What Only My Mind Could See

There are few people that know what I am about to share. I suppose I never felt it was something I could explain. The older I get, the more I feel I am a collection of stories to be told, so here goes.

Ever since I was an adolescent, I was prone to sorts of visual hallucinations that are not actual hallucinations, as most know them. I only later in life learned that they are a feature of my narcolepsy and they are a common symptom of those who have the narcolepsy condition.

When I was younger, I told no one about them, as I feared they would be “taken away” somehow. The experience was uniquely my own, and I cherished it as a genuine part of myself.

They are called hypnagogic hallucinations. They occur while awake and right before or while transitioning into sleep. Some would say that the experience is just like dreaming, but when one is not entirely asleep. For me, it occurred when I was lying in bed with my eyes closed, waiting for sleep to occur.

Images and scenes played out in my mind’s eye as if right in my field of vision. The images and scenes changed quickly, one transitioning into another, and they were extremely vivid. If I ever opened my eyes, the visual display went away because the visual experience is not at all like a psychosis hallucination where you think something is really there. I was entirely cognizant that visual images and scenes were not real and I could stop the experience by forcing myself to be in a completely wakeful state with my eyes open.

When I was younger, I used to say that I wish I could record the things I saw in those moments. It is a very wild, surreal, and fascinating thing to experience. The most interesting, should I say incomprehensible, part was that I felt I was seeing things that I never saw or experienced in my life. I had not seen them in my real life, not in movies I saw, etc. Everything was completely novel.

At rare times, I also had experiences where I was transplanted at a totally different time in history and in a place completely unknown to me. A few times, I found myself directly placed in a moment of time in either the past or future, in whole other space, time, and location, and I could look around and observe things in great detail.

For example, once (while semi-awake mind you) I entered this visual arena where I was at party amidst a house full of people. They wore clothes in a time I did not recognize and that I never heard described to me. There was art on the walls that seemed to be tied to the time, again, never experienced by me before.

The people were seemingly very real, and the party seemed to occur in real time. There was no sound. I could not interact, and I could not affect the environment. I could just move around the space and see things as if my presence wasn’t perceivable by those in the scene.

Now, imagine your mind displaying images of people, creatures, faces, scenery, shapes, etc. that you never imagined or experienced before or taking you in a time and place you never knew. Wouldn’t you wonder how your mind could conjure up these novel visual experiences?

I never understood it. How could I see in my mind’s eye things I had never experienced? It raised some serious philosophical questions for me... Did I have a collective consciousness that was shared with others, that traversed time, that reached locations and generations that only others experienced? Or, was it possible that a mind, only in a semi-dream state, could confabulate a whole series of nonexistent and unique visual experiences from random brain activity?

In any case, I never took it all too seriously. I merely found it fun and fascinating.

It all stopped when I started my meds for narcolepsy and my sleep got regulated.

I now miss the experience. Whatever it was, my experience does not amount to much if I don’t share it. Now that the experience is gone, it is just an interesting story at most.

Who knows, maybe I transcended to an actual place that is the source of imagination, the birthplace of art, or the crossroad of human experiences.

I have always thought of myself as a storyteller. Maybe one day I will write a story set in the times and places my mind once took me or I will detail what only my mind could see. Maybe the dream states were just stories that I had yet to tell.