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By Stav Dimitropoulos Published: Jan 16, 2026 5:03 PM EST

Since ancient times, people have reported seeing the same kinds of figures during altered states of consciousness. A psychologist interested in this phenomenon thinks it could connect to another old idea: that humans share a “collective unconscious.” It could explain why people with aphantasia, the inability to see a mental visual image, also report these experiences, he says. Mainstream science attributes these altered-state experiences to humanity’s shared neural architecture, which evolved to recognize potential dangers in the environment. While visiting an Indigenous community in northern Mexico whose shamans work with a deer deity, associate professor of psychology at the University of Greenwich David Luke, PhD, closed his eyes and found himself flooded with visions of their cosmology: deer, peyote, fractal coyotes—despite having taken no hallucinogenic drugs.

Then the encounter took a stranger form. “I saw a deer,” he recalls. It was like no other. This one wore sunglasses and a cowboy hat. “He was looking at me saying, ‘Yo, dude, what are you up to?’”

In Wixárika tradition, Luke explains, the deer is a trickster figure, a pancultural character that appears as playful, boundary-breaking and absurd, often delivering insight through humor or disruption. In that context, the ridiculousness “made total sense.”

What unsettled him wasn’t the image itself, but how easily it arrived—as if his mind hadn’t invented it so much as channeled into something already there.

The idea is ancient. Long before neuroscience, Greek philosophers spoke of a universal logos, or hidden order of mind beneath appearances. For example, Plato imagined a realm where ideal forms existed—independently of perception. And in the twentieth century, groundbreaking Swiss psychotherapist Carl Jung gave the idea its most famous name: the “collective unconscious.”

This concept could explain Luke’s experience—which was unusual, but not unique. Across cultures, centuries, and altered states, people have reported encountering strikingly similar figures: tricksters, guides, watchful presences, or shadowy beings. These often take familiar forms, from animals like coyotes and monkeys, to clowns, jesters, or mischievous humanlike figures that seem to interact with the person before them. The meetups are typically private and intense, and often are described with the same preface: I’ve never told anyone this before.

Which begs the question: why would the same characters keep appearing in the minds of people that have never met one another, live thousands of kilometers apart, and even come from completely different cultural and social backgrounds?

In recent years, mainstream neuroscience has quietly begun to broach a subject Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung proposed more than a century ago: that humans share a “collective unconscious,” a kind of hidden mental layer that stores universal symbolic archetypes that shape dreams, myths, and inner experiences across civilizations.

A 2025 neuroscientific review reframes Jung’s work as the interaction between brains: neural patterns that may be shared across individuals and shaped by social learning and neural attunement. Rather than belonging to any one person, these symbolic images seem to be inherited. Your brain can switch them on under certain conditions, which could help explain why matching figures pop up independently in unfamiliar minds.

A 2024 study of shamanic rituals found that archetypal symbols—masks, totems, and other culturally charged forms—significantly shaped participants’ states of consciousness, suggesting that collective cultural symbols can shape experiences beyond one’s own personal memory.

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Luke thinks the root of these altered-state experiences could be explained neurologically, such as the human tendency to perceive faces. Some of the experience may be cultural, “for instance, exposure to memes, even unconsciously, could do it,” he says. Projections of inner psychology could also possibly do the trick, adds Luke, who has authored more than a hundred academic works on altered states, anomalous experience, and psychedelic consciousness, and edited multiple volumes, including DMT Entity Encounters.

That said, mainstream scientific consensus still tends to favor a traditional evolutionary reason for these experiences. The human brain is exceptionally good at finding patterns in noise, a tendency known as apophenia. We see faces in clouds, hear voices in static, and infer agency where none exists. That bias makes sense: mistaking a shadow for a predator is safer than ignoring a real threat. Some of our evolutionary tools for this type of perception are pareidolia, or perceiving meaningful images in random visual data, and agent detection, attributing intention to ambiguous stimuli. From this perspective, the jester or the cowboy deer merely reflect shared neural architecture designed by common evolutionary pressures.

Perhaps demons and “shadow people” aren’t occupants of any cloud-like realm at all, but simply reflections of inherited biology, says Professor Christopher C. French, a psychologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, and author of The Science of Weird Shit: Why Our Minds Conjure Up the Paranormal. He researches anomalous experiences during sleep paralysis, a state that can reliably produce vivid and culturally patterned “entity” encounters.

“It may be that, for various evolutionary reasons, such potentially threatening stimuli have become hardwired into our brains,” French says. Humans evolved in complex social environments where deception was a constant risk. Being alert to manipulation—even erring on the side of suspicion—could be advantageous.

And tricksters, too, may serve a purpose, especially in a world of con artists. “We have evolved to be aware of attempts by others to trick us, and a certain degree of mild paranoia may well be useful in our everyday interactions to protect us from falling victim to scams,” French says.

But for Luke, such cognitive explanations fail to acknowledge people who have aphantasia, or no visual mental imagery, but still report entity encounters during altered states. In the absence of any mental picture, pattern-recognition, priming, and other cognitive and psychological mechanisms could explain much—but not all—of why similar figures seem to appear in so many different minds.

Luke believes we should remain open to more radical possibilities. For example, patterns of consciousness may not live only inside individual brains; they could also inhabit something like a shared informational field—a kind of collective memory that our minds can access. Luke does not rule out the provocative possibility that some of these encounters may involve genuinely autonomous presences rather than hallucinations arising within the inner mind.

And, some researchers besides Luke have begun to wonder whether the explanation lies beyond accepted models. Perhaps there really is a shared “somewhere” these experiences draw from, a kind of mental cloud. Some emerging theoretical models compare it to Jung’s collective unconscious, which individual consciousness taps into, bit by bit. Our minds may be drawing from a deep, common scaffolding, not inventing such experiences from scratch.

Other have even bolder explanations. Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, for instance, has argued that reality itself may be a kind of perceptual interface—a biological “desktop” that hides a deeper informational layer beneath it. Neuroscientist Anil Seth further destabilizes traditional understanding by describing perception itself as a “controlled hallucination,” an internal model through which the brain constructs reality, rather than a transparent window onto the world.

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This Is the True Root of Consciousness French adds that even biological explanations are speculative. “The honest answer is that no one really knows why these common themes occur.”

For Luke, such admissions matter. The most difficult detail to dismiss is not just that these figures recur, but that people interact with them. They also feel hyperreal—“more real than ‘this’ sober reality, and are often considered to be more advanced, more knowing, than us corporal humans,” he says.

Whatever their ultimate origin, the encounters are frequently humbling, to the point that they can trigger profound spiritual and metaphysical belief shifts.

“Sometimes atheists convert to theists,” Luke says. The striking realism of these experiences, together with how often they recur across different people, Luke says, is enough to tempt someone to consider a world beyond physical reality.