Visionary Experiences

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The following originally appeared on Singing to the plants

There are a number of human experiences — I am thinking of such things as hallucinations, lucid dreams, visions, apparitions, false awakenings, out-of-body experiences, DMT journeys, eidetic visualization, hypnagogia, waking dreams, and active imagination — that are characterized by presentness, detail, externality, and three-dimensional explorable spacefulness. We can call these visionary experiences.

Specifically, visionary experiences have in common that they

  • occur with the force of a present perception of external reality;
  • have what appears to be the same quantity and quality of sensory detail as ordinary experiences;
  • are experienced as external to the experiencer;
  • occur in what seems to the experiencer to be an extended, three-dimensional, explorable perceptual space; and
  • frequently involve interactions with apparently autonomous others.

Such visionary experiences can be categorized in several ways. First, we can distinguish overlapping visionary experiences from total ones.

An overlapping vision appears to occur within the otherwise normal perception of the environment: a person with Charles Bonnet syndrome sees a monkey sitting on his neurologist’s lap (Ramachandran, 1998, p. 107); a bereaved widow sees an apparition of her deceased husband standing in the hallway; an ayahuasca drinker sees cast-iron lawn furniture placed in front of a jungle hut (Beyer, 2009, pp. 232-233).

total vision, on the other hand, substitutes an entirely different perceptual space for the ordinary environment: a lucid dreamer floats down a staircase; a runner hovers in the air, looking down at her own body during a marathon; an ayahuasca drinker has a vision of a golden child standing by a garbage-strewn empty lot (Beyer, 2009, p. 241).

Either type of visionary experience may be multisensorial, incorporating vision, sound, and kinesthesia. Of course, there can be ambiguity. I may seem to awaken in my darkened room to see a figure standing in front of the dresser by the bed. If I have in fact awakened, then the figure appears to occur in my normal perceptual space; if this is, instead, a false awakening, and I am in fact dreaming, then clearly the vision has constructed not only the figure but my room as well.

The same descriptions would fit a wide variety of total visionary experiences. Whether in lucid dreams, active imagination, or hallucination, people move through explorable landscapes — along a country road (Jung, 1935/1997b, ¶394, p. 144), through unfamiliar streets (Green & McCreery, 1994, pp. 1-2), high enough in the air to see the tops of the trees and small hills (Alvarado, 2000, p. 184). They interact with objects and people — push open a door (Jung, 1935/1997b, ¶394, p. 144), carry on a conversation (Jung, 1962/1997a, pp. 28, 30), confront an angry father (Laberge & Gackenbach, 2000, pp. 169). They turn corners and see unexpected things — a small chapel (Jung, 1935/1997b, ¶394, p. 144), a war memorial (Green & McCreery, 1994, pp. 1-2), a sunlit glade (Green & McCreery, 1994, p. 11). Unexpected events occur — a sparrow alights on one’s hand (Green & McCreery, 1994, p. 11), something with pointed ears scurries out of sight (Green & McCreery, 1994, p. 69), the hands of a clock suddenly move (Jung, 1935/1997b, ¶394, p. 144). These descriptions come from active imagination, lucid dreams, out-of-body experiences, and false awakenings, but they have a striking phenomenological consistency.

Total visionary experiences convey the sense of being in an explorable environment, often in the presence of autonomous other-than-human persons. This sense has been discussed, in particular, by analysts describing active imagination — a world they call imaginal and I have here called visionary. For example, transpersonal psychologist John Rowan says, “It is crucial to understand that the imaginal world has a reality of its own, within the four walls of its own realm” (1993, p. 63). Here, Hillman says, “we have to engage with persons whose autonomy may radically alter, even dominate our thoughts and feelings” (1983, p. 55).

Psychologist Mary Watkins says that one creates for oneself a home in the imaginal (1976, p. 124). “The imaginal world,” says Rowan, “is a world where real things happen” (1993, p. 54). Henry Corbin, a scholar of Sufism and Persian Islam, calls this visionary world the mundus imaginalis, “a very precise order of reality, which corresponds to a precise mode of perception” (1972/2000, p. 71).

These visionary experiences can also be characterized along two dimensions — first, according to the degree to which the experience is entered into intentionally; and, second, by the amount of control the experiencer exercises over the content of the experience. Active imagination would be high in intentionality and low on control; Tibetan tantric eidetic visualization would be high on both; and a Charles Bonnet hallucination would typically be low on both.

The same type of experience may occur at different points along these dimensions on different occasions. Hallucinations of the deceased are a commonly documented part of the grief reaction (Bentall, 2000; Grimby, 1993; Reese, 1971). Such experiences may vary on intentionality, to the extent that the bereaved attempts, for example, to engage the deceased in conversation or perhaps even attempts to call the deceased for purposes of communication. A lucid dreamer may — or may not — be able to control the actions of dream objects and persons, or be able to do so to varying degrees.

Such visionary experiences appear to be a central and consistent component of shamanism generally — most prominently, for example, in the ayahuasca shamanism of the Upper Amazon (Beyer, 2009). Shamanic experiences would rank high on intentionality and relatively low on control, like active imagination. While the shaman can control his or her own actions while interacting with the spirits, the shaman has no direct control over the actions of the autonomous spirits; the shaman can ask a question, ask for help, even demand compliance, but most commonly cannot compel a particular response (see, e.g., Jakobsen, 1999). In this, shamanic experiences are similar to some Buddhist and Hindu eidetic visualization practices; conversely, certain spontaneous Buddhist visionarysamādhis would rank low on both intentionality and control.

Visionary experiences also appear to be quite widespread across cultures. For example, it is possible to trace the development and spread of both spontaneous visions and eidetic visualization as a meditative practice in both Hinduism and Buddhism (Beyer, 1977). Similar visionary experiences can be found in the writings of certain Muslim mystics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, especially the Persian Suhrawardī and the Arabic Avicenna and Ibn al-‘Arabī (Corbin, 1972/2000; Chittick, 1994). Here imaginal dialogues between men and their angels form the central experience around which a cosmology of levels and worlds revolves (Watkins, 2000, p. 75).

In Europe, the surrealists independently plunged into the visionary world, which they called the imagination. “The imaginary,” says André Breton, “is what tends to become real” (quoted in Alquié, 1969, p. 126). And, in his Surrealist Manifesto (1971a, p. 66), he wrote, “Perhaps the imagination is on the verge of recovering its rights. If the depths of our minds conceal strange forces capable of augmenting or conquering those on the surface, it is in our greatest interest to capture them.” Similarly, in his Second Surrealist Manifesto (1971b, p. 89), Breton called the imagination the “vital and highest faculty of the mind,” the illuminator and not the falsifier of reality, the unveiler of hidden zones.

Guillaume Appollinaire, in his Calligrammes, writes of “kingdoms vast and strange,” where “there are new fires of colors never seen, a thousand mysterious phantoms, which we must say are real” (quoted in Balakian, 1947, p. 106). “Reality, then,” says Breton’s biographer Anna Balakian, “in its dynamic sense proceeding from an interior state, nurtured by what we call imagination, and brought to an exterior existence . . . is what Breton calls the ‘surreal,’ in a sense that it has no connection with the unreal” (p. 89). Paul Eluard says, “Images are, images live, everything becomes image. They were long mistaken for illusions because they were restricted, were made to undergo the test of reality, an insensitive and dead reality” (Eluard, 1932, quoted in Ray, 1971, p. 126).

There seems to be much in common among the various visionary experiences — active imagination, hallucinations, lucid dreams, out-of-body experiences, false awakenings, ayahuasca visions, shamanic journeys, waking dreams, apparitions, and eidetic visualization. There may indeed be an additional experience that shares with visionary experiences their characteristic presentness, detail, externality, autonomy, three-dimensional explorable spacefulness, and interaction with apparently autonomous others. I am talking, of course, about reality.

If reality is a visionary experience, it lies toward the bottom of the scale of control. To the extent that the boundary between reality and other visionary experiences is fluid, and may be influenced by culture, training, and experience, it may rank higher on the scale of intentionality than we usually believe.

Say you dream that you trip over a rock, look up, and see a child holding a flower and smiling at you. You might then seek to understand the meaning of the dream — to explore its depths, to find its message, to swim in its currents, to interrogate it and let it speak. You might go back intop the dream, or call it up in active imagination, and speak to the rock, the child, the flower: Who are you? What do you want me to do? Will you be my teacher?

Now suppose that in reality you trip over a rock, look up, and see a child holding a flower and smiling at you. Why do we disrespect reality so much that we deny to it the meaning we seek in a dream or vision? Soul, says Hillman, is “that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical” — including mere reality.

To the extent that these experiences are convincing, detailed, explorable, real, they make fluid the line between the visionary and the everyday worlds. Perhaps they teach us to de-reify the world, to personify, to mythologize — to obliterate the boundaries, construct a visionary world from the detritus of the everyday, let us see through, turn the world into metaphor, into magic.

 

REFERENCES

Alquié, A. (1969). The philosophy of Surrealism. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Alvarado, C. S. (2000). Out-of-body experiences. In E. Cardeña, S. J. Lynn, & S. Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evidence (pp. 183–218). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Balakian, A. (1947). The literary origins of Surrealism. New York, NY: New York University Press.

Bentall, R. P. (2000). Hallucinatory experiences. In E. Cardeña, S. J. Lynn, & S. Krippner (Eds.), Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evidence (pp. 85–120). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Beyer, S. (1977). Notes on the vision quest in early Mahāyāna. In L. Lancaster (Ed.). Prajñāpāramitā and related systems: Studies in honor of Edward Conze. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Buddhist Studies Series.

Beyer, S. (2009). Singing to the plants: A guide to mestizo shamanism in the Upper Amazon. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.

Breton, A. (1971a). Le manifeste du Surréalisme. In Waldberg, P. (Ed.), Surrealism. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Breton, A. (1971b). Le second manifeste du Surréalisme. In Balakian, A. (Ed.), Andre Breton: Magus of surrealism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Chittick, W. C. (1994). Imaginal worlds: Ibn al-’Arabi and the problem of religious diversity. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Corbin, H. (2000). Mundus imaginalis: Or the imaginary and the imaginal. In B. Sells (Ed.), Working with images (pp. 71–89). Woodstock, CT: Spring Publications. (Original work published 1972.)

Eluard, P. (1932). Poetry’s evidence (Beckett, S., Trans.). This Quarter, 5(1).

Green, C., & McCreery, C. (1994). Lucid dreaming: The paradox of consciousness during sleep. London: Routledge.

Grimby, A. (1993). Bereavement among elderly people: Grief reactions, post-bereavement hallucinations and quality of life. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 87, 72–80.

Hillman, J. (1983). Healing fictions. Woodstock, CT: Spring.

Jakobsen, M. D. (1999). Shamanism: Traditional and contemporary approaches to the mastery of spirits and healing. New York: Berghahn Books.

Jung, C. (1997a). Confrontation with the unconscious. In J. Chodorow (Ed.), Jung on active imagination (pp. 21–41). Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1962.)

Jung, C. (1997b). The Tavistock lectures. In J. Chodorow (Ed.), Jung on active imagination (pp. 143–153). Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1935.)

Laberge, S., & Gackenbach, J. (2000). Lucid dreaming. In E. Cardeña, S. J. Lynn, & S. Krippner (Eds.),Varieties of anomalous experience: Examining the scientific evidence (pp. 151–182). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Ramachandran, V. S. (1998). Phantoms in the brain. New York: Harper Collins.

Ray, P. (1971). The surrealist movement in England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Reese, W. D. (1971). The hallucinations of widowhood. British Medical Journal, 210, 37–41.

Rowan, J. (1993). The transpersonal: Psychotherapy and counselling. London: Routledge.

Watkins, M. (1976). Waking dreams. New York: Harper Colophon.

Watkins, M. (2000). Invisible guests: The development of imaginal dialogues. Woodstock, CT: Spring Publications.

Image by Lola Audu, courtesy of Creative Commons license. 

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Ayahuasca and the Godhead: An Interview with Wahid Azal of the Fatimiya Sufi Order
Wahid Azal, a Sufi mystic of The Fatimiya Sufi Order and an Islamic scholar, talks about entheogens, Sufism, mythology, and metaphysics.

 

Ayahuasca and the Feminine: Women’s Roles, Healing, Retreats, and More
Ayahuasca is lovingly called “grandmother” or “mother” by many. Just how feminine is the brew? Read to learn all about women and ayahuasca.

What Is the Standard of Care for Ketamine Treatments?
Ketamine therapy is on the rise in light of its powerful results for treatment-resistant depression. But, what is the current standard of care for ketamine? Read to find out.

What Is Dissociation and How Does Ketamine Create It?
Dissociation can take on multiple forms. So, what is dissociation like and how does ketamine create it? Read to find out.

Having Sex on Ketamine: Getting Physical on a Dissociative
Curious about what it could feel like to have sex on a dissociate? Find out all the answers in our guide to sex on ketamine.

Special K: The Party Drug
Special K refers to Ketamine when used recreationally. Learn the trends as well as safety information around this substance.

Kitty Flipping: When Ketamine and Molly Meet
What is it, what does it feel like, and how long does it last? Read to explore the mechanics of kitty flipping.

Ketamine vs. Esketamine: 3 Important Differences Explained
Ketamine and esketamine are used to treat depression. But what’s the difference between them? Read to learn which one is right for you: ketamine vs. esketamine.

Guide to Ketamine Treatments: Understanding the New Approach
Ketamine is becoming more popular as more people are seeing its benefits. Is ketamine a fit? Read our guide for all you need to know about ketamine treatments.

Ketamine Treatment for Eating Disorders
Ketamine is becoming a promising treatment for various mental health conditions. Read to learn how individuals can use ketamine treatment for eating disorders.

Ketamine Resources, Studies, and Trusted Information
Curious to learn more about ketamine? This guide includes comprehensive ketamine resources containing books, studies and more.

Ketamine Guide: Effects, Common Uses, Safety
Our ultimate guide to ketamine has everything you need to know about this “dissociative anesthetic” and how it is being studied for depression treatment.

Ketamine for Depression: A Mental Health Breakthrough
While antidepressants work for some, many others find no relief. Read to learn about the therapeutic uses of ketamine for depression.

Ketamine for Addiction: Treatments Offering Hope
New treatments are offering hope to individuals suffering from addiction diseases. Read to learn how ketamine for addiction is providing breakthrough results.

Microdosing Ketamine & Common Dosages Explained
Microdosing, though imperceivable, is showing to have many health benefits–here is everything you want to know about microdosing ketamine.

How to Ease a Ketamine Comedown
Knowing what to expect when you come down from ketamine can help integrate the experience to gain as much value as possible.

How to Store Ketamine: Best Practices
Learn the best ways how to store ketamine, including the proper temperature and conditions to maximize how long ketamine lasts when stored.

How To Buy Ketamine: Is There Legal Ketamine Online?
Learn exactly where it’s legal to buy ketamine, and if it’s possible to purchase legal ketamine on the internet.

How Long Does Ketamine Stay in Your System?
How long does ketamine stay in your system? Are there lasting effects on your body? Read to discover the answers!

How Ketamine is Made: Everything You Need to Know
Ever wonder how to make Ketamine? Read our guide to learn everything you need to know about the procedures of how Ketamine is made.

Colorado on Ketamine: First Responders Waiver Programs
Fallout continues after Elijah McClain. Despite opposing recommendations from some city council, Colorado State Health panel recommends the continued use of ketamine by medics for those demonstrating “excited delirium” or “extreme agitation”.

Types of Ketamine: Learn the Differences & Uses for Each
Learn about the different types of ketamine and what they are used for—and what type might be right for you. Read now to find out!

Kitty Flipping: When Ketamine and Molly Meet
What is it, what does it feel like, and how long does it last? Read to explore the mechanics of kitty flipping.

MDMA & Ecstasy Guide: Effects, Common Uses, Safety
Our ultimate guide to MDMA has everything you want to know about Ecstasy from how it was developed in 1912 to why it’s being studied today.

How To Get the Most out of Taking MDMA as a Couple
Taking MDMA as a couple can lead to exciting experiences. Read here to learn how to get the most of of this love drug in your relationship.

Common MDMA Dosage & Microdosing Explained
Microdosing, though imperceivable, is showing to have many health benefits–here is everything you want to know about microdosing MDMA.

Having Sex on MDMA: What You Need to Know
MDMA is known as the love drug… Read our guide to learn all about sex on MDMA and why it is beginning to makes its way into couple’s therapy.

How MDMA is Made: Common Procedures Explained
Ever wonder how to make MDMA? Read our guide to learn everything you need to know about the procedures of how MDMA is made.

Hippie Flipping: When Shrooms and Molly Meet
What is it, what does it feel like, and how long does it last? Explore the mechanics of hippie flipping and how to safely experiment.

How Cocaine is Made: Common Procedures Explained
Ever wonder how to make cocaine? Read our guide to learn everything you need to know about the procedures of how cocaine is made.

A Christmas Sweater with Santa and Cocaine
This week, Walmart came under fire for a “Let it Snow” Christmas sweater depicting Santa with lines of cocaine. Columbia is not merry about it.

Ultimate Cocaine Guide: Effects, Common Uses, Safety
This guide covers what you need to know about Cocaine, including common effects and uses, legality, safety precautions and top trends today.

NEWS: An FDA-Approved Cocaine Nasal Spray
The FDA approved a cocaine nasal spray called Numbrino, which has raised suspicions that the pharmaceutical company, Lannett Company Inc., paid off the FDA..

The Ultimate Guide to Cannabis Bioavailability
What is bioavailability and how can it affect the overall efficacy of a psychedelic substance? Read to learn more.

Cannabis Research Explains Sociability Behaviors
New research by Dr. Giovanni Marsicano shows social behavioral changes occur as a result of less energy available to the neurons. Read here to learn more.

The Cannabis Shaman
If recreational and medical use of marijuana is becoming accepted, can the spiritual use as well? Experiential journalist Rak Razam interviews Hamilton Souther, founder of the 420 Cannabis Shamanism movement…

Cannabis Guide: Effects, Common Uses, Safety
Our ultimate guide to Cannabis has everything you want to know about this popular substances that has psychedelic properties.

Cannabis and Ayahuasca: Mixing Entheogenic Plants
Cannabis and Ayahuasca: most people believe they shouldn’t be mixed. Read this personal experience peppered with thoughts from a procannabis Peruvian Shaman.

CBD-Rich Cannabis Versus Single-Molecule CBD
A ground-breaking study has documented the superior therapeutic properties of whole plant Cannabis extract as compared to synthetic cannabidiol (CBD), challenging the medical-industrial complex’s notion that “crude” botanical preparations are less effective than single-molecule compounds.

Cannabis Has Always Been a Medicine
Modern science has already confirmed the efficacy of cannabis for most uses described in the ancient medical texts, but prohibitionists still claim that medical cannabis is “just a ruse.”

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