Daydreams

Hypnagogic hallucinations are vivid perceptual experiences occurring at sleep onset while hypnopompic hallucinations are similar experiences but occurring at awakening.

Many surveys suggest that ordinary men and women, who are neither disturbed nor neurotic, spend a large part of each day in some sort of fantasy, reverie or daydream. In an unusual British study, the psychologist E. J. Dearnley recorded what he was thinking and doing whenever a buzzer sounded at random times during a number of 24 hour periods. Dearnley found that fantasies or daydreams accounted for an astonishing 11% of his waking hours.

Even individuals doing work that requires a high degree of concentration can lapse into daydreams. Michael Czikzentmihalyi of the University of Chicago found that even surgeons have been known to slip into financial or sexual fantasies while performing operations. These types of quick fantasy rarely have a structured narrative. They are moments when we stop paying attention to what we are seeing and hearing and switch into an inner theatre of the imagination where we can play at wish fulfillment. Many of Dearnely's daydreams, for example, centred around sitting in the local pub.

But there are other fantasies qualitatively different from these "wouldn't it be nice if...?" stories. These are sustained fantasies, which often seem to have been crafted, worked and reworked to meet some more profound psychological need. Sustained fantasies usually take the form of longer, more coherent narratives, and are typically clearer and more easily interpreted than dreams. In 'The House of Make Believe', Jerome Singer of Yale University traces the links between childhood fantasies and those of later life. Since claims that sustained fantasies, which may run longer than 60 seconds, are a way of coping with deep-seated childhood anxieties and fears. Indeed, it is Singer's view that all fantasies are healing and creative: even guilty fantasies are a way of purging guilt.

Psychiatrists who deal with certain kinds of offenders would disagree. When one daydreams, normal inhibitions are bypassed: for many criminals, this provides a mental theatre in which to rehearse violent scenarios. The evidence of the rather macabre biographies of serial killers shows that they had frequently recurring violent fantasies before they turned to murder.

A third type of daydream is the hypnagogic hallucination. This type of vivid image may be experienced on the edges of consciousness when one is either just falling asleep or, less frequently, on waking up. Hypnagogic hallucinations are often said to possess an exaggerated sense of reality combined with super-saturated colour. They are particularly fascinating because, unlike dreams, they are subject to the control of the will. The Belgian psychologist Jon Varendock tried hard to bring the phenomenon of hypnagogic hallucination within the field of psychoanalytic theory in the same way that Freud had shed light on the content of dreams. However, many of the images that were presented by his subjects were confused, proving extremely difficult to interpret in terms of wish fulfillment, and could not be 'read' as easily as the stories that we tell ourselves in daydreams.




The hypnagogic hallucinatios that we sometimes experience on the verge of waking are vivid, colour-saturated images. Hypnagogia (also spelled hypnogogia) are the experiences a person can go through in the hypnagogic (or hypnogogic) state, the period of falling asleep. Hypnopompia are the experiences a person may go through in the hypnopompic state, the period of waking up. The term hypnagogia often encompasses hypnopompia as well. Hypnagogic sensations collectively describe the vivid dream-like auditory, visual, or tactile sensations that can be experienced in a hypnagogic or hypnopompic state. These sensations can be accompanied by sleep paralysis, the sensation that the body is temporarily paralyzed after waking or before falling asleep.




I am here for you. You are here for me. We are here for others.

Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that people are here for the sake of other people. ~ Albert Einstein