Dreams

Source: TW

New faces

Several people, including me, occasionally or frequently have seen vivid apparitions of faces they have never seen in real life during hypnagogia.

Accounts

It matches a description from the 1800s well (translated from the French by GPT):

“As I was falling asleep, faces began to form before me, one after another –
faces of men, women, and children whom I did not recognize.
Each appeared for a few seconds, distinctly modeled and animated,
then faded and was replaced by another,
as if I were watching a procession of unknown beings.
Their expressions were lifelike, sometimes benign, sometimes severe, yet entirely unfamiliar.”
-Alfred Maury, Le Sommeil et les Rêves (1861)

Slightly paraphrased:

“I have frequently noticed, on closing my eyes, that faces of strangers appear with great distinctness – faces I am sure I have never seen before.
They are not recalled memories; they come unbidden, sometimes with minute detail – wrinkles, glances, peculiarities of expression – and vanish instantly as if they had never existed.”
-Havelock Ellis in The World of Dreams (1911?)

F. W. H. Myers also mentions seeing such faces in his Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903).

Fusiform face area

Modern workers tend to explain it away as arising from increased activity in the fusiform face area located on the ventral surface of the right temporal lobe and the association visual cortex in hypnagogia. In purely mechanistic terms one could compare it to the neural networks emitting images of faces from weights learnt from previous input images.

But why should this happen at all? That remains a mystery… Is this an odd byproduct of brain function or is there any evolutionary significance to it or is it even more mysteriously implanted (at least in some cases) by ghostly entities.

Dead person

Regarding the last point, while I have not experienced this personally, one person has reported to me that he repeatedly saw the face of someone whom he later confirmed as having lived in the past.

Fainting visions

There is a study on pilots being trained for high g-forces being spun in centrifuges. When they lose consciousness in the process, at least 15% report witnessing memorable dream-like visions. These are said to present vivid landscapes, faces of friends, or “mystical” imagery.

Some American teenagers do something called the “Choking game” – it would appear to simulate the effects of blood flow to the brain being cut off.