Hypnopompic Hallucinations

Dreams have been a strong source of curiosity for a very long time. People from ancient days, and on into the present, have tried to find special meaning in dreams. Some believe they are prophecies, or even messages from spirits. Most people have had some form of a bad dream, a nightmare, where they are being chased by something with evil intent, or witness a terrifying occurrence. The nightmare may even reflect their real-life anxieties, but they always wake up and realize, “It was just a dream.” Sometimes though, the distinction between awake and asleep gets blurred during the transition, and a person can experience a bizarre manifestation of his nightmares. There have been many accounts of people who have been visited by ghosts, spirits, aliens, and other sorts of mysterious visitors—or at least they believe so. There are simple explanations for these supernatural encounters, and they are called hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations. In 1664, a Dutch physician named Isbrand Van Diemerbroeck published a collection of case histories, one of which was
They seem to be very common. Most of the general population is expected to experience a sleep hallucination sometime during their life. They are, however, much more common in people who already have some form of sleep or mental disorder. Individuals with narcolepsy, anxiety, depression, or bipolar affective disorder are twice as likely to experience these phenomena at least once weekly (Knott). They can also occur more often with people who are under a lot of mental stress, or use drugs (prescription drugs included) and alcohol. Treatment for sleep hallucinations is usually not necessary, but for extreme cases of them the treatment falls to the cause. If excessive hallucinations are the result of narcolepsy, then the narcolepsy needs to be managed to reduce