{"id":1758,"date":"2014-10-14T15:30:56","date_gmt":"2014-10-14T19:30:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/?p=1758"},"modified":"2014-10-14T15:31:45","modified_gmt":"2014-10-14T19:31:45","slug":"hypnopompic-hallucinations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/?p=1758","title":{"rendered":"Hypnopompic hallucinations"},"content":{"rendered":"

I woke up this morning staring at the ceiling, and on the ceiling was the clear image of a young woman’s green eye staring back at me.  I blinked my eyes, made sure I was awake, but the image lingered.  After a moment, it faded away, but I thought the incident was rather bizarre and somewhat creepy.  It was as though a random dream image had been burned into my retina so that I could see it even in waking life.  I\u2019ve had minor sleep-deprivation hallucinations before, but this was more vivid than those.  It looked a bit like a fragment of a Vermeer painting:<\/p>\n

\"greeneye2\" <\/p>\n

Some internet searching confirmed that I\u2019m far from the only one to experience this sort of phenomenon.  According to Wikipedia\u2019s article on the hypnopompic state<\/a> (the state of consciousness leading out of sleep):<\/p>\n

\n

When the awakening occurs out of rapid eye movement<\/a> (REM) sleep, in which most dreams occur, the hypnopompic state is sometimes accompanied by lingering vivid imagery.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So, assuming the vision was not actually a dream-seer from another dimension spying into my waking life, or a mystical prophecy that I am to meet and wed a green-eyed beauty (although I\u2019ll leave those possibilities open), I\u2019m guessing a \u201chypnopompic hallucination\u201d is what it was.<\/p>\n

And, come to think of it, I\u2019ve had these sort of hallucinations before — with music.  It\u2019s not uncommon to wake up to beautiful music that isn\u2019t there.  I\u2019ve just never had it with such vivid imagery before.<\/p>\n

Oh, and the dream that preceded the hallucination was quite nice.  I was exploring a university campus, but it was in some royal futuristic steampunk world.  The university buildings were like gilded palaces, curved like the sides of pirate ships.  In one room, I witnessed a number of gamers playing a grand war game involving a bunch of little toy soldiers that were moved about a wire mesh grid.  When soldiers from opposing armies clashed and fought, mini-games involving dice and cards were played to determine which piece would defeat the other.  It looked like a lot of fun; I need to design the game for the real world now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I woke up this morning staring at the ceiling, and on the ceiling was the clear image of a young woman’s green eye staring back at me.  I blinked my eyes, made sure I was awake, but the image lingered.  After a moment, it faded away, but I thought the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[686],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7gI4B-sm","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1758"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1758\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}