Hypnagogic Hallucinations Causes | Brain Damage or Injury

It is common sense that whatever brain damage or injury a person may have, regardless if it is minor or major then there is a big chance that there will be negative consequences on the person’s health or mental control and just one of the many effects can be hallucinations.

The brain is very complex and each part of it is working on managing and maintaining the hundreds and thousands of parts that our body is made of, so an injury to a specific location will result in those neurons, those neural connections and those control mechanisms to fail partly or completely which will then have a consequence on the areas of the body which those elements manage.

Hypnagogic hallucinations can be a result of brain damage

Hypnagogic hallucinations or hypnopompic ones can be a direct result of brain damage as the brain no longer processes information the way it was used to and due to some adaptive mechanism or malfunction it ends up either generating hallucinations itself or incorrectly calculates or processes the huge amount of information which is coming to us through all of our senses, which is not just the sense of sight, but also auditory and tactile as there are several types of hypnagogic hallucinations.

Brain disease as a cause of hallucinations

Brain damage or injury does not only occur as one would immediately imagine as a result of some terrible accident or some other physical shock directly to the head, but it can also occur as a consequence of some virus or a disease which starts spreading and damaging healthy cells. Not only hallucinations but also other sleep disorders can be a consequence of brain disease and damage.

Such brain cell destruction can also be observed in people suffering from various mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia and hypnagogic hallucinations

Up to 75% of those patients who suffer from schizophrenia and, to be accurate, among those who are admitted for treatment (because not all cases are reported or sent for treatment) they report hallucinations. This is, as one can imagine, a huge percentage which shows a direct correlation between schizophrenia and hallucinations and specifically hypnagogic hallucinations.