Lights and lattices and where they are seen.

The author describes personal observations of persistent bright lights that appear during lucid dreams and upon waking (hypnopompic states). These lights—such as areas of light, disks, or sun-like concentrations—remain fixed in the visual field regardless of dreamed body movements and recur in the same locations across different dreams. Unlike ordinary dream images, they are not representational. The author notes that hypnopompic geometrical patterns, though appearing dome-like, are actually experienced as two-dimensional and flat. This flatness, the author argues, applies to all internal images, which the mind then translates to external positions around the eyes.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The article discusses characteristics of internal visual images and is based on personal observations of lucid dream and hypnopompic phenomena. In the context of lucid dreaming there sometimes occur persisting bright lights that do not behave like ordinary dream images. These phenomena appear as areas of light, peripheral light, disks of light, sun-like concentrations of light, and fullness of light. These luminous phenomena remain in a fixed location in my view in spite of any dreamed body movement, may appear in different dreams in the same locations, are not truly representational, and appear to be unrelated to other dream images, visual or otherwise. These stable intense lights remain in a fixed location in relation to an area defined by keeping the head still and moving the eyes. This area is the space that is filled at times by scannable hypnopompic geometrical patterns or scannable hypnagogic complex images. Although space-filling patterns look like they extend like a dome over the eyes, a close examination shows that they have a two-dimensional flatness that reaches over the entire scannable area. The observation of these patterns as flat becomes understandable when we think of the internal image as having no distance or separation from the seeing of the image, that is, as being experienced face on at every point. The flatness of the hypnopompic pattern implies the flatness of all internal images. The experiences translates the flat image to external positions around the eyes. This translation is explained.