There are 2 things I can say in relation to this (3 actually, see below), though I can't give you all the answers. |
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My dad had a seizure a month and a half ago, and it was a very traumatic experience for me. The day after I had a hynagogic hallucination upon waking and saw a non-colored outline of his face, which frightened me greatly. Unfortunately, after that time I've been seeing faces in my head before I go to sleep at night. |
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There are 2 things I can say in relation to this (3 actually, see below), though I can't give you all the answers. |
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Last edited by Darkmatters; 08-08-2014 at 11:56 AM.
Thank you VERY much. That's very helpful and alleviates my worries. |
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My thoughts are- bring it up with a doc! If you see things after you're out of bed and eating breakfast, it's closed-eye hallucinations. Pretty simple. Hypnagogia can linger after waking up. I slept poorly recently (and slept a lot- like you did), and woke up convinced that I for a brief second saw a large face in front of me. Upon waking up properly, I realized I had looked at a chair. |
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Whenever I'm going to sleep I will occasionally see a split second flash of a random really scary face, and then it is gone. They startle and scare me, but they don't show up in my nightmares and as far as I know no face has appeared many times, but it still bothers me. I just assume it is a subconscious thing. |
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Birds of the night..
To support what Darkmatters is saying here, facial recognition really is one of the things that the brain really tries to do most often. It is more or less the same with recognizing human figures as well, but it just goes so much further with faces. It is very common for "hallucinations" to involve faces in some way, your brain just has so much processing power devoted to recognizing faces and their emotions that it's just natural to see them in everything. I place "hallucinations" in quotes because when I say it, I am referring to a very broad spectrum of perceptual disturbances that can range from something as small as seeing a few lines drawn on a piece of paper and kind of imagining they look like faces up to full blown seeing faces popping out of things that are not there, or seeing a person's face directly in front of you that isn't actually there. On the lower end the "hallucinations" are so minor that most would not consider them hallucinations, and then on the upper end its entirely hallucination. The brain is a device that constantly is filtering out things in order for them to correspond with "objective" reality and when you start to turn off some of the mechanisms for filtering things out, so to speak, like closing one's eyes, the filtering is no longer occurring and starts to seep into one's conscious perception of reality. |
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I just woke up quite abruptly from sleeping deeply and I'm on my way out. I couldn't be closer to sleepwalking. I close my eyes and I feel like falling asleep... but I'm getting no such thing as images or faces popping up. |
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A hallucination is a false perception of reality, but it is still a perception. The only reason you know it is false is because there are other people to tell you it is false. The same way you see real people, feel real pencils, taste real pizza, hear real music, or smell real cookies is the same way you see hallucinated people, feel hallucinated pencils, taste hallucinated pizza, hear hallucinated music, and smell hallucinated cookies. I don't mean to say that reality is a hallucination per se, but rather that hallucinations are just as subjectively real as objectively real things are because the brain creates these models the same way. Can you really deny that the only way to make a distinction between real reality and hallucinated reality is an outside observer? Even the outside observer might be a mere "hallucination". You are arguing semantics--you are arguing against my word choice and not my meaning. |
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Hallucinations are not caused by external stimuli. Period. Hallucinations without a clear cause are not something to be shrugged off. If you're extremely stressed or sleep deprived, that's one explanation. But in an otherwise healthy person it is not something you treat like a sneeze. |
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I didn't say hallucinations are caused by external stimuli, I said they are influenced by them. So we are agreeing, must you continue to argue with that? |
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Last edited by snoop; 09-22-2014 at 12:48 AM.
To bring up another point, I hallucinate on a daily basis, but it is a result of extensive hallucinogenic drug use and I have symptomology corresponding with Hallucinogenic Persisting Perception Disorder. So, despite the fact that I am literally always experiencing hallucinations, given my situation, it makes sense to shrug these hallucinations off, because they aren't harmful to me. I can still function just fine. Make sense? |
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I was at sports practice and one of our players (who has had a history of LSD) did a handstand and apparently the blood rushing to his head gave him hallucinations because he got up and shouted "What the fuck!" and looked really bewildered. It was pretty funny. |
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Birds of the night..
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