Noted Princeton psychiatrist Dr. Julian Jaynes asserts in his recent books that all human perception is, in fact, hallucinatory in nature and that we synthesize all we 'hallucinate' and call it Life. According to Jaynes we subjectively hallucinate all that we see, hear, smell, touch and taste. He has located the organ in the brain responsible for auditory hallucination, Broca's lobe, and all other parts of the brain responsible for processing our senses. Years ago Dr. Carl Jung told us that the mind organizes impressions into archetypal forms that recur in human societies worldwide as they develop over centuries. Thus, phantasmagoria are archetypal forms, patterns, images, symbols which codify our perceptual experience and, as art, render it permanent.

In literature phantasmagoria is wide ranging: from Dante's "Divine Comedy" to Lewis Carroll, Charles Baudelaire to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to countless science-fiction and fantasy writers. In his story "The Aleph," Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges describes a the discovery of the very secret of the philosopher's stone, the magical Aleph wherein all things in the universe can be seen in one single instant from every view point, the Ultimate Ineffable where all things are One in a crystalline flash. A descriptive passage of poetic glimpses and rapturous extraneous visions ensues, both personal and extra-personal. In this profound moment the full spectrum of phantasmagoria are seen, such as realizing each reflection in every mirror on the planet simultaneously, and each and every grain of sand on every shore. Literary visions, like the artistic, are places we can revisit to re-experience our initial fascination with the awesome phantasmagoric motif, phenomenon, symbol or pattern.

Phantasmagoria is all that we do not expect to see in real life, unless we are 'seeing' outside of what is generally agreed upon to be objective reality. History is replete with humankind's attempts to induce hallucinations - by the use of costume, ceremony, masks, drugs, drink, magic ritual, dance, incantation, litany, sacrifice and ordeal. Coming of age rites combine some or all of these elements to foster a context where young braves and old sorcerers, maidens and witches, experience visions from which they may derive transcendent meaning about their lives, world and society. Modern peoples have their own means and methods of inducing metaphysical vision, and some of them are quite familiar to us , and others rather arcane.