Hallucinations during sleep can be experienced as real. This is a phenomenon known in psychiatry as hypnagogic hallucinations. The people who suffer from them, When they wake up they experience terrifying scenes and are not able to differentiate dreams from reality.

Hypnagocic hallucinations: what they are

Technically, hypnagogic hallucinations like those experienced by the protagonists of «Behind Your Eyes» are perceptions produced in the sleep state, in which the subject sees before him a figure – human or otherwise – 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 series of questions arise in this regard.

What motivates these types of experiences? What psychic function do they fulfill? Are they disturbing or calming? 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 these types of sensations, even if they were very fleeting. The son-in-law who, faced with his father-in-law’s absence from 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 are also those who, after inheritance problems left by the deceased, see their image appear saying: in this house there will never be a lack of money. These apparitions usually have a benevolent nature, in which, in some way, a desire is compensated and satisfied, giving voice to a character with whom there are pending issues, but that would be resolved in the imagination.

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

But What happens with visits from 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 passing a condemnable value judgment on himself. This intimidating presence is the representative of social criticism of a moral, behavioral nature or failure of expectations that we set for ourselves.
• The feeling of oppression in the chest and immobilization that they bring are nothing more than the punishment that the sleeper inflicts on himself. His failure seems unforgivable.
• If in a normal dream the disfigurement of situations, speeches and characters allows us to conceal and mitigate the pending issues of our life, to the point of waking up when the story is too harsh, In the case of these dramatic hallucinations, the moralizing forces have been oversized, and it is felt that one cannot escape from them. It is the apparition that seems to have the power.

When you believe that you are awake, the feeling of helplessness and the sensation of suffocation in the face of that situation is at its highest level.

Why you can’t distinguish dream from reality

How is it possible for a person to believe they are in reality, but be asleep? And how can he not realize what kind of specter is in front of him?
Let’s move, for a moment, to a hypnosis session.

The hypnotist, once he has managed to put the subject into a trance through his words, introduces the hypnotized person into a certain scenario. He tells him that he is on the beach one summer day and that on the shore there is a boat with rows. Then he starts giving him orders. 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 paddling.

We can see how the subject, even with his eyes open, believes he is on that beach and will behave exactly the way 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 dream 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 real reality. It is there, but he does not perceive it.

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

So, if we return again 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 emergence of a rarefied figure like a hologram points, on the one hand, to the degree of conflict burden it represents; on the other hand, to the fact that our usual defense mechanisms against it have not worked, as happens in normal dreaming.

For this last reason, they tend to be exceptional phenomena in common humans, although, when they take on a repetitive and invasive character, it is necessary to delve deeper to rule out that they are not hallucinations. properly speaking, of psychoses.

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

It means that, or the subject goes to the usual state of sleeping and dreaming; or something awakens him and connects him with real reality. In the Netflix series «Behind Their Eyes», which is based on the idea of ​​nocturnal hallucinations but is developed 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 as many of the day’s pending issues as possible resolved, or widely open to consciousness. This is how we can unload the imaginary representations that may become intrusive in our rest. Even if they are not fully elaborated, we will have reduced their load and the psychological defensive system of sleep will have its task lightened.