Two examples. 1) I visit a friend’s house, and they haven’t changed the catbox in too damn long. House smells strongly of cat-poop. For the next week (!) I find myself smelling imaginary cat poo stench. It clearly isn’t a real smell (i.e., it isn’t on my clothes.) It’s hallucinatory.
I had a visit with someone else, who was smoking cigarettes. Ditto; for the next week, I was smelling non-existent cigarette smoke.
Someone tried to tell me that these are not “hallucinations” but are “flashbacks” instead, and that there is a technical distinction between the two. But he couldn’t make it clear to me. How are these olfactory hallucinations not “hallucinations?” How do the two ideas differ?
I don’t see them as “flashbacks” because they don’t come with any other involvement. There’s no emotional tonality, no sense of presence or nearness, no association with the events of the visit. Just…the smell, when the smell could not possibly be real.
Your friend is talking out of his ass. There is no such “technical” distinction. Indeed, “flashback” is not a “technical” or scientific term at all, and I doubt that it has any well established, stable meaning. In its colloquial use, “flashback” may sometimes denote a type of hallucination, but a type of hallucination is, obviously, still a hallucination.
When I learned the term “flashback” it was in relation to taking hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD. A flashback was a brief, “trip-like” experience that occurred some time after the drug’s effects seemed to have worn off, and the main “trip” was over. As it is essentially a slang word, however, I daresay people, such as your friend, sometimes use it in different ways, possibly ways they have made up for themselves. I think I have also heard it used just to mean a sudden experience of a vivid (but not hallucinatory) memory.
Perhaps it is worth adding that the proper definition of “hallucination” itself is a tricky business that experts disagree and argue about (and it is not the sort of word concerning which you can uncritically trust a dictionary). However, at least it is a word whose meaning the relevant experts have made an effort to get clear about, even if they have not entirely succeeded to universal satisfaction. For good reason, nobody has thought it worth expending such intellectual effort on the slang term “flashback”.
Are you sure? If you’re in an environment with a very strong smell for a while, you can subsequently carry enough of the odour’s particles to be emitting the smell yourself.
Or, indeed, there may have been a little drop of crap or urine that you didn’t notice but got on you. Or you got a bunch of cat hairs on you, some of which had been urine/crap soaked.
And the other example, cigarette smoke: clearly that can settle on things and make them smell of smoke.
njtt: Cool! Thank you. I was kind of thinking my friend might be full of nonsense.
Mijin: I’m pretty sure it was not a real smell, but a hallucination: it was much too strong to have just been residual odor from clothing deposits. Same with the tobacco smoke. It lasted beyond showering and clothing changes, and was full-strength, instead of being weak and stale the way real odors are when they linger. Also, it came and went, in little puffs, instead of being dependably detectable. If it had been on clothes, I could have sniffed about, getting closer and closer, till I zeroed in on it.
I honestly thought, as you suggest, that it was a real odor, somehow persisting in my environment; I only came to the hallucination explanation reluctantly, when the other explanation was no longer sustainable.
Inna Minnit: Nifty term! Thanks. Never heard it before.