This chapter examines how psychoactive substances shape hallucinations by acting on perception, prediction and meaning-making rather than “creating” experiences from nothing. It contrasts the hallucinatory styles of classic psychedelics, stimulants and dissociative drugs, linking their neurochemical effects to characteristic changes in vision, sound, body experience and selfhood. The discussion...
This chapter examines hallucinations linked to sleep as a powerful window into how the brain constructs perception at the borders between waking and dreaming. It focuses on hallucinations arising in hypnagogic (sleep-onset) and hypnopompic (awakening) states, in isolated episodes in the general population and in the context of sleep paralysis, narcolepsy and parasomnias. These experiences...
This chapter examines how people inhabit, interpret and respond to hallucinatory worlds across clinical, cultural and everyday settings. Drawing on phenomena such as near-death and out-of-body experiences, grief-related encounters with the dead, alien abduction narratives, phantom limbs, hypnosis, synaesthesia and voice hearing, it explores how altered perceptions emerge from interactions...
Perceived ethnic discrimination is known to be associated with anxiety and depression, and in turn, anxiety and depression are known to be associated with nightmare frequency and distress. This elicits a question: is perceived ethnic discrimination associated with nightmare frequency and distress? In this study, 179 female university students from the United Arab Emirates were assessed to...