Consciousness Dreams Hallucinations Sleep

That meant that both Freud and James had been correct in predicting that hallucinations and delusions could be chemically mediated, but it remained to specify how altered chemistry could lead to altered consciousness. The 1953 discovery of REM sleep and its associations with dreaming promised to provide an answer. If the hallucinations and delusions of normal dreaming were themselves chemically mediated, we could compare that chemistry with the chemistry of psychosis and the chemistry of psychedelic visions. 

Examples of dissociations of consciousness that often divide the waking mind into two compartments include microsleeps, attentional lapses, and fantasy states. At the edges of sleep are hypnagogic hallucinations and sleep paralysis. Within sleep are sleep walking, sleep talking, and lucid dreaming. In all of these conditions, consciousness has some features characteristic of one state mixed with features characteristic of another. 

This normalizing account of hypnagogic hallucinations lends itself nicely to explanation in terms of AIM and hence to integration with those spontaneous and induced alterations in conscious state that interest us most. For example, an exaggeration of the normal tendency to hallucinate at sleep onset is seen in narcolepsy, as well as with the use of clinical and recreational drugs that alter the M axis of the AIM model in ways that promote REM sleep phenomena, including the intense dreaming often associated with it. 

The best that poor old Freud could do with flying dreams was to argue that they represented displaced sexual desire. Freud s rebus, you will recall, was that unconscious wishes - and sexual wishes needed to be kept unconscious - escaped the censor s denunciation when the ego was weakened by sleep. If the now free-to-be-expressed sexual impulses were not disguised, by the pleasurable but not sexual hallucination of flying, the dreamer would be awakened by the consciousness of these forbidden desires. Freud never mentioned his own sexual dreams. Perhaps he never had any - or never remembered them. But this is unlikely. And any research participant - or any of his patients - could have told him that sexual dreams, complete with orgasm, occur in the very same people who enjoy flying dreams. 

HEALTH SYMPTOMS inhalation (convulsive seizures, headache, dizziness, nausea, loss of consciousness) skin absorption (difficulty in sleeping, bad dreams, restlessness, hallucination, anxiety, mania, loss of appetite) ingestion (abdominal pain, burning sensation, diarrhea, dullness). 

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