Hypnopompic Hallucinations - Causes, Symptoms

If you don’t get adequate sleep or have irregular sleep patterns, if you are on certain medications or drugs that DEA may look askance at, if subjected to a lot of stress, you could suffer from hypnopompic (hypno=sleep; pompic=sending) hallucinations. Hallucinations are perceptions of reality that lack actual input of information from the environment. That is, you see, hear or feel things that are not really there. Hypnopompic hallucinations are the confused bits of sensory data you perceive when you are beginning to awake but are not yet completely conscious. They include sights and sounds and are marked by their non-dreamlike appearance to the person having them. They appear to bear at least some similarity to hypnagogic hallucinations, which occur at the time people are falling asleep, and are disorientingly real to the person having them. Hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations are associated with a lot of ‘paranormal’ experiences, which may explain why most people see ghosts, UFOs and other spectral creatures only at night and are too paralyzed to deal with them. According to an article in the British Journal of Psychiatry, 37 per cent of the people that they tested experienced hypnagogic hallucinations while 12.5 per cent were found to have experienced hypnopompic hallucinations. This makes sense if you consider that lack of sleep is more likely to be a problem at the beginning than at the end of a nap.

Hypnopompic hallucinations are also associated with narcolepsy, a condition where people fall asleep with no warning. They could be a more likely indicator of narcolepsy as compared to hypnagogic hallucinations in subjects that report excessive daytime sleepiness. The study found that both kinds of hallucinations were far more common among people who experienced insomnia, were very sleepy in the day, or had some sort of mental disorders. They found that these hallucinations were more common than they had anticipated, with people being unwilling to report them because of fears that they may be thought to be mentally ill. Backing the assertion that there indeed are changes that occur in the brain during sleep, a study in the journal ‘Brain’ showed that blood flow patterns change in the brain during sleep but switch back during waking. In the process, blood flow is most rapidly re-established in the brain stem and the area where brain wiring crosses over, the thalamus, suggesting that these areas are involved in re-establishing conscious awareness. Then blood flows increased in the front surface (cortical) regions of the brain. These and other associated changes may all contribute to the hallucinations experienced.