Above: In one hallucination, text on a poster would change, when you walked closer to it.
When I first read the study suggesting that VR might help prime people to have more lucid dreams, it immediately seemed credible to me. For one thing, extensive VR use often shapes my own dreams. For another, it immediately reminded me of an experiment from back in 2004, when a medical doctor/programmer recreated the hallucinations of real schizophrenics in Second Life:
The concept of creating a visual recreation of a purely internal experience originated with Baldwin’s colleague Dr. Peter Yellowlees, an Australian psychiatrist who often treated his patients in the Outback remotely, via video conferencing. This inspired his idea to visualize the hallucinations associated with schizophrenia, a mental illness that afflicts some one percent of the population (mostly people in their teens and 20’s). To determine what they hallucinated, Yellowlees compiled interviews with his patients, to draw out specifics. What kind of voices? How many voices? Like a police sketch artist of the mind, an artist drew out the visual descriptions, and Dr. Yellowlees integrated the results into a computer mockup. The first attempt was produced on a Silicon Graphics machine, and took nine months to build from scratch. ("Which doesn't look anything as good,” Nash promises me, as we begin the tour, “as what you're about to see.") By contrast, Baldwin put his Second Life version together in some three weeks...
Things change, as you approach them, but the shift is subtle. A poster suddenly shifts to contain obscenities; a single word in a newspaper headline suddenly becomes the only word you see. A bookshelf seems to contain nothing but volumes about fascism. And most disturbing to me, a bathroom mirror which contains your reflection becomes, when you come closer, a bloody death mask. The man in the mirror is actually a model, but the hallucination is based on the testimony of a schizophrenic who stopped shaving, because when he looked in the mirror, he’d see his corpse staring back at him. (And when you get close enough to the sink, you hear the strains of bagpipes— because this is the music the man heard too, when he glimpsed his own death.)
One of the goals with the project was to give people personal insight and empathy for people with schizophrenia. As a graduate student training to be a therapist put it to me:
“I have seen patients start yelling in the middle of a group session,” Helga Kerensky tells me, “and I would be clueless as to what set the person off. You know when this happens, that it is most likely a hallucination--but you expect that they are seeing something very threatening, the type of things seen in slasher movies. These hallucinations,” referring to those contained in Baldwin’s simulation, “are terrifying in a more Hitchcock sort of way.” Conveying their subtle horror is important, she says, because a schizophrenic “may not gain much sympathy and understanding for saying ‘The paper said I am dead’, as they would if they said 'A man was coming at me with a knife.'” Now it’s possible to see how wracking a newspaper headline can actually be. So, she says, “I believe this virtual lab will help families and medical professionals to develop a better sense of how debilitating this condition is.”
Much more here. For me, the experience of these virtual hallucinations, even with such rudimentary graphics, not only seeped into my dreams. For a few days afterward, they actually crept into my waking consciousness in a totally disturbing way. So personally, the idea that VR primes us to question the reality of what we're in experiencing in dreams is totally plausible.
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