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In some way their fancy is enlivened, and they can behold, in the glass, just such vivid pictures as many persons habitually see between sleeping and waking, illusions hypnagogiques. These 'hypnagogic illusions' Pontus de Tyard described in a pretty sonnet, more than three hundred years ago. Maury, in his book on dreams has recorded, and analysed them.
Many who are very bad 'visualisers, like the writer, who think in words, not in pictures, see bright and distinct hypnagogic illusions, yet see nothing in the crystal, however long they stare at it. And there are crystal-seers who are not subject to hypnagogic illusions. These facts, like the analogous facts of the visualisation of arithmetical figures, analysed by Mr.
It is at this point that images are really most intense, and that every idea assumes a body and form, every image a reality: finally, when the body and the brain have reached the physiological conditions of sleep, thoughts which had been changed into hypnagogic images in the intermediate stage between sleep and waking, are altogether transformed into the real images of dreams.
This gradually produces the state which has been described by Maury and others as hypnagogic hallucination; that is, the images seem to be real, although the subject is still partly awake, and the voluntary exercise of thought is lost from time to time in this species of incipient chaos.
He assumed that in being exhausted from sporadic fits of sleep and wakeful spans of dull, hypnagogic thoughts matching the inertia of his confinement he would finally become ensconced there, in this train jostling him around, and at last fall asleep.
All at once the thread of the abstract thought is broken and autosymbolically in the place of it is presented the following hypnagogic hallucination: Symbol. An enormous circle, or transparent sphere, floats in the air and men are putting their heads into this circle. Interpretation. In this symbol everything that I was thinking of is expressed.
If the hypnagogic phase actually affects the cerebral cellules in connection with the various senses of which they are the organs, the phases of sleep and dreams, strictly so called, have more general conditions.
The mind does not pass suddenly and at a bound from the condition of dream-fancy to that of waking perception. I have already had occasion to touch on the "hypnagogic state," that condition of somnolence or "sleepiness" in which external impressions cease to act, the internal attention is relaxed, and the weird imagery of sleep begins to unfold itself.
The idea, converted into an image presented to the senses, may thus be said to have three stages: that of the waking state, which depends as we have said on the intensity and vividness with which it is reproduced, aided by a momentary detachment from the real environment; secondly, the hypnagogic phase, in which there is the physiological action of the nervous centres, which produce the image, though still with the implicit consciousness of the waking state; and finally, the actual dream, in which this implicit consciousness is almost always wanting, and the psychical exercise of thought is completely transformed into visions and figures which are believed to be real.
This intermediate and persistent stage of hypnagogic images serves in every way to explain the physical genesis of involuntary hallucinations. As a proof that the image physiologically assumes the form of a real appearance, I may mention the experience of myself and others.
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