A well-known alleged paranormal phenomenon is the alien abduction popularized by books such as Communion: A True Story (Strieber 1988) and Intruders (Hopkins 1987). The stereotypical abduction begins with the sleeping human participant being awakened by an entity. Sometimes the human/entity encounter is confined to the bedroom; other times, the entity conveys the human to another location and later returns the human to his bedroom. During the encounter, the entity either imparts arcane knowledge to the human or performs pseudo-medical procedures upon him. When this extraordinary encounter is over, the human paradoxically resumes sleeping. This paradoxical resumption of sleep suggests that the encounter is a hypnopompic or hypnogogic hallucination (those experienced during the transitional state between sleep and wakefulness) devoid of any objective reality (Klass 1989).

It is entertaining to speculate on possible inspirations for the hallucinations. A cultural background shared by millions may provide the source material for this brand of hallucination—the shared experience of watching mental hygiene films: short classroom films, dating between 1945 and 1970, “deliberately made to adjust the social behavior of their viewers” (Smith 1999). Mental hygiene films typically focus on how to attain social acceptance along with exhortations to avoid premarital sex, illegal drugs, and careless driving. Curiously, the motifs of several of these films resemble an alien abduction or a hypnopompic/hypnogogic hallucination. [...]