I think I recall reading an article in The New Scientist about a woman (IIRC) who had a leprechaun following her around everywhere. She wasn’t ‘crazy’, because she knew he wasn’t real, and he wasn’t causing any trouble - he just followed her around. I won’t bother trying to find any cites or further info for that unless it is of any interest to you. I don’t remember what it was that caused him to appear, but the little dude was a hallucination, just not a drug induced one.
Is the easy answer just to tell you to go to Disneyland?
Attend science fiction or comic book conventions, preferably dressed as a character. Become a rabid fan of a given sports franchise. Immerse yourself in a detail-obsessive hobby such as stamp or butterfly collecting (extra points if you specialize in stamps with pictures of butterflies).
Or (my personal favourite due to budgetary constraints) sleep and practice dreaming.
One of my favorite fringe theories (Which I know wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny) is that people with Schizophrenia are stuck between two realities. Ours and some other reality. And it’s the being able to observe both is what drives them crazy.
If you could find a way to push them completely into either one, they would be fine. Because who knows, maybe in that other world it’s perfectly normal to have your own personal leprechaun following you around.
The most serious and original answer I can think of is augmented reality. Or maybe geocaching. So you want to look at, say, a coffee shop, and see it’s really a spaceship repair station?
Whether he was fishing for that or not, it’s probably the best answer to the question. We’ve all had the experience of being so immersed in a movie that we forget that we’re sitting in a theatre.
It can take you to all sorts of fantastical worlds, it’s relatively healthy (if you avoid the popcorn), it’s pretty inexpensive, it’s reliable and easily accessible, and it enables millionaires to give other millionaires gold statues.
I think that’s probably as close to a right answer as can be. Augmented reality could introduce illusory beings into your environment, or could map certain easily-recognisable objects as something else (say, change phone boxes into space rockets).
But any such system can’t change so much as to put the user at risk - if it converts your reality into one where there are no cars visible, you’ll get squished trying to cross the road.
The Oculus Rift, coming out later this year I think, will be a VR system with head tracking and 3D full-field-of-view immersion. You’ll be able to play some video games as if you were actually inside the game in many ways!
There are quite good virtual world servers - I recommend InWorldz.com. You could wear a head mounted display if you have one, but even on a flat computer screen, they are quite immersive.
If you like the concept, but aren’t sure how to get started, I’ll be glad to show you (or any dopers) around. It’s free (if you like it you will probably buy extra content, but you don’t have to).
