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Tuesday 10 February 2009

Hypnopompic hallucination or jinns


Hypnopompic hallucination is a psychiatric term that refers to a hallucination that occurs while a person is waking up from sleep. In psychiatry, a hallucination can be in any sensory modality like an auditory hallucination (sounds), visual (lights, figures), or tactile (pressure, pain), etc.

So, why am I talking about this?

A few nights back I was asleep, I felt I heard a sound and then as though there was something sitting on me. As a reflex, I wanted to recite the ayat ul kursi but I was still asleep in reality and paralysed and couldn't recite it. By the way, I talk in my sleep too so it would have been normal for me to recite surahs in my sleep. Then I tried to move and I couldn't for maybe 10 secs and finally I was able to open my eyes and move and I started reading the ayatul kursi thrice, then the 3 quls thrice each before I finally felt better. I was wide awake and wondering if this was a dream or a jinn.

My friends and I used to love sharing jinn stories and I remember my friend saying that there are a certain type of jinn which sit on you and you can't speak or move and these jinns are usually very powerful. Personally, I never researched this. I guess I should.

If you haven't already figured out, the reason I mentioned hypnopompic hallucinations are because if I had relayed my experience to a psychiatrist, he/she would almost certainly tell me it was a hallucination as I was awakening. These kinds of hallucinations are not pathological and do not indicate any mental illness.

In psychiatry, we learn about and see patients with certain symptoms very similar to jinn possession. Sometimes, it's hard for me to separate the two. Maybe because you learn with experience and I haven't studied either in great detail.

Maybe what I had experienced was a hallucination or maybe, just maybe, it was a jinn playing around. *dum dum ddduuuummm* *x-files music* :P

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