I’ve never had any personal experience with hallucinations – my only exposure has been through TV (such as in recent episodes of “House”) and the movies (such as “A Beautiful Mind.”)
When they are presented in such pop culture forms, the general idea of how they work is that, to the person who is hallucinating, the hallucinations seem just as real as actual people. They talk, interact, follow physical laws, seem to have a physical presence, etc. Usually the only way they are revealed as hallucinations is that other characters indicate there is no one there, or the hallucinator realizes they can’t be there (e.g., they’re dead).
I’m wondering if this bears any resemblance to what real people experience when they are suffering from hallucinations. I suspect not. I suspect that either there is something about them that is dreamlike, or that the hallucinator has such an altered state of perception that both reality and hallucinations come through as dreamlike – the reason that he can’t tell the difference between hallucinations and reality is that both seem “off.”
That’s just wild speculation on my part. If anyone has any first-hand experiences that they’re comfortable sharing, I’d be interested to read them.
I think they exhibit themselves on a huge spectrum of real. The closest thing I’ve had to a hallucination is in a state somewhere between asleep and awake. They were very real, but very fleeting.
I have a hard time beleiving that someone could be having such a severe hallucination as House and remain so lucid. On the other hand, in his case, it is not clear how lucid he was throughout the episodes. Irratic behavior was not beyond the norm for him, so it is likely that the transition to insanity was not noticed.
This is my experience as well. As an adult, due to sleep deprivation, it was more out-of-the-corner-of-my eye kind of things, like thinking my roommate had come in and was standing next to me and I only realized he wasn’t there when I started talking to him and he didn’t answer. But it was really fleeting.
When I was a kid though, I once had a hallucination about a jack-o-lantern that took longer to go away. I think I was about 5. I remember being really sick at the time and not going to school during the day. In the middle of the night I woke up, and on a chair in my room was a stuffed toy scarecrow (which was real, I think it came with a Wizard of Oz book) and beside the scarecrow was a small table with a jack-o-lantern on it. The jack-o-lantern wasn’t lit or anything, it was just the carved pumpkin on a small table. No such table or pumpkin existed.
At first I thought “Hey, cool! A jack-o-lantern!” Then I thought, “Wait, that can’t be right. It’s not Hallowe’en… and I’ve never seen that table before.”
So I was looking at the thing really bewildered, wondering WTF? I guess I figured maybe I was dreaming. I closed my eyes and said out loud: “Yes, I really am awake this time.” When I opened my eyes, the scarecrow was still there but the table with the pumpkin was gone.
I briefly hoped I was psychic or something, because that would have been cool, but after a few days with no more “powers” I gave up on it.
The pumpkin was probably only there for about 30 seconds, and I didn’t try to touch it, but I swear it totally seemed real. The hallucination/dream was very vivd an extremely detailed.
ETA: I don’t remember what I was sick with, but I did have a fever and my mom did have to give me foul tasting medicine a couple times a day. So either I was still half-asleep and half-dreaming or the illness made my brain a little screwy that night.
When I had my wisdom teeth out (age 15 or 16, probably) I had crazy-ass Demerol hallucinations. They were as real as could be, although some of them were more like false memories.
I’ve had many hallucinations under the influence of LSD or mushrooms. I have never mistaken them for reality. I don’t know how I would have reacted if someone had slipped me the drug without my knowledge. But because I had the knowledge, I had some degree of power over the hallucinations.
So, when you were a child, you had a fever. How did your hands feel? Like two pumpkins?
I think there needs to be a distinction between recreational and unintentional hallucinations, perhaps with a further subdivision for the latter (psychosis v. illness). I’ve never really suffered the latter (except for already described notions of sleep deprivation). For the former, never anything as dramatic and impenetrable as television, but often there are things that take some concentration to determine whether or not it’s just imagination. It can be extraordinarily simple, too – is that tapestry moving/fluttering against the wall due to some air current or trick of the eye? That glass tabletop is liquid, isn’t it? I don’t want to touch it because I might cut myself, but isn’t glass a liquid? It must be…
I had auditory hallucinations for several months and they seemed very, very real to me. I would hear cell phones ringing all of the time and sometimes hear voices.
I’ve only had a few visual hallucinations but they were just glimpses of movement in the corner of my eye or seeing a human shape in the shadows. Again, they seemed real up until I would actually look in the direction of the movement or turn on a light to eliminate the shadows.
These were real enough to lock myself in the bathroom one night and I had 911 entered into my phone but never called.
ETA: These were a symptom of depression/anxiety and not due to drugs.
My experiences are similar- and I’ve had them (again, fleetingly) when I was sleep-deprived but alert due to caffeine. They seemed quite real at the time, but it was pretty easy to tell they weren’t when I thought about it.
When I was 15, I had a very high fever that induced period of hallucination. I distinctly recall most of the cast of Soap (it was 1979) sitting on my bed and talking among themselves. They got very annoyed with me when I kept telling them to get off my bed because it was too crowded. Apparently my parents heard me talking to and yelling at them as well. It was totally convincing at the time and I can see how people could mistake such things for aliens and ghosts in other circumstances. When I was well, I knew intellectually that it had not happened but I kept remembering it as if it had been a memory of a real event.
I’ve had some fever-induced hallucinations when I was little and they were mostly blobs on the ceiling flowing around, not sure how “real” I perceived them at the time, but they didn’t scare me or anything - just interesting colors and the ceiling moving slowly.
I’ve also had a few mushroom-induced hallucinations and they were more or less the same only stronger; walls and ceilings “flowing” out of their regular shapes, paintings that look 3-D, more saturated colors, movements that leave glowing “after images”, and a strong tendency to see more or less detailed shapes in random patterns. Never had any problem at all recognizing what was “real” and what wasn’t.
I heard from a few friends who where more adventurous that there are some drugs that can cause hallucinations strong enough to more or less completely “block out” the real world, which I can imaging would be pretty disorienting.
When I was a child, one time I had a double ear infection which gave me a high fever. I was watching the Super Chicken cartoon while lying on the couch home from school, and started hallucination that Super Chicken was coming out of the TV at me. I started screaming, and tried to explain to my mother what was happening. Once my fever broke, everything was fine again.
I remember in the third grade, my 105 degree fever caused me to think I was in a swamp and a witch was sending snakes to crawl all over me. Another time, i was sick and though that little people were doing diving competitions off the window sill and onto/into my bed. The former didn’t seem as real as the latter.
Once, I stayed up for two nights straight working on a project, drinking caffeine and taking ephedrine, and by the third day I was hallucinating badly, but in very interesting ways. At first I didn’t realize they were hallucinations, so they scared the hell out of me; I went into the bathroom and the pattern of speckles on our shower wall literally seemed to be moving downward, from every angle. When I went out to the dimly-lit garage to get a network cable, a tangled mess of cable suddenly looked like it had indeterminate bugs crawling all over it. I also kept seeing fleeting shapes running around our back yard. In all three cases, it wasn’t until somebody came and verified that the wall was NOT moving, the cable had NO bugs, and there were NO people hiding in the back yard, that I realized each was a visual hallucination. It was quite fascinating, but I decided I might be putting my brain at risk and got some sleep, and the hallucinations vanished.
A couple years later I had a near-death experience, and my actions and surroundings seemed perfectly real to me at the time. Later, though, I found out that my experience was completely and totally inaccurate. But until I found out it was completely inaccurate, I would have sworn it was totally correct. So that hallucination seemed perfectly real, at least in my memory.
Then again, every dream I have seems perfectly real at the time, even when I’m doing crazy stuff like flying…
Yes, this is similar to my sleep deprivation hallucinations. I’d been up two nights with not a wink of sleep, and the hallucinations started on the third night.
I’d say most of it was just fatigue totally screwing around with depth perception and not true hallucinations. For example I’d think my tools were sliding off the table or that the room was shrinking. Every time I shifted my focus the room seemed to bend to a different shape. Like if I went to wash my hands when I looked at the sink, the sink seemed to rise up to me and get really big. If I looked at the corner of the ceiling, the corner was coming at me in a zoom lens type of effect, so it seemed as if the room was getting smaller. I’m pretty sure it was just that my poor, fatigued brain couldn’t process the information of my eyes focussing and general depth perception any more.
But the fleeting stuff was more apparition-like, but really, really, really fleeting. Like if you thought you saw a mouse or a cat scurry past out of the corner of your eye, but when you turn, there’s no mouse/cat. Sort of catching glimpses of movement in your peripheral vision. Nothing I would mistake for “real”. It was the kind of thing where you say to yourself “Whoa, I’m so tired I’m seeing things!”
But the pumpkin was totally different. It seemed TOTALLY real, I asked my parents if they’d put it in my room and then taken it away to play a trick on me.
I’ve hallucinated recreationally, but was self-aware enough to realize whatever I was experiencing was just a result of what I’d ingested (none of it was really all that interesting, either. A lot of fun to experience, but no great stories) but I also hallucinated on a morphine drip while in ICU and those were a lot more real.
The first was me trying to close the door of my room by warping the space-time continuum with my tongue (it made sense at the time) and the second was the uneasy feeling that the Eye of God was staring down at me. The former was completely real in my mind, but my atheism is apparently deep enough rooted that the latter just made me really uncomfortable and squirmy.
It occurs to me that a lot of these experiences could fairly be described as “waking dreams” (it’s telling, I think, that more than a few of these happened while the person was in bed). The entire experience could have been a hallucination – it’s just that the normal parts didn’t stick out as being particularly weird, so the assumption is that they were real and the weird parts weren’t.
If I were to clarify my OP, I would say that I’m interested in hallucinations that coexist with reality, and the real parts could be verified by someone external to you.
Let’s say for example, you’re having a conversation with Wilson (who is real) and Amber (who isn’t). You can perceive no difference between the two, but it occurs to you that Amber must be a hallucination because it is impossible for her to physically be there. You later talk to Wilson and either (a) he has no memory of that conversation (you hallucinated the whole thing!) or (b) he remembers talking to you and can’t understand why you seemed to be talking to someone who wasn’t there. It’s (b) that I’m interested in – can you really see someone who is real and someone else who is not real at the same time, without perceiving a difference between the two?
I hear explosions. frequently, and they seem very real to me but except for one that was very very real, no one else ever reacts, so I just quietly look around first then ignore them.
Yep, mentioned it to a Dr. once and got a “Hmmm?, don’t know what that is but its probably nothing serious.”
Probably a bit too esoteric but indulge me in the following hypothesis: There is no such thing as the present. Or more accurately, the present is so fleeting as to render it useless as any kind of a frame of reference. All of your sensory input from a single instant is meaningless without the context of the immediate past. What you saw a second ago? That’s a memory, and that memory will grow increasingly inaccurate and incomplete with time. Do you remember what you had for breakfast yesterday? Maybe. But do you remember how many bites it took to get through it? And yet, we are tasked with making sense of our sensory input if we are to survive. With wildly fallible and inefficient memories this task would be impossible if we did not allow ourselves to “enhance” the picture with imagination at some times, or to “not worry about it” and just accept a memory as corrupted at others. Enhancing imagination is usually tempered with reason: “I don’t remember exactly how the coffee table is orient(at)ed in the living room at this moment, but when I get home I expect it to be in more or less the “right place.” Unless I remember specifically placing it a certain way, I’m not really going to fret too much as long as it isn’t somehow “wrong.” There being no such thing as the present, reality then must exist in our individual minds. I think we take it for granted just how much of what we KNOW is really more accurately described as what we WANT, or at least are able to allow.
When I’m in full bloom the way the world IS, changes. I walk into a room, I can feel the resentment and anger toward me pouring out of everyone else. Nobody will tell me the truth, everything they tell me conflicts with what I KNOW already to be true. At those times my mind is actively enhancing my perceptions and giving them meaning in the context of a paranoid delusion. Friendly smiles are knowing leers, casual glances are momentary looks of disgust, everything said has a double meaning and my mind races to put all the pieces together so that they make some kind of sense based on what my memories are telling me. As I grow more weary and stressed out, I start NOT seeing things and become startled when I look back and the thing is there where it should have been a moment ago but wasn’t. I have remembered day-old conversations that I’ve never had with people I haven’t seen in years, but I haven’t gone so far as to see someone who isn’t there and have a full conversation with them, but if a mind can eliminate an object from reality—after all, it’s simply a process of selectively “forgetting” about something—I see no reason why a mind can’t “remember” something that wasn’t there only a moment ago. Everyone has lost something that they set down just a second ago “I put it right here!” and then found it someplace else. Sometimes bewildered and sometimes, “Oh yeah, I remember now…”
So the OP: Pretty damned real I’d say. But I would expect that such hallucinations would not manifest themselves in a way that would get them “caught” by someone else.
Hmm. Well, a lot of conditions that would cause hallucinations I would presume also cause delusions and related cognitive impairment. A schizophrenic may hear voices, see no one in the room, but still absolutely believe the voices are real. In other words, if something is haywire in your brain so that you are interacting with someone who is not there, chances are that it’s haywire enough that you’ll also be unshakably convinced that Amber is still real, but that your reality is “special”.
You may realize that Wilson can’t see Amber, and in fact NO ONE ELSE can see Amber, but you’ll just deduce that you’re a psychic “ghost whisperer” and that Amber is, obviously, a ghost! See? There is a perfectly logical reason why no one else can see her.
Edit:
I would strongly recommend a second opinion from another doctor.