanded scene. As if that were not enough, the hypnotized person does not see the real reality. He is there, but he does not perceive her.

The first appreciation that emerges is that There is a big difference between sight and gaze. The eye as an organ can see, but what is registered with it is determined by the look, that is, by what our mind organizes by choosing, highlighting or rejecting external and internal visual stimuli. The same thing happens with the ear. Our deafness or persuasion will become selective and will also depend on the auditory combinatorics that we allow ourselves to hear.

So, if we go back to hypnagogic hallucinations, the first thing we can conclude is that, Whether positive or negative, the hypnotist is ourselves. A part of our psyche is placed as a censor/mandator against the feeling of failure that we have had in those days.

Can nocturnal hallucinations be controlled?

The rise of a rarefied figure as a hologram points, on the one hand, to the degree of burden of the conflict it represents; on the other hand, due to the fact that our usual defense mechanisms against it have not worked, as it does in normal dreaming.

For this last reason, they are usually exceptional phenomena in common humans, although when they take on a repetitive and invasive nature, it is necessary to dig deeper to rule out that they are not hallucinations. properly so called, of the psychoses.

The way in which they usually disappear is connected to that state of asleep but awake, or awake but asleep.

It means that, or the subject passes into the current state of sleeping and dreaming; or else something wakes him up and connects him with real reality. In the Netflix series “Behind their eyes”, which starts from the idea of ​​nocturnal hallucinations but develops in fiction and suspense, the protagonists manage to control these images with a very peculiar method (we will not reveal more for those who have not seen the series).

In real life, the best prevention will be to go to sleep with the maximum of pending accounts of the day resolved, or widely open to consciousness. It will be this way as we can download imaginary representations likely to become intruders in our rest. Although they are not fully developed, we will have lessened their load and the psychological defense system of sleep will have lightened its task.