Across cultures, time periods, and completely different belief systems, people entering altered states of consciousness often report something strange: they meet the same kinds of “beings.”
Tricksters. Guides. Watchful presences. Shadowy figures.
It doesn’t seem to matter whether the state is reached through psychedelics, meditation, ritual, or spontaneously. The characters show up anyway, and they feel real. Sometimes more real than everyday life.
So what’s going on here?
A Shared Inner World?
Psiholog David Luke, PhD, has spent years studying altered states, anomalous experiences, and psychedelic consciousness. During a visit to an Indigenous Wixárika community in northern Mexico, he had an experience that pushed this question further.
Surrounded by a culture whose rituals centre around a deer deity, Luke closed his eyes — and without taking any substances, he began to see vivid imagery tied to their cosmology: deer, peyote, fractal coyotes.
Then it shifted.
“I saw a deer,” he recalls. But not a typical one. This one wore sunglasses and a cowboy hat. “He was looking at me saying, ‘Yo, dude, what are you up to?’”
Na spletnem mestu Wixárika tradition, the deer is a trickster figure: playful, disruptive, often delivering insight through absurdity. In that context, the bizarre image made sense. What unsettled Luke wasn’t the content. It was how easily it appeared, as if it hadn’t been consciously constructed, but accessed.
The Return of an Old Idea
This kind of experience isn’t new. For centuries, people have described encountering similar figures during dreams, rituals, and altered states (such as when tripping on magic mushrooms).
Ancient Greek philosophers spoke of a hidden mental order beneath reality. Plato described a realm of ideal forms existing independently of perception.
In the 20th century, Carl Jung gave this idea a name: the collective unconscious.
Jung proposed that humans share a deep layer of mind filled with archetypes — universal symbols and characters that shape myths, dreams, and inner experiences across cultures.
For a long time, that idea sat outside mainstream science. But it’s starting to creep back in, this time through neuroscience.
What Science Is Starting to Say
A 2025 neuroscientific review reframed Jung’s theory in modern terms, suggesting that shared neural patterns may emerge across individuals through evolution, social learning, and what’s sometimes called neural attunement.
Instead of each brain inventing these figures from scratch, the idea is that we inherit certain symbolic templates. Under the right conditions, the brain can “switch them on.”
That could explain why people who have never met, live thousands of kilometres apart, and come from entirely different cultures still report encountering similar entities.
A 2024 študija of shamanic rituals adds another layer. It found that archetypal symbols (like masks and totems) significantly shaped participants’ altered states. In other words, shared cultural imagery can influence what people experience, even beyond their personal memory.
Why the Same Figures Keep Appearing
The obvious question is why these specific figures — tricksters, animals, watchers — keep showing up.
Luke points to several possible explanations.
Part of it may be neurological. Humans are wired to detect faces and agency, even in random patterns. Cultural exposure also plays a role. “For instance, exposure to memes, even unconsciously, could do it,” he says.
There’s also projection, our inner psychology externalised into symbolic form.
Mainstream science tends to favour a more grounded explanation: evolution.
The human brain is built to find patterns, even where none exist. This tendency, known as apophenia, helps us survive. Seeing a threat where there isn’t one is safer than missing a real danger.
Related processes like pareidolia (seeing faces in oblaki) and ‘agent detection’ (assigning intention to ambiguous stimuli) reinforce this.
From that perspective, these entities aren’t external—they’re byproducts of shared brain architecture shaped by common evolutionary pressures.
The Evolutionary Case for “Entities”
Psiholog Christopher C. French argues that these experiences may be rooted in survival mechanisms.
“It may be that, for various evolutionary reasons, such potentially threatening stimuli have become hardwired into our brains,” he says.
Humans evolved in complex social environments, where deception was a real risk. Being slightly paranoid, quick to detect trickery or hidden intent, could be useful.
That might explain why trickster figures appear so often.
“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.
Even so-called “shadow people” or threatening presences could be extensions of this system — our brains leaning toward caution.
Where the Theory Falls Short
For Luke, these explanations cover a lot. But not everything…
One sticking point is aphantasia, a condition where people are unable to form mental images. Even without visual imagination, some individuals still report vivid entity encounters in altered states.
If these figures are purely constructed from internal imagery, how does that happen?
Luke suggests that current models: pattern recognition, cultural priming, psychological projection, may explain much, but not all, of the phenomenon.
A More Radical Possibility
Luke is open to the idea that consciousness might not be entirely contained within the brain. Instead, he suggests that it could interact with something like a shared informational field — a kind of collective memory that individuals can access.
In that model, these archetypal figures aren’t invented. They’re encountered.
Some researchers are exploring similar ideas from different angles.
Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman has proposed that reality itself may function like a user interface — a simplified layer hiding a deeper informational structure.
Neuroscientist Anil Seth describes perception as a “controlled hallucination,” where the brain constructs reality based on internal models rather than directly perceiving the world.
Both perspectives loosen the idea that what we experience is purely external or purely self-generated.
The Honest Answer: We Don’t Fully Know
Even among scientists, there’s no clear consensus.
“The honest answer is that no one really knows why these common themes occur,” French says.
What makes the phenomenon difficult to dismiss is not just that people see similar figures. It’s that they interact with them.
And those interactions often feel intensely real.
Luke describes them as “more real than ‘this’ sober reality, and are often considered to be more advanced, more knowing, than us corporal humans.”
When Experience Changes Belief
Whatever their origin, these encounters tend to have a lasting impact. They can feel meaningful, humbling, and sometimes destabilising in a incredible way.
“Sometimes atheists convert to theists,” Luke says.
That shift isn’t necessarily about adopting a specific belief system. It’s more about the sense that reality might be deeper, stranger, or more interconnected than it first appears.
Something Shared — Whatever It Is
Whether these experiences come from shared brain structures, cultural archetypes, or something less easily explained, one thing is consistent: they’re not random.
They follow patterns. They repeat across people and places. And they leave an impression.
The idea of a collective unconscious — once dismissed as abstract — now sits in an interesting space. Not fully accepted, not entirely ruled out.
Somewhere between neuroscience and mystery.
And for now, that’s where it stays.
