One thing I’ve personally witnessed is people claiming to have had the exact same vivid dream the night before. I’m talking stuff like playing scrabble with Brad Pitt and Former President Carter on the summit of mount McKinley, so it seems unlikely that they were both prompted by the same recent event. Assuming that these people haven’t been primed until after the fact, I would expect even stronger effects to be possible for those who have.
Intuitively, I would expect memories of dreams to be different than memories of reality—since dreams themselves are just confabulations in the first place, and memories of them fade rapidly, it’s not entirely surprising that people trying to remember their dreams would get confabulations instead.
This suggests a cause for many cases of mass hallucination: sleep deprivation. It’s known to cause hallucinations, and in some settings it happens to whole crowds of people at once. Add an ambiguous stimulus and a few people shouting out their interpretation, and you have all the ingredients for a shared hallucination.
Intuitively, I would expect memories of dreams to be different than memories of reality—since dreams themselves are just confabulations in the first place, and memories of them fade rapidly, it’s not entirely surprising that people trying to remember their dreams would get confabulations instead.
This suggests a cause for many cases of mass hallucination: sleep deprivation. It’s known to cause hallucinations, and in some settings it happens to whole crowds of people at once. Add an ambiguous stimulus and a few people shouting out their interpretation, and you have all the ingredients for a shared hallucination.
One thing I’ve personally witnessed is people claiming to have had the exact same vivid dream the night before. I’m talking stuff like playing scrabble with Brad Pitt and Former President Carter on the summit of mount McKinley, so it seems unlikely that they were both prompted by the same recent event. Assuming that these people haven’t been primed until after the fact, I would expect even stronger effects to be possible for those who have.
Intuitively, I would expect memories of dreams to be different than memories of reality—since dreams themselves are just confabulations in the first place, and memories of them fade rapidly, it’s not entirely surprising that people trying to remember their dreams would get confabulations instead.
This suggests a cause for many cases of mass hallucination: sleep deprivation. It’s known to cause hallucinations, and in some settings it happens to whole crowds of people at once. Add an ambiguous stimulus and a few people shouting out their interpretation, and you have all the ingredients for a shared hallucination.
Intuitively, I would expect memories of dreams to be different than memories of reality—since dreams themselves are just confabulations in the first place, and memories of them fade rapidly, it’s not entirely surprising that people trying to remember their dreams would get confabulations instead.
This suggests a cause for many cases of mass hallucination: sleep deprivation. It’s known to cause hallucinations, and in some settings it happens to whole crowds of people at once. Add an ambiguous stimulus and a few people shouting out their interpretation, and you have all the ingredients for a shared hallucination.