They’re heeeeeeeere.
Most recreational substances that are dubbed “hallucinogens” are really not - generally they provide interesting visual distortions, but subjectively the user can make the distinction between what’s real and what is an effect of the drug.
Belladonna alkaloids are something else again. The user may have a conversation with someone that is not there, and the subjective experience is a solid and “real” seeming as a dream. (Or reality.)
One thing I think many here haven’t considered is the fact that the human mind just isn’t smart enough to create a convincing hallucination of a person. It’s just too complex. Particularly in the way people move. There are too many subtleties which would give away a false image from a real one. In order to mistake a hallucinated image for a real one, the other functions of the brain must be significantly impaired such that you are unable to notice how the image you are seeing looks… not quite right. I suspect if a normal mind were to see such an image, not only would it be unconvincing… it wouldn’t even be noticed. It would just be recognized as imaginary and dismissed without even enough awareness to remember seeing it to begin with.
I’m pretty sure exploding head syndrome only happens when you are falling asleep. I used to get it every night… I had to listen to music to get to sleep otherwise I would get woken up by this sudden, really loud… umm sound. I knew it wasn’t a real sound but it still woke me up. Years later, having apparently outgrown the effect, I came across the term exploding head syndrome, and, noting that it is sometimes experienced as a physical sensation of explosion inside the head, I realized that I STILL EXPERIENCE IT! It’s just changed from a sound to a physical feeling. I had assumed that it was something like my neck cracking as the muscles relaxed or something like that. Since I woke up unharmed the morning after the first time I noticed it, I knew it couldn’t really something physically happening in my head every night, so I wasn’t bothered enough by it to worry. 
As for hearing explosions at other times… Something odd happened when I played Star Wars Battlefront for the first time. I spent almost a whole day playing, then for weeks afterwards, I would occasionally hear blaster fire outside my window! Each time, I would be momentarily startled and confused, but would realize in that same instant that I couldn’t possibly have heard what I thought I did. I think it was the result of some kind of mental short-cut. While playing the game, I was struggling to maintain situational awareness with a lot of things going on at once, so I created simpler ways of sorting out the sounds that I was hearing… then afterwards, a sound would only have to have a certain similarity to the blaster fire for my mind to jump to the conclusion that that’s what I heard. I imagine it would be quite unnerving if it hadn’t been a sound so easily recognized as fictional. I wonder how many of the symptoms of PTSD are actually unrelated to the stress, and just something similar to this effect.
-on preview-
Larry Mudd, just because a person knows what they’re seeing isn’t real doesn’t mean they aren’t hallucinating. I think you may be confusing hallucination with delusion.
To rule out any physiological issue such as a tumor or brain damage. If his physical health is fine, then no worries.
I’ve had minor hallucinations from high fevers, and bad ones from taking ambien. They’ve been pretty real. Even when your brain tells you that it’s impossible, they still seem like they’re as real as anything else in the room.
It’s a lot like what being the skeptic in a horror movie must be, not being able to believe in what you can clearly see and hear.
I don’t have any problem believing this, especially if the hallucinations do turn out to be because of his drug addiction, not a psychotic break. Read the thread I linked - we knew exactly why we were hallucinating, but that didn’t “break the spell” because knowing what we were seeing wasn’t real didn’t get the ambien out of our system any more than knowing Amber wasn’t real would get the vicodin out of his.
OK, perhaps the second sentence of the passage you quote was an overstatement. Hallucinations can persist after you recognize that they are hallucinations. (Those of Charles Bonnet syndrome very often do.)
I stand by the rest though. It was unrealistic because we were given the impression that House’s perception was not otherwise impaired (everything else appeared normal), and his intellect only appeared to be fairly trivially impaired.
I had hallucinations as a result of medication that I was taking. All three involved seeing animals on my bed. The most frightening of these was a crow. My husband reminded me that it was because of the medicine. I believed him and I told him so. But I begged him not to make me look at that crow. It was very real looking.
The other things that I saw were a bear sitting on the bed. That did not seem so real. It looked more like a bear from a storybook. And the final thing I saw was a swarm of bees. It disappeared too quickly to look very real, but it frightened me briefly.
I also hallucinated more vaguely when I had pneumonia: I was watching the World Series but my husband returned home from night school to find me sitting up in bed singing the Pearl High School Fight Song from the school where I taught. My fever was 104 degrees. The game was in Montreal and I think it was snowing. It looked so nice and cool there. This may have been my imagination, but sometimes I think they sang “The Happy Wanderer.”
And Warren Cromarty. That’s the only player I can remember.
Now this is quite helpful, thanks!
And to others, no it really doesn’t impact my life as I can pretty readily tell it isn’t real.
Nope, wasn’t a joke, but I now see why you might think so. The real explosion I refer to was during the 9/11 Pentagon one, where I worked.
(With apologies for the late response)
No, I’m just using the strict psychological definition of hallucination. The perceptions that people have when taking LSD, peyote, psilocybin, large amounts of MDMA, etc are rarely “true hallucinations,” usually they are pseudohallucinatory or illusionary images.
Strictly speaking, a hallucination is indistinguishable from reality. An inexperienced person who accidentally ingests LSD is not in the same predicament as a genuinely psychotic person at all, at all.
Your basic relativity, if the observer is inside the malfuctioning sensor array they’re real, if the observer is outside, they’re not