From personal experience, I can speak best to falling-asleep hallucinations. I see geometric patterns, but not faces or insects (thankfully to the latter!). More often I get auditory hallucinations when I'm falling asleep, consisting of a voice talking with indistinct words. It's always a voice I heard talking a lot during the day--when I was growing up, it would be my mom's voice; when I was in college, it would be the sound of one of my professors lecturing; now it's likely to be one of my co-workers talking.
I have a theory that my auditory hallucinations have to do with one of the functions that's been posited for sleep: long-term memory formation. I was in college 10 years ago, so this theory could be way out of date. But I suspect my brain is taking the most salient input it received during the day, and re-traveling those neural pathways to reinforce them into long-term memory.
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Date: 2013-02-02 02:29 am (UTC)I have a theory that my auditory hallucinations have to do with one of the functions that's been posited for sleep: long-term memory formation. I was in college 10 years ago, so this theory could be way out of date. But I suspect my brain is taking the most salient input it received during the day, and re-traveling those neural pathways to reinforce them into long-term memory.