Hypnagogic Question

[Kiloisalb]

this about the hypnagogic (don't know if it's spelled correctly) imagery. What exactly is the "old hag". I've tried a wild where i heard buzzing and felt energy wash over my body, but I've never seen this "old hag". Does everyone see this when they attempt a wild?

[skunk]

i aint never seent no "old hag". Do you actually want to?

[Bonsay]

No. Seeing the "old hag", which is the presence people feel when in the hypnagogic states, isn't a standard thing when doing WILDs or having SP. It can take the form of just about anything, usually something unpleasant (Aliens, witches, monsters, ghosts etc.). Although it doesn't have to be. In the end it's all about how you cope with it, if it does appear. The "cure" is usually to change your attitude towards it and even try to change it into something pleasant or firendly.

[Shift]

The old hag is often times a 'symptom' of true sleep paralysis, and is simply a "sensed presence". This 'sensed presence' occurs most often in people who suffer sleep paralysis as a disorder, but does not always accompany sleep paralysis. It is, simply, the feeling that there is someone/thing in your bedroom. Since most of us are not accustomed to people/things being in our bedrooms, the sensed presence usually takes on the identity of something specific and scary. For some reason, this often is the form of an old woman- possibly due to cultural influences and because now you have heard that it is supposed to be an old hag. Personally I like to just call it a sensed presence, because that implies the most important part- that you are sensing it, but that it's not really there. Once you know what it is, if you do think something is in your room, you realize it's just a harbringer of, hopefully, a lucid dream... and so it should either not bother you at all or, in the event that it materializes into a visual hallucination, hopefully it will not be frightening since you are thinking of it as a positive thing. Sleep Paralysis is probably much more rare than a lot of people think it is, and of course a sensed presence doesn't always accompany sleep paralysis (the paralysis of your body outside of rem sleep). So you will not necessarily experience a sensed presence at all, and the chances of you experiencing it prior to sleep are markedly lower than the true experience of a sensed presence upon awakening in sleep paralysis. Hypnagogic imagery is pretty different from a sensed presence. It's just weird little images, pictures, and abstract things you see in your head while falling asleep. These are not specific to sleep paralysis, but are just their own little phenomenon that occur when you are falling asleep, and again that are not always experienced/present. Hypnopompic imagery occurs after awakening, and is either rarer or not documented as often because people think it is a remnant of the dream itself. These are all hypnagogic/hypnopompic (hypna in the case of a WILD attempt) hallucinations that are pretty common. Just as you sometimes feel a wave, or buzzing, some people feel a sensed presence or hear weird noises. It varies, there's no set list of experiences one should get while WILDing. I DEILDed this morning, and I didn't feel a single thing. I just went from seeing black to looking at something. My sensed presences are usually family members, since my mind thinks that if someone is in my room, it is a family member who has walked in. Go figure.

[Robot_Butler]

There is one additional explanation for why people often have the common experience of seeing a presence in their room when they are on the verge of sleep. Theoretically, if you are dreaming, you could hallucinate anything. Why would there be a commonly experienced hallucination? The reason people see Old Hag is because humans have a blind spot in the center of their vision. During normal, every day life, your brain fills in this blank area before your mind interprets the image. You never see the blind spot. When you are just waking from or slipping into a dream (especially in a dark room) your mind will place erroneous images into this blind spot. You do not have enough visual information to fill in the blank spot, so you fall back on images from the dream. This is why many people report seeing ghost images when it is dark, or when they have just woken up. Even if you are fully awake, the hallucinations can still appear. They often seem to be indistinct, gray or shadowy floating masses. They commonly seem out of scale with their surroundings, or incongruous with your depth perception. As you move your eyes around the room, the image will stay rooted in the center of your vision, so will appear to float. If you've seen it before, you know what I mean. If you want to experiment with this, just sit in a very dark room and stare at a certain point in space for a few minutes. It works especially well when you sit in front of a mirror and stare at a barely visible image of yourself. You starve yourself of visual input, so your brain starts going haywire trying to dump something into the blind spot. We try to make this image make sense, which can lead to all sorts of strange hallucinations. We change what we see to try and fit this anomaly. The hallucinations can get quite involved, with the false images interacting with our surroundings or even our bodies. If you are interested in this, read about Charles Bonnet syndrome. Just google it and go to town. Here is a quote that explains it well in relation to sleeping in a dark room: At the moment little is known about how the brain stores the information it gets from the eyes and how we use this information to help us create the pictures we see. There is some research which shows that, when we see, the information from the eyes actually stops the brain from creating its own pictures. When people lose their sight, their brains are not receiving as many pictures as they used to, and sometimes, new fantasy pictures or old pictures stored in our brains are released and experienced as though they were seen. These experiences seem to happen when there is not much going on, for example when people are sitting alone, somewhere quiet which is familiar to them or when they are in lying in bed at night.

[moonshine]

Thats really fascinating RB. Makes sense too. Thanks for posting. This should definitely be dropped somewhere in the tutorials section.

[Shift]

There is one additional explanation for why people often have the common experience of seeing a presence in their room when they are on the verge of sleep. Theoretically, if you are dreaming, you could hallucinate anything. Why would there be a commonly experienced hallucination? The reason people see Old Hag is because humans have a blind spot in the center of their vision. During normal, every day life, your brain fills in this blank area before your mind interprets the image. You never see the blind spot. When you are just waking from or slipping into a dream (especially in a dark room) your mind will place erroneous images into this blind spot. You do not have enough visual information to fill in the blank spot, so you fall back on images from the dream. This is why many people report seeing ghost images when it is dark, or when they have just woken up. Even if you are fully awake, the hallucinations can still appear. They often seem to be indistinct, gray or shadowy floating masses. They commonly seem out of scale with their surroundings, or incongruous with your depth perception. As you move your eyes around the room, the image will stay rooted in the center of your vision, so will appear to float. If you've seen it before, you know what I mean. If you want to experiment with this, just sit in a very dark room and stare at a certain point in space for a few minutes. It works especially well when you sit in front of a mirror and stare at a barely visible image of yourself. You starve yourself of visual input, so your brain starts going haywire trying to dump something into the blind spot. We try to make this image make sense, which can lead to all sorts of strange hallucinations. We change what we see to try and fit this anomaly. The hallucinations can get quite involved, with the false images interacting with our surroundings or even our bodies. If you are interested in this, read about Charles Bonnet syndrome. Just google it and go to town. Here is a quote that explains it well in relation to sleeping in a dark room: Damn, that's very interesting, where did you hear about it? I love playing with blind spots, but this is a neat theory about the hags!

[Robot_Butler]

While growing up, I knew a woman with a bad case of macular degeneration. She is now completely blind. When I was a kid, she would always tell me about the crazy things she would see. She knew they were not there, but that did not stop them from seeming real. I later learned there is a name for this, and that it is extrememly underreported. Most people with failing vision don't want to mention that they "see things" for fear of being labeled crazy and losing what little independence they still have. I've always wondered how common this really is. It is interesting to think about it in relation to fear-of-the-dark mythology such as ghosts, UFOs, and alien encounters.

[Shift]

While growing up, I knew a woman with a bad case of macular degeneration. She is now completely blind. When I was a kid, she would always tell me about the crazy things she would see. She knew they were not there, but that did not stop them from seeming real. I later learned there is a name for this, and that it is extrememly underreported. Most people with failing vision don't want to mention that they "see things" for fear of being labeled crazy and losing what little independence they still have. I've always wondered how common this really is. It is interesting to think about it in relation to fear-of-the-dark mythology such as ghosts, UFOs, and alien encounters. That's really intersting... I spent about a year helping a blind woman and she never said anything to me, but yea probably because she was worried about sounding crazy. The mind filling in blind spots is such an insane thing... complicated enough to fill in patterns even! Do you know if this phenomenon has a name or anything? I don't know why it would only occur during SP, though...