Dreamways

Visions and hallucinations are experiences, occurring when not asleep, in which one sees, hears, smells, tastes, or feels something in the absence of external stimulus to the sense organs.

Visions and hallucinations are dream-realm manifestations where the interface between the inner and outer worlds can feel particularly intense and jarring to the dreamer. Such an experience can often feel like a wild and uncontrolled intrusion by manifestions arising from the realm of one's unconscious into the restrained and predictable world of conscious reality. Experiencing a vision or a hallucination, it often feels like our rational mind is only minimally, if at all, in control of what we are witnessing and feeling, which can feel extremely disconcerting and disturbing to both the beholder of the vision or hallucination as well as to people who are in close proximity to the dreamer.

Visions and hallucinations can be understood as experiences that afford an individual, while in a non-sleeping state, an opportunity to perceive patterns and structures in the world that are not available to consensual, waking consciousness. If these experiences can be grounded, integrated into consensual reality, they can, indeed, fling open the doors of perception. Characteristically they seem to arise well outside the boundaries and control of our rational minds, often feeling as though they come from outside ourselves.

What is the distinction between a vision and a hallucination? It seems that primarily it has to do with value judgments regarding the dream event. Visions historically have had a positive spin ascribed to them, particularly in the spiritual / religious realm. From time immemorial, shamans and prophets the world over have experienced visions as a medium whereby a power greater than the individual has made itself and its wisdom available to the world of humans. Such information that is not available to most mortals has been perceived as valuable and to various degrees integrated into the views of the waking world in which they arose. Visions can be understood as a bridge between mortals and the gods, between an individual's rational waking reality and the a transcendent, supra-human reality. However, the rational, scientific age mistrusts such irrational events and has relegated them to the dumpster of superstition and hysteria. Visions may be induced by ingesting drugs, by emotional or physical stress, by focused intent and attention as in meditation, prayer, and supplication; or by a completely uninvited and unintended visitation. Typically, one who experiences a visionary experience has somehow prepared herself to be receptive to such an event.

Hallucinations generally have a negative connotation in our culture. Certainly, since the drug experimentation of the Sixties, hallucinations are associated with wild-eyed LSD trips of melting walls and dancing colors, or with nightmarish flashbacks from trips gone bad. Native traditions the world over have used hallucinogens mindfully and ritualistically as a way to expand one's understanding of self and reality. Our puritanical, controlling culture has melded what are seen as the excesses of hippie behavior with ritualistic hallucinogen use, making all drug-induced mind-expanding experiences illegal and immoral. Non-drug induced events labeled as hallucinations are pathologized as an illness In our psychiatrized milieu, occurrences to be suppressed, ironically, with drugs.

Visions of any sort that cannot be rationally explained tend to be viewed as something fearful. They are pejoratively labeled as hallucinations. Hallucinations are categorized as dangerous, to be controlled by any means necessary. As with all the ways of dreaming, visions and hallucinations, when worked with, understood and integrated into consciousness are of immense value in forming coherent lives. And, as with all types of dream, unexamined, misunderstood, not brought into consciousness, they can have a very disruptive and even destructive influence. The value of visions and hallucinations comes when the dreamer cultivates a Dreamful relationship with them.