The only absolutely real seeming hallucination I’ve ever had was under the influence of salvia. I went through a doorway (which did not exist; in fact it was not even in a wall, it just kinda… stood there, the frame attached to nothing), then down a hallway, then through another door, and into the circus. As soon as the drug wore off, I knew that I had been sitting at a patio table the whole time, but during the trip it was quite real.
You just blew my mind.
No, seriously. That’s a very interesting way of thinking about a hallucination, which hadn’t occurred to me before. It’s easy to take the whole “perceiving” process for granted – it’s easy to forget how complex the brain is.
I’m just 19 and I understand the joke… Good one, what war were you in? Guys, watch “Up In Smoke”.
What for? If he’s able to distinguish these “explosions” from reality, and they don’t impact his life in any negative way, what’s the problem?
Sometimes I’ll experience hypnagogic hallucinations, when I’m under a lot of stress or haven’t slept in several days. Never mistook them for actual reality, but they can be quite vivid at times. “Waking dreams” is a good way to describe them.
Back in my LSD-taking days, I don’t recall ever mistaking hallucinations for the real thing, but I would often mistake real people for hallucinations. :smack:
From what I’ve read, how convincing a hallucination is, is only loosely connected to how realistic it appears. There’s some sort of switch, some labelling mechanism in the brain that sorts everything into the categories of “real” and “imaginary”. If whatever causes the hallucination also flips the “switch” to “Real”, then even a crude hallucination will be treated as real by the hallucinator. If the “switch” isn’t flipped, then the hallucinator will have no such compulsion to regard the hallucination as real, no matter how convincing. I understand that the latter isn’t all that rare, but people just don’t usually bring up the subject.
There is actualy a medical name for this: Exploding Head Syndrome!
I used to get it myself sometimes. Despite the name, it is actually quite harmless.
So far as the OP’s original question goes, I just so happen to have been researching this topic quite extensively in the scientific literature recently. I think it is fair to say that there is a pretty strong consensus that hallucinations are nothing like what was shown on that episode of House (which I also saw).
It is actually quite difficult to come up with a satisfactory definition of “hallucination,” since the word gets used to refer to all sorts of diverse perceptual phenomena, some of which have other names as well. However, it seems to be very rare for people to mistake any sort of hallucination for reality for more than a few moments unless their critical judgement is already quite badly impaired. That is to say, if people have hallucinatory experiences when they are otherwise more or less in their right mind (as occasionally happens), they usually figure out that it is a hallucination quite quickly. You have to pretty badly messed up, by drugs, sleepiness, psychosis, or whatever, to make the mistake. We all imagine stuff all the time, but we normally know that we are doing it and are not in the least deceived. What makes something into a deceptive hallucination, rather than just something you imagined, has much more to do with you and the general clarity of your state of mind than it does with any inherent quality of the experience itself. (Of course, psychedelic drugs, and maybe schizophrenia, will make your imagination a lot more vivid, and they can also make you, and especially your perceptual experience, quite confused, but even so this is rarely enough to fool someone taking drugs recreationally into thinking they are really seeing something that actually is not there at all.)
Of course, House did quite quickly figure out that his experience was a hallucination. What made the whole thing so unreal was that the hallucination persisted and was just as vivid and realistic after he realized this. Also there was the fact that everything else around him appeared perfectly normal (usually there will be a lot of other weirdness and confusion in your perception when you are hallucinating), and, despite the fact that we were told that he hadn’t slept for days, House showed very few other signs of being groggy or intellectually impaired. Yes, in reality maybe you could have a hallucination of a person who hangs around and talks to you, but only if there was a lot of other weirdness going on in your mind at the same time.
Probably the real hallucinations that come closest to the typical fictional ones are those of what is called Charles Bonnet syndrome. This happens to some people with certain types of visual impairments. They are often elderly, but not demented or intellectually impaired in any significant way. Despite having their wits fully about them, such people will occasionally see people, animals and other things that are not there. However, they usually very quickly realize that the things they are seeing are not real, and the hallucinated people do not talk to them. It is a purely visual phenomenon.
No one else commented on this, but I made my husband pause his movie (clone wars) so that I could read it to him. He didn’t react, so I sang it to him. He was so excited, he started filling out divorce papers. I think he’s intimidated by being married to such a good singer.
There’s been a couple times when an unexpected sensory input (in one case a sound, in the other a smell) brought up a memory so intense that it felt like the memory was real and the location I was actually seeing and touching wasn’t. The dislocation lasted one or two seconds tops, but it’s among the weirdest experiences I’ve lived (OK, so I have a plain vanilla life, sue me but I’m poor).
I have had a few hallucinations.
I was walking through the hallway of my high school, and a girl was walking towards me, talking to her friend. All of a sudden, her eyes started crying blood. It LOOKED utterly real, and the only way I knew it wasn’t was because I hadn’t slept for around five days.
Under stress because I was getting kicked out of my house, I hallucinated a friend was in the room saying comforting words to me, behind me while I sat at my desk. After a time when I realized there was no way he could be in my room, I turned around and saw he wasn’t there.
During another period in my life where I had very little human contact, when I started lying down each night to sleep, I would hear voices. It sounded like being in the room next to a dinner party going on, words were too muffled to go make out. This one I knew was not real from the get go because it was 3am in a quiet apartment building. Got the sounds to go away by saying “SHUT UP.” sternly.
They can be as real as reality, I think for people who are succeptible to hallucinations, there are probably many things we don’t realize aren’t really there, only because we don’t know that they aren’t possible.
The only hallucination I’ve had was auditory. I was, like many people have mentioned, suffering a fever, and I heard quite distinctly my parents having a throwdown screaming match, and I heard plates smashing and doors slamming.
Turns out it didn’t happen at all. My Dad wasn’t even home at the time. I think all I was hearing was my Mum indistinctly talking to Dad on the phone, and it somehow exaggerated into complete melodramatic lies.
When I told my Mum what I heard (I was about nine years old) she realised how unwell I was. I think I probably was taken back to the Doc quick-smart.
Back in 1982, I went something like 42 hours without seep. I was going to a dog show with a friend, then going to pick out my first show dog, and the excitement was too much for me.
When we were on our way home, it wasdark, and I kept seeing Gordon Setters runing across the highway. See… the dog show was a Gordon Specialty, where that was the only breed competing. I had seen something like 250 of 'em over the weekend.
But everytime one of those phantom Gordons ran across the highway, I would jump and grab Gary’s arm, and he would look at me and ask WTH was wrong with me. My final hallucination of the night before arriving home was to see a man riding a bicycle down the side of the interstate; he was wearing black and yellow racing clothes. I could have sworn that Gary hit him.
They were as real to me as real. After 27 years I can still recall them vividly.
That’s pretty much my experience. It looks real, but you know it’s not. However, I do know people who could not distinguish between reality and hallucination when under the influence.
Not sure if this is exactly what you mean… Once I was tripping on mushrooms with a friend, and we were lying on the grass in a park looking up at the sky. We both shared the same odd visual perception of the clouds – that they were ‘faceted’ like gemstones. We could somehow see geometric patterns in them, and the more we discussed it and tried to verbalize what we saw, the more it seemed like we were seeing the same thing.
We both knew it wasn’t ‘real’, but we were fascinated at how it could be that our warped perceptions were so close to each other. And it made us both think, for a while, that just maybe there was something real up there that our, er, unenhanced eys, couldn’t see. I’ve never had any other experience even close to that.
Inigo: great post!
A friend of my aunt’s had some sort of brain surgery performed (Sadly, I don’t know what kind) and he was told that things he’d seen before might pop up from nowhere from time to time. They did, and they were so vivid that he could read the subtitles from a movie he’d seen years ago, now appearing from nowhere. I don’t know how real they looked, but reading subtitles requires a pretty clear picture for a hallucination.
I can answer that: a buddy of mine kept hearing loud snippets of a tune by Green Day. Theyn one day he heard the tune and immediately started to puke. It was a brain tumor.
Rather secondhand, but I was once at a dinner table with a lawyer, and he was talking about a person he was representing. That person was a truck driver who had, in the course of his career, ended up running over and killing at least one person. The man now had hallucinations that the woman he had run over would be sitting in the truck cab with him as he drove.
My own experiences with hallucinations were varied depending on the cause. I’ve never had any fever-induced symptoms, but throughout my “rebellious” :rolleyes: teen years I experienced nearly everything the drug world had to offer, including a vast multitude of hallucinogenics. I’ve also have had a few isolated “brain glitches” since then, likely caused by a chemical imbalance from the overuse of said drugs. Nothing serious, mostly ‘corner of the eye’ stuff, and some random auditory nonsense.
My experiences with LSD and mushrooms produced the distorted reality dream effect hypothesized by the OP, wherein everything was very surreal and interesting, but I never created something out of thin air. Walls breathed, ceilings dripped and people were all staring at me, but this was just a modified perception of the physical reality that surrounded me at the time, not a fabrication thereof. Similar were the effects from sleep-deprivation (on a particularly serious Meth binge, I managed 13 days with only occasional half-hour ‘power naps’. That was just bizarre.). “Shadow people” were common, where we saw figures and faces coming out from the shadows, though they would vanish when looked at directly.
One experience that differed from this was when a group of us, in all our indestructible genius, decided to deliberately OD on Dimenhydrinate (sold as the motion-sickness OTC drug, Dramimine). This was the only experience I’ve ever had where nothing seemed out of the ordinary at all, no ‘body high’ or dreamlike state of any sort, but I had hallucinations that were out of this world. I remember stting at a friend’s house complaining that nothing was happening. I casually asked him about the cat that was sitting on his kitchen counter. He gave me an understandably odd look, as he didn’t even own a cat, much less see the one sitting on the counter. Then the cat jumped onto the floor and I saw that it was completely transparent. Sort of like the cloaking trait in Halo, where it looked like it was made out of water. As I tried to point out this odd turn of events, my friend made a sudden motion like he was answering a phone. He shouted “hello” into his fist a few times and then slammed the pretend receiver on the table. During the next 8 hours or so, I fought giant liquid spiders that would multiply when you squashed them :eek:, laughed with (yes, with… not at) the teapot on his stove that had somehow sprouted arms and a mouth reminiscent of the Kool-aid man :D, and went for a wild car ride… in a closet :dubious:. Throughout it all I felt completely normal, except for all the strange happenings around me. This is sort of what I envision severe schizophrenia to be like.
As others have stated, the line between reality and hallucination is a blurry one indeed, defined by nothing more than your own perception. What is actually the present reality is meaningless, much like Inigo Montoya said. Your brain will piece together your own reality, be it based on memory, popular opinion, or chemical composition. Take cases of Synesthesia. The severity of the condition varies but to some, when a car honks they don’t hear the sound, but rather they see red ribbons emanating from the hood. I actually had an experience of this myself after a massive indulgance in ahem “enhanced” brownies. Every movement I made was accompanied by a cartoon sound (most amusing when I went to urinate and played the song of the ice cream truck). Most Synesthetics report seeing each letter as having its own specific color. Interesting, to say the least.
Sage Rat,
Woo, that’s a really creepy one. Mostly, I saw pretty colors, and solid things that seemed to wave in the breeze. I had a couple that slightly affected my sense of balance, but nothing that could be described as nightmarish.
I had an experience when I was around 13. I awoke in the middle of the night to get a glass of water. Everyone was in bed. I walked down the hallway, noticing that the living room tv was on (seeing flashes of light hitting the walls, you know?) and the living room chair was rocking. I walked out to say hello to my mother, but she wasn’t in the chair, it was just rocking, and I fell into it. I got scared, sat down on the couch nearby. I looked up at the tv and it was flashing bright vivid colors. I thought “that isn’t right” and got up to look closer. I pressed my face against the tv and the colors slowly faded out (the power was never on) and I realized I was in complete darkness in the living room. I made a panic run for my room and quickly went back to sleep.