oneiroid hallucination

   The term oneiroid hallucination is indebted to the Greek noun oneiros, which means dream. It also refers to the * Oneiroi, the gods of dreams featuring in Greek mythology. The term oneiroid hallucination translates loosely as 'dream-like hallucination'. It was introduced by the French classical scholar and dream researcher Louis-FerdinandAlfred Maury (1817-1892), who suggested that the false perceptions of * dreams, * delirium, and *hallucinations proper have a common origin. Due to a nervous breakdown, Maury had firsthand experience of hallucinations. He postulated a mechanism called * oneirism to denote an uninterrupted process of * dream activity which may be drowned out by * sensory perceptions, but which under certain peculiar circumstances may gain the upper hand during one's waking hours. It was also Maury who in 1848 introduced the term *hypnagogic hallucination to denote the introductory nature of these phenomena as they lead the individual into sleep.

   References

   Dowbiggin, I. (1990). Alfred Maury and the politics of the unconscious in nineteenth-century France. History of Psychiatry, 1, 255-287.

   Maury, L.F.A. (1848). Des hallucinations hypn-agogiques. Annales Médico-psychologiques, 11, 26-40.

   Maury, L.F.A. (1865). Le sommeil et les rêves. Études psychologiques sur ces phénomènes et les divers états qui s'y rattachent. Troisième édition. Paris: Librairie Académique Didier et Cie., Libraires-Éditeurs.