Hallucinatory obliviousness

Answer: Yes, the phenomenon you are thinking of is called negative hallucination. Whereas a "positive" hallucination adds a perception that is not really there (hearing a voice, seeing an extra figure), a negative hallucination does the opposite: it removes a perception that is actually present. The person looks straight at (or listens directly to) a real stimulus yet reports nothing at all.

Where the term comes from

The expression goes back to the work of French physician Hippolyte Bernheim in the 1880s and was picked up by Freud in his early writings on hypnosis. In Bernheim’s demonstrations, highly suggestible volunteers failed to see a chair or a person standing right in front of them after a hypnotic suggestion that "there is nothing there." Freud later used the term to illustrate how perception itself can be defensively blocked, not merely distorted.

Laboratory evidence

Modern research still uses hypnosis to study the effect because it offers a controlled way to switch the experience on and off. Electro-encephalography (EEG) studies show that when hypnotized participants are told to "not see" a specific colour, early visual-cortex responses to that colour shrink dramatically, and later decision-related brain waves (the P300) are slowed, as if the stimulus never arrived at all. One small but influential experiment found precisely this pattern when four highly hypnotizable adults ignored "forbidden" green targets on a screen.

Outside the hypnosis lab

Negative hallucinations can also crop up spontaneously in certain psychotic states. Case reports describe people who cannot see parts of their own body ("negative autoscopic hallucination") or fail to hear actual voices while other hallucinated sounds dominate their awareness. Clinicians occasionally observe the phenomenon in severe dissociative disorders and postictal states after temporal-lobe seizures. A recent review aimed at the general public outlines these less common, non-hypnotic examples.

How it differs from ordinary "blind spots"

Not every failure to notice something counts as a negative hallucination. Inattentional blindness, famously illustrated by the "invisible gorilla" video, occurs because attention is tied up elsewhere; once your focus shifts, the object becomes perfectly visible. In a true negative hallucination, no amount of refocusing brings the stimulus into awareness while the suggestion or psychotic state persists. The brain behaves as though the stimulus has been erased, not merely overlooked.

Why it matters

Studying negative hallucinations gives psychologists a rare window on how the brain can veto incoming information. It highlights the role of top-down processes (expectations, beliefs, clinical symptoms) in shaping even the earliest stages of perception. Clinically, recognizing the phenomenon can prevent mislabeling such episodes as simple inattention or malingering and can guide treatment toward managing the underlying dissociation, psychosis, or susceptibility to suggestion.

In short, the absence you asked about is real for the experiencer and it is called a negative hallucination.