Understanding the distinct features of waking states, dreams, psychedelics, psychosis, and alien abduction experiences

December 15, 2024
Simon Bresler, LCSW, CGP

Have you ever wondered what separates your normal waking consciousness from the vivid landscapes of dreams? Or how a psychedelic experience differs from a psychotic episode? Perhaps most intriguingly, how do these states compare to the profound and life-altering experiences reported by people who believe they’ve encountered non-human intelligence?

Human consciousness exists on a spectrum—from our everyday reality to extraordinary states that challenge our understanding of perception and experience. By exploring these different states, we can gain valuable insights into the complexity of the human mind.

Our Baseline Reality: The Waking State

The waking state serves as our default mode of human consciousness—the standard against which we measure all other experiences. It provides the foundation that allows us to navigate the world effectively, maintain a coherent sense of self, and participate in shared reality with others (Seth, 2021).

What makes our normal waking state distinct is its remarkable stability and predictability. In this state, we experience:

Adherence to Physical Laws

Our waking reality generally follows the predictable rules of physics. Objects fall down, not up. Time moves forward, not backward. While quantum physics reveals a more complex picture at the subatomic level, our everyday experience is primarily governed by consistent physical laws that create a stable environment for our survival. The predictability of materialist physics in our waking state fosters trust in cause-and-effect relationships—crucial for both survival and decision-making.

Logical Consistency

When we’re fully awake, our thoughts typically follow a logical pattern. Events happen in sequence. Cause precedes effect. This logical consistency helps us make sense of our experiences and anticipate future outcomes. Unlike in dream or psychedelic states where illogical or fantastical elements may dominate, waking consciousness ensures that experiences align with shared, objective reality.

The waking state provides us with a shared framework for reality. Even with individual differences in perception, we generally agree on basic facts about the physical world, which is essential for our collective functioning.

Coherent Sense of Self

Another defining characteristic of the waking state is our relatively consistent sense of self-identity. This includes our personality, memories, and understanding of our role and place in the world. This continuity provides a stable foundation for decision-making, emotional regulation, and social interaction.

Critical Thinking Abilities

Perhaps most importantly, our waking state allows us to evaluate information critically, distinguish between reality and fantasy, and engage in problem-solving. This crucial ability enables us to adapt to challenges and distinguish between helpful and harmful choices. Unlike in dreams, where critical reasoning may be suspended, waking consciousness enables us to evaluate and effectively adapt to our environment.

The Dreamscape: Where Logic Breaks Down

Dreams offer a fascinating contrast to waking consciousness. During REM sleep, our brains create immersive experiences that often defy the laws of physics and logic—yet feel entirely real until we awaken (Hobson & Friston, 2012). Dreams are characterized by several key qualities that distinguish them from other states:

Suspension of Critical Thinking

In dreams, we readily accept bizarre or implausible scenarios that would immediately trigger skepticism in waking life. You might find yourself having a conversation with a historical figure, flying without wings, or walking through walls—all without questioning how these impossible events could occur. This suspension of critical reasoning is one of the most distinctive features of the dream state.

Fragmented Narratives

Unlike the logical progression of waking experiences, dreams often lack a coherent narrative structure. They may jump between scenes, locations, and timeframes with little regard for logic or continuity. Symbolism and metaphor dominate dream imagery, allowing the mind to process emotions and experiences in abstract ways that might not make sense in the waking state.

Dreams operate by different rules than waking consciousness. They’re governed more by emotional and symbolic logic than by physical or rational consistency, which is why they can feel so disjointed when recalled after waking.

Emotional Intensity

Emotions in dreams can be heightened and unfiltered, ranging from joy and euphoria to fear and despair. These emotional experiences often reflect challenges or unprocessed emotions from waking life. Nightmares, for example, may serve as a way for the brain to confront fears or anxieties in a safe, albeit unsettling, environment.

Transience

Despite their emotional impact, dreams are notably fleeting. Upon waking, individuals often recognize dreams as unreal, with details fading quickly unless immediately recorded or recalled. While their emotional or symbolic impact may linger, dreams rarely produce the profound, enduring psychological transformations seen in other altered states. Our inability to maintain grip on dream content contrasts sharply with the vivid persistence of memories from waking life or other altered states.

Psychedelic States: Chemically-Induced Perception Shifts

Psychedelic experiences—induced by substances like psilocybin, LSD, DMT, or mescaline—create distinctive alterations in consciousness characterized by dramatic shifts in perception, cognition, and self-awareness.  Research by neuroscientist Robin Carhart-Harris suggests that psychedelics temporarily disrupt the brain’s default mode network—regions associated with our sense of self and identity (Carhart-Harris & Friston, 2019). This disruption allows for increased connectivity between normally separated brain regions, leading to:

Altered Cognition

Thoughts become more fluid, abstract, and associative during psychedelic experiences. You might perceive connections between seemingly unrelated concepts or experience insights that feel profound and meaningful.

Dissolution of Self

One of the most reported effects of psychedelics is ego dissolution—the temporary blurring or complete disappearance of the boundaries between self and environment. This can manifest as a sense of unity with the universe or a feeling that consciousness has merged with something larger than the individual self.

Heightened Sensory Perception

Colors appear more vibrant, sounds gain new dimensions, and tactile sensations intensify. Many users experience synesthesia—a blending of sensory modalities where people might “see” sounds or “taste” colors.

Unlike psychotic states, individuals under the influence of psychedelics typically maintain awareness that their altered perceptions are substance-induced. This meta-awareness provides an important contextual frame that helps them integrate their experiences afterward.

Psychedelic experiences are unique in that they temporarily alter perception and cognition while generally preserving insight. Users usually understand their state is externally triggered, which helps distinguish these experiences from psychotic episodes.

Psychotic Episodes: When Reality Processing Breaks Down

Psychotic episodes represent a profound disruption in an individual’s ability to process reality accurately. Unlike other altered states, psychosis significantly impairs functioning and causes distress, often requiring clinical intervention.  According to the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5-TR (2022), psychotic symptoms can manifest in various mental health conditions, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and severe depression. Key features include:

Disorganized Thinking

During a psychotic episode, thoughts may become fragmented, incoherent, or nonsensical. Individuals might jump from one topic to another without logical connections, making it difficult for others to follow their speech or reasoning. This disorganization often leads to confusion and frustration for both the individual and those trying to communicate with them.

Hallucinations and Delusions

Hallucinations are sensory experiences that occur in the absence of an external stimulus, such as hearing voices, seeing non-existent objects, or feeling imaginary sensations. Delusions are strongly held false beliefs that remain unshaken despite contradictory evidence. Common delusions include paranoia (believing one is being watched or persecuted) or grandiosity (believing one has special powers).

Emotional Disturbance

Psychotic episodes are often accompanied by intense and unstable emotions, ranging from euphoria to profound despair. Emotions may not align with the individual’s current circumstances, further confusing their experience and interactions with others. For example, someone might laugh uncontrollably during a somber moment or feel overwhelming fear without any identifiable threat.

Impairment of Daily Functioning

Psychosis severely disrupts an individual’s ability to maintain relationships, perform at work, and take care of basic needs like hygiene, nutrition, and shelter. This impairment is one of the defining features that distinguish psychotic episodes from other altered states of consciousness.

Lack of Insight

Individuals suffering from psychosis often struggle to engage in self-reflection about their illness. This condition prevents them from recognizing or acknowledging their mental state as abnormal. Psychosis typically distorts reality through delusions or hallucinations, making it difficult for individuals to critically evaluate their thoughts or experiences.

What distinguishes psychotic experiences from other altered states is their internal generation and the significant distress and dysfunction they cause. Unlike the transient nature of dreams or substance-induced states, psychotic episodes often persist without treatment and impair daily functioning.

Psychotic episodes can have devastating consequences for individuals and their loved ones. The inability to distinguish reality from delusion often leads to social isolation, stigma, and difficulties in maintaining relationships or employment. Additionally, the distress and fear experienced during an episode can contribute to long-term psychological trauma.

Alien Abduction Experiences: The Anomalous Encounter

Perhaps the most controversial and least understood altered state involves reports of encounters with non-human intelligence. These experiences differ markedly from both ordinary dreams and psychotic episodes in several important ways:

Coherent Narratives

Unlike the fragmented nature of dreams, alien encounter reports often follow a detailed and internally consistent storyline. Experiencers typically describe being taken aboard a spacecraft, interacting with non-human intelligence (NHI), and sometimes undergoing examination procedures—all with remarkable narrative coherence (Mack, 1994). While experiencers often remember many details, there are typically gaps in their memory that they cannot access for certain periods after an encounter.

Missing Time

A hallmark of abduction experiences is the phenomenon of “missing time,” where individuals report unexplained gaps in their memory, often spanning several hours, leading up to or following an alleged encounter. This experience of lost time is consistent across many reports and differs from normal memory lapses.

Physical Effects

Many experiencers report unexplained physical marks such as scars, bruises, burns, nosebleeds, or puncture marks that appear after the alleged experience, sometimes in symmetrical or otherwise unusual patterns. These physical traces provide a tangible dimension not typically present in dreams or psychotic episodes.

Shared Witness Accounts

In some cases, multiple individuals claim to have experienced the same event, providing corroborative testimony that lends credence to the account. This external validation is rare in other altered states.

Research by psychiatrist John Mack (1994, 1999), who documented numerous encounter cases, found these experiences particularly intriguing due to their consistent patterns across diverse populations and cultures. The experiences often occur to individuals with no prior interest in the subject and no history of mental illness.

Heightened Sensory Detail

Abductees often describe their experiences with vivid sensory detail, including the appearance of beings, the layout of the spacecraft, and even the sounds, smells, and textures encountered during the event. The level of specific detail remains consistent over time, unlike the fading quality of dream memories.

Life-Transforming Impact

Perhaps most striking is the profound psychological transformation that frequently follows these encounters. Unlike the dysfunction associated with psychosis, many experiencers report positive life changes including:

• Expanded Consciousness: A heightened sense of awareness about the universe and their place within it, with increased belief in the interconnectedness of all life forms
• Altered Religious or Spiritual Beliefs: Significant shifts in spiritual beliefs, often incorporating elements of extraterrestrial existence
• Sense of Purpose and Mission: A newfound purpose often centered around the well-being of humanity or the planet, and a strong impulse to share what they have discovered 
• Enhanced Intuition: Reports of increased intuitive or psychic abilities, such as telepathy, precognition, or healing powers
• Existential Reflections: Profound contemplation about the nature of existence, life, and the cosmos
• Connection with Cosmic Beings: A sense of ongoing connection or communication with extraterrestrial beings
• Changed Values: Adoption of more holistic, eco-friendly, or humanitarian values and behaviors
• Feeling of Oneness: A profound sense of unity with all beings and the universe

When Worlds Collide: Overlap Between Anomalous Experiences and Mental Health

While these states of consciousness have distinct features, they aren’t always cleanly separated. Sometimes anomalous experiences and mental health conditions overlap, creating complex situations that require nuanced understanding.  Several scenarios can create this overlap:

Trauma Following Anomalous Experiences

An anomalous experience, such as an alien abduction or unexplainable encounter, may act as a traumatic event, leading to significant psychological distress. This distress can manifest as anxiety, hypervigilance, disrupted sleep, or even transient psychotic symptoms as the mind struggles to integrate an experience that challenges fundamental beliefs about reality. The intense emotional impact of reconciling such an experience with one’s prior understanding of reality may overwhelm coping mechanisms, triggering a mental health crisis.

Pre-existing Vulnerability to Mental Health Disorders

Individuals with pre-existing mental health vulnerabilities—such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or complex trauma—may process an anomalous event in ways shaped by their condition. Their interpretation of the experience may intertwine with symptoms like delusions or hallucinations, complicating the distinction between the event’s objective reality and their subjective perceptions.

Misinterpretation Due to Mental Health Symptoms

Symptoms of mental health disorders can color an individual’s perception of a real anomalous event. While an authentic anomalous experience may have occurred, psychotic features may distort its meaning or add layers of imagined detail, creating a hybrid narrative that blends fact and psychosis. There is also the possibility that certain mental health symptoms, such as brief psychosis, can lead an individual to think that an anomalous experience has occurred when it has not.

Stress-Induced Psychosis Post-Anomalous Event

Processing the existential implications of a profound anomalous event can precipitate psychosis, particularly in those predisposed to mental health challenges. The stress of reconciling such an event with prior beliefs may trigger paranoia, dissociation, or hallucinatory episodes as the individual grapples with cognitive dissonance.

Exacerbation by Social Stigma and Isolation

The societal stigma surrounding anomalous experiences often amplifies the psychological burden on those who experience them. Skeptical or dismissive reactions from others can lead to feelings of alienation, mistrust, or rejection, worsening existing mental health symptoms.

The presence of psychological distress following an anomalous experience doesn’t automatically invalidate that experience. Just as trauma from any life-altering event can trigger psychological symptoms, confronting something that challenges one’s entire worldview can be destabilizing even for psychologically healthy individuals.

Distinguishing Between States: A Practical Guide

How can we differentiate between these various states of consciousness? The intersection of anomalous phenomena and mental health conditions poses unique diagnostic challenges. Clinicians must navigate the complexities of disentangling an authentic anomalous experience from an individual’s psychological state. Several key features help distinguish them:

1. Evaluate the Reliability of the Experience

Seek corroborative evidence, if any exists, such as physical marks, shared testimonies, timing of events, or other data supporting the experience. Assess narrative consistency across multiple recountings, as this is more typical of genuine anomalous events than psychotic delusions.

2. Identify Mental Health Features

Look for hallmark symptoms of psychosis, such as disorganized thought processes, hallucinations, or delusions unrelated to the anomalous event. Consider the onset, duration, and triggers of symptoms to distinguish between situational reactions and chronic conditions. Notice how the person is psychologically organized around other areas of their life: are they still able to maintain employment, have social relationships, take care of themselves and other life responsibilities?

3. Recognize Trauma Responses

Consider the psychological impact of the anomalous experience as potentially traumatic. Hypervigilance, avoidance, or intrusive memories may mimic psychotic symptoms but arise from trauma rather than a psychotic process. Pay attention to when symptoms arise and how they express themselves.

4. Unpack Ontological Response and Observe Worldview Shifts

A hallmark of anomalous experiences is that they often shake the core beliefs concerning what an individual thought to be real and true about the universe and their reality. After dealing with this initial shock, many individuals then seek to understand their experience within a larger context, expand their worldview, and engage in positive value shifts.

5. External Validation

Dreams and psychotic episodes typically lack external validation—they don’t leave physical evidence or witnesses. In contrast, some anomalous experiences involve corroborative elements like physical marks, shared witness accounts, or missing time that can be documented.

6. Narrative Consistency

Dreams tend to be fragmented and illogical, while psychotic narratives often contain internally inconsistent elements. Anomalous experiences frequently maintain internal consistency when recalled multiple times, even years apart.

7. Psychological Impact

Psychotic episodes typically impair functioning, while profound anomalous experiences often lead to enhanced psychological wellbeing and positive life changes after the initial adjustment period. The quality of life transformation following an experience can be a significant indicator of its nature.

8. Insight and Awareness

During psychedelic experiences, individuals typically maintain awareness that their state is substance-induced. During psychosis, insight is impaired, with individuals often unable to recognize their altered perception. Anomalous experiencers generally recognize the unusual nature of their experiences while maintaining normal functioning in daily life.

The Bigger Picture: What These States Reveal About Consciousness

By examining these varied states of consciousness, we gain valuable insights into the remarkable complexity of human perception and experience.

As neuroscientist Anil Seth (2021) suggests in his work, the study of consciousness requires examining its full spectrum. By understanding both ordinary and extraordinary states, we develop a more complete picture of how the brain constructs our experience of reality.

The distinctions between these states of consciousness lie in their origins, impacts, and persistence. Dreams, psychotic episodes, and psychedelic states are often transient and internally generated, offering limited external validation. In contrast, anomalous experiences stand out for their coherence, transformative psychological outcomes, and the high psychological functioning capacities in those who experience them.

These different states remind us that our perception of reality is not fixed but constructed by our brains—a construction that can vary dramatically under different conditions. This understanding encourages both scientific curiosity and humility about the limits of our knowledge.

Understanding these differences is crucial for advancing both clinical perspectives and the study of anomalous phenomena. By recognizing the unique features of each state, researchers, clinicians, and individuals can better explore the complexities of human consciousness and the ways in which it challenges conventional explanations of reality.

Whether examining dreams, psychedelic journeys, psychological distress, or anomalous encounters, respecting the profound complexity of human experience helps us approach these phenomena with both critical thinking and compassionate openness.

References and Further Reading

Carhart-Harris, R. L., & Friston, K. J. (2019). REBUS and the anarchic brain: Toward a unified model of the brain action of psychedelics. Pharmacological Reviews, 71(3), 316-344.

Hobson, J. A., & Friston, K. J. (2012). Waking and dreaming consciousness: Neurobiological and functional considerations. Progress in Neurobiology, 98(1), 82-98.

Mack, J. E. (1994). Abduction: Human encounters with aliens. Ballantine Books.

Mack, J. E. (1999). Passport to the cosmos: Human transformation and alien encounters. Crown Publishers.

Seth, A. K. (2021). Being you: A new science of consciousness. Dutton.

American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., text revision).