Hallucination

Hallucination

by : Aria Ratmandanu

      Hallucinations may occur to perfectly normal people under perfectly ordinary circumstances. Hallucinations can also be elicited: by a campfire at night, or under emotional stress, or during epileptic seizures or migraine headaches or high fever, or by prolonged fasting or sleeplessness* or sensory deprivation (for example, in solitary confinement), or through hallucinogens such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, or hashish. (Delirium tremens, the dreaded alcohol-induced DTs, is one well-known manifestation of a withdrawal syndrome from alcoholism.) There are also molecules, such as the phenothiazines (thorazine, for example), that make hallucinations go away. It is very likely that the normal human body generates substances - perhaps including the morphine-like small brain proteins called endorphins - that cause hallucinations, and others that suppress them 

      Hallucinations are common. If you have one, it doesn't mean you're crazy. The anthropological literature is replete with hallucination ethnopsychiatry, REM dreams and possession trances, which have many common elements transculturally and across the ages. The hallucinations are routinely interpreted as possession by good or evil spirits. The Yale anthropologist Weston La Barre goes so far as to argue that 'a surprisingly good case could be made that much of culture is hallucination' and that 'the whole intent and function of ritual appears to be . . . a group wish to hallucinate reality'. 

           Here is a description of hallucinations as a signal-to-noise problem by Louis J. West, former medical director of the Neuropsychiatric Clinic at the University of California, Los Angeles. It is taken from the fifteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: 

          Imagine a man standing at a closed glass window opposite his fireplace, looking out at his garden in the sunset. He is so absorbed by the view of the outside world that he fails to visualize the interior of the room at all. As it becomes darker outside, however, images of the objects in the room behind him can be seen reflected dimly in the window glass. For a time he may see either the garden (if he gazes into the distance) or the reflection of the room's interior (if he focuses on the glass a few inches from his face). Night falls, but the fire still burns brightly in the fireplace and illuminates the room. The watcher now sees in the glass a vivid reflection of the interior of the room behind him, which appears to be outside the window. This illusion becomes dimmer as the fire dies down, and, finally, when it is dark both outside and within, nothing more is seen. If the fire flares up from time to time, the visions in the glass reappear. 

        In an analogous way, hallucinatory experiences such as those of normal dreams occur when the 'daylight' (sensory input) is reduced while the 'interior illumination' (general level of brain arousal) remains 'bright', and images originating within the 'rooms' of our brains may be perceived (hallucinated) as though they came from outside the 'windows' of our senses. 

          Another analogy might be that dreams, like the stars, are shining all the time. Though the stars are not often seen by day, since the sun shines too brightly, if, during the day, there is an eclipse of the sun, or if a viewer chooses to be watchful awhile after sunset or awhile before sunrise, or if he is awakened from time to time on a clear night to look at the sky, then the stars, like dreams, though often forgotten, may always be seen. 

         A more brain-related concept is that of a continuous information-processing activity (a kind of 'preconscious stream') that is influenced continually by both conscious and unconscious forces and that constitutes the potential supply of dream content. The dream is an experience during which, for a few minutes, the individual has some awareness of the stream of data being processed. Hallucinations in the waking state also would involve the same phenomenon, produced by a somewhat different set of psychological or physiological circumstances . . . 

         It appears that all human behaviour and experience (normal as well as abnormal) is well attended by illusory and hallucinatory phenomena. While the relationship of these phenomena to mental illness has been well documented, their role in everyday life has perhaps not been considered enough. Greater understanding of illusions and hallucinations among normal people may provide explanations for experiences otherwise relegated to the uncanny, or ’extrasensory’.

         We would surely be missing something important about our own nature if we refused to face up to the fact that hallucinations are part of being human. However, none of this makes hallucinations part of an external rather than an internal reality. Five to ten per cent of us are extremely suggestible, able to move at a command into a deep hypnotic trance. Roughly ten per cent of Americans report having seen one or more ghosts. This is more than the number who allegedly remember being abducted by aliens, about the same as the number who've reported seeing one or more UFOs, and less than the number who in the last week of Richard Nixon's Presidency, before he resigned to avoid impeachment, thought he was doing a good-to-excellent job as President. At least one per cent of all of us is schizophrenic. This amounts to over 50 million schizophrenics on the planet, more than the population of, say, England. 

         Most of us recall being frightened at the age of two and older by real-seeming but wholly imaginary 'monsters', especially at night or in the dark. I can still remember occasions when I was absolutely terrified, hiding under the bedclothes until I could stand it no longer, and then bolting for the safety of my parents' bedroom - if only I could get there before falling into the clutches of . . . The Presence. 

When I was a boy, our house was filled with monsters. They lived in the closets, under the beds, in the attic, in the basement, and when it was dark, just about everywhere. This article is dedicated to my father, who kept me safe from all of them. 

      Part of the reason that children are afraid of the dark may be that, in our entire evolutionary history up until just a moment ago, they never slept alone. Instead, they nestled safely, protected by an adult, usually Mum. In the enlightened west we stick them alone in a dark room, say goodnight, and have difficulty understanding why they're sometimes upset. It makes good evolutionary sense for children to have fantasies of scary monsters. In a world stalked by lions and hyenas, such fantasies help prevent defenceless toddlers from wandering too far from their guardians. How can this safety machinery be effective for a vigorous, curious young animal unless it delivers industrial strength terror? Those who are not afraid of monsters tend not to leave descendants. Eventually, I imagine, over the course of human evolution, almost all children become afraid of monsters. But if we're capable of conjuring up terrifying monsters in childhood, why shouldn't some of us, at least on occasion, be able to fantasize something similar, something truly horrifying, a shared delusion, as adults ? 

         A common, although insufficiently well-known, psychological syndrome rather like alien abduction is called sleep paralysis. Many people experience it. It happens in that twilight world between being fully awake and fully asleep. For a few minutes, maybe longer, you're immobile and acutely anxious. You feel a weight on your chest as if some being is sitting or lying there. Your heartbeat is quick, your breathing laboured. You may experience auditory or visual hallucinations of people, demons, ghosts, animals or birds. In the right setting, the experience can have 'the full force and impact of reality', according to Robert Baker, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky. Sometimes there's a marked sexual component to the hallucination. Baker argues that these common sleep disturbances are behind many if not most of the alien abduction accounts. (He and others suggest that there are other classes of abduction claims as well, made by fantasy- prone individuals, say, or hoaxers. )

         We know from early work of the Canadian neurophysiologist Wilder Penfield that electrical stimulation of certain regions of the brain elicits full-blown hallucinations. People with temporal lobe epilepsy - involving a cascade of naturally generated electrical impulses in the part of the brain beneath the forehead - experience a range of hallucinations almost indistinguishable from reality: including the presence of one or more strange beings, anxiety, floating through the air, and a sense of missing time. There is also what feels like profound insight into the deepest questions and a need to spread the word. A continuum of spontaneous temporal lobe stimulation seems to stretch from people with serious epilepsy to the most average among us. In at least one case reported by another Canadian neuroscientist, Michael Persinger, administration of the antiepileptic drug, carbamazepine, eliminated a woman's recurring sense of experiencing the standard alien abduction scenario. So such hallucinations, generated spontaneously, or with chemical or experiential assists, may play a role, perhaps a central role, in the UFO accounts.

        There's no doubt that humans commonly hallucinate. There's considerable doubt about whether extraterrestrials exist, frequent our planet, or abduct and molest us. We might argue about details, but the one category of explanation is surely much better supported than the other. The main reservation you might then have is: why do so many people today report this particular set of hallucinations? Why sombre little beings, and flying saucers.