And that what I was seeing was really there. When I observed the crawling coffee stain as I awoke in the dimly lit lecture hall, I thought I might be dreaming. Many people describe hallucinating as dreamlike, as if part of the brain is dreaming while the rest of the body is awake. Surprisingly, despite the regularity with which we hallucinate, there has been little research to explain what’s going on in our brains when we do so, particularly during states of sleep deprivation or sleep-wake transitions. Given such a high frequency, there must be a physiological basis for those all-nighter induced visions of things not really there. According to one Stanford researcher, at least 80% of people will hallucinate if severely sleep-deprived (“severe” meaning anything from getting only a few hours of sleep in a single night to going days without sleeping). It is well documented that a common side effect of sleep deprivation is hallucination, as evidenced by, but not limited to, long-distance swimmers, ultra marathon runners, and overly ambitious college students. What trick of visual perception caused this illusion of motion where there was none? It took a good 10 seconds for that coffee stain to stop moving. When I opened my eyes, I noticed that the coffee stain on my jeans had grown legs and started crawling away. My friend certainly hallucinated.įast-forward a few years: I was sitting in a seminar one evening after work and inadvertently dozed off. To be clear, western North Carolina, even in the chilliest of springs, isn’t hospitable to polar bears. Nearing the end of our six hour return trip, about 30 miles outside our town, my friend gazed to the side from the driver’s seat and saw a polar bear on the side of the road. The spring after I graduated from college, I did one of those things you only do when you’re young and mad: a friend and I drove from the mountains of North Carolina to the coast and back in a single day. Below is an exposition of my journey, beginning about a decade ago. My quest turned up a key paper (written entirely in German), a new hypothesis and a vow to get more sleep. What do psychosis, psychedelics and sleep deprivation have in common? They make you really bad at perceiving visual illusions…and really good at hallucinating.ĭriven by bewilderment, a hunch, and a sense of purpose, I set out to determine how sleep deprivation causes visual hallucinations.
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