Hallucination

“ The picture is mental, in such a case; it is an imaginative creation; it is a hallucination,—although it was caused or created by another, distant mind. It was, it is true, a hallucination; but as it was induced by telepathy, we have for such apparitions the name of “telepathic hallucinations.” It is this theory of “telepathic hallucinations” which is invoked to explain many of these cases of death-coincidences, or apparitions of the dying. ”

“ Let it be understood, then, that in this and the following chapter the apparitions or "ghosts" of which instances will be cited are regarded primarily as hallucinations. A hallucination is a sensory perception which corresponds to no sensory reality [1] ; it is a creation of the brain; in the case of a visual hallucination we may describe it as the final member in a series of which intermediate terms can be traced in the half realised pictures that flit before our waking thought in every act of memory; the imagery which fills our consciousness in dreams ”

“ Of course, it had been an hallucination. But when hallucinations start behaving like realities, even a scientist has to face the possibility that he may have to treat them like realities. And when hallucinations begin to threaten you and yours in a direct physical way—
He reached out for the first length of cord and tied the ends together in a granny. ”

“ In [Pg 115] ordinary parlance hallucination is held to differ from illusion in that, whilst there is an object really there in illusion, in hallucination there is no objective stimulus at all. We shall presently see that this supposed absence of objective stimulus in hallucination is a mistake, and that hallucinations are often only extremes of the perception process, in which the secondary cerebral reaction is out of all normal proportion to the peripheral stimulus which occasions the activity. Hallucinations usually appear abruptly and have the character of being forced upon the subject. ”

“ This hallucination of one of the senses is often produced in an instant, and generally becomes gradually weakened in process of time, by the perpetual stimulus of external objects, or by the successions of other catenations of ideas, or by the operations of medicines; and when the maniacal hallucination ceases, or is forgotten, the violent exertions cease, which were in consequence of it, and the disease is cured. ”

“ It is evident that when illusion reaches this stage, it is scarcely distinguishable from what is specially known as hallucination. As I have remarked in setting out, illusion and hallucination shade one into the other much too gradually for us to draw any sharp line of demarcation between them. And here we see that hallucination differs from illusion only in the proportion in which the causes are present. When the internal imaginative impulse reaches a certain strength, [Pg 112] it becomes self-sufficient, or independent of any external impression. ”

“ In so far as the error involves the ascription of the sensation to a force external to the sense-organ, this part of the mental process must, when there is no such force present, be viewed as hallucinatory. Thus, the feeling of something creeping over the skin is an hallucination in the sense that it implies the idea of an object external to the skin. Similarly, the projection of an ocular impression due to retinal disturbance into the external field of vision, may rightly be named an hallucination. ”

“ But in most of the cases of collective hallucination hitherto reported, the hallucinations have been, so far as could be ascertained, similar and simultaneous, so as indeed to suggest a real figure rather than a hallucination. Moreover, in well-attested recent narratives it rarely happens that a connection between the hallucination and any unusual state of the person represented is clearly established; whilst in many, perhaps most cases, the hallucination has not been recognised as resembling any person known to either percipient, and has in some instances been purely grotesque. ”

“ When an insane patient sees at his elbow a walking, talking spectre, he has an hallucination. But if in a dark forest, at night, one takes some deformed trunk for a ghost, he has an illusion. Illusion presupposes an actual sensation, the perception of which is exaggerated and erroneous, whereas hallucination comes spontaneously without requiring a sensation to give rise to it. Now, under the hasheesh influence, the sensations are exaggerated so as to produce endless illusions. ”

“ When secondary sensory elements become under conditions of dissociation dynamically active in the focus of consciousness we have hallucinations.
From this standpoint we can well understand why a hallucination, like a percept, has all the attributes of external reality. A hallucination is not any more mysterious and wonderful than a percept is. ”

“ Fifthly, we have those cases in which the apparition has produced a physical effect in the material world—snuffed a light, opened a door, pulled back the bed-curtains, etc. A hallucinatory figure could not do this. It has been suggested that all this is only a part of the hallucination, but when the thing is found to have been moved in reality, we must explain this somehow ”

“ The most curious proofs of the existence of such an undifferentiated sense of reality as this are found in experiences of hallucination. It often happens that an hallucination is imperfectly developed: the person affected will feel a 'presence' in the room, definitely localized, facing in one particular way, real in the most emphatic sense of the word, often coming suddenly, and as suddenly gone ”

“ An injured external organ conveys a false and distorted message to the brain and to the intelligence. A nascent malady of the ear may produce buzzings, and these may develop into hallucinatory voices. Here be hallucinations from without. But when a patient begins with a hallucination of the intellect, as that inquisitors are plotting to catch him, or witches to enchant him, and when he later comes to see inquisitors and witches, where there are none, we have, apparently, a hallucination from within. ”

“ It is not at all uncommon for a vivid hallucination of one or other of the senses, of hearing, of sight, of smell, of touch, of muscular sensibility, to precede immediately the unconsciousness of an epileptic fit. It may be a command or threat uttered in a distinct voice, or the figure of a person clearly seen, or a feeling of sinking into the ground or of rising into the air; and a common visual hallucination on such occasions is a flash, a halo, or a flood of bright or colored light, which makes a strong impression before the person falls unconscious. ”

“ It is, indeed, obvious enough that the more idiognomonic the hallucination is, the more isolated from any other disturbance of normality, the greater will be its psychological interest. An apparently spontaneous modification of central percepts—what phenomenon could promise to take us deeper into the mystery of the mind? ”

“ Sporadic cases of hallucination, visiting people only once in a lifetime (which seem to be by far the most frequent type) , are on any theory hard to understand in detail. They are often extraordinarily complete; and the fact that many of them are reported as veridical, that is, as coinciding with real events, such as accidents, deaths, etc., of the persons seen, is an additional complication of the phenomenon. ”

“ Another indication of the subliminal power at work to produce these hallucinations is their remarkable range—a range as wide, perhaps, as that over which therapeutic effects are obtainable by suggestion. The post-hypnotic hallucination may affect not sight and hearing alone (to which spontaneous hallucinations are in most cases confined) , but all kinds of vaso-motor responses and organic sensations—cardiac, stomachic, and the like—which no artifice can affect in a waking person. ”

“ When they "grow inattentive," the feeling "dies back," or "jumps back to the stump." Every degree of consciousness, from complete and permanent hallucination, down to something hardly distinguishable from ordinary fancy, seems represented in the sense of the missing extremity which these patients say they have. ”

“ Hallucination—A mental experience, in which a phantom is seen, a voice heard, etc., when there is no real external cause for this seeing or hearing. Hallucinations are more complete than mere “illusions.”
Pact—An agreement, entered into before death, between two persons, that, whichever one dies first, shall appear to the other one. ”

“ As we have already pointed out, the expression "ghost stories" covers a multitude of different phenomena. Many of these may be explained as "hallucinations," which does not imply that they are simply the effect of imagination and nothing more. "The mind receives the hallucination as if it came through the channels of sense, and accordingly externalises the impression, seeking its source in the world outside itself, whereas in all hallucinations the source is within the mind, and is not derived from an impression received through the recognised organ of sense. ”

“ This is the true question of ghosts and wraiths. That apparitions, so named by the world, do appear, is certain, just as it is certain that visionary rats appear to drunkards in delirium tremens. But, as we are only to take the evidence of sane and healthy witnesses, who were neither in anxiety, grief, or other excitement, when they perceived their one hallucination, there seems to be a difference between their hallucinations and those of alcoholism, fanaticism, sorrow, or anxiety. ”

“ According to modern opinion every “ghost” is a “hallucination,” a false perception, the perception of something which is not present.
It has not been thought necessary to discuss the psychological and physiological processes involved in perception, real or false. Every “hallucination” is a perception, “as good and true a sensation as if there were a real object there. ”

“ When, however, the mind is diseased, the hallucinations of sane life take possession of the person. The poor soul possessed by hallucination becomes a prey to melancholia, hysteria, and dementia. But the mind of the superstitious man, who is ever recalling the phantasms born of hallucination, is exploiting upon the brink of the sea of hallucination into which he may plunge by insanity. While ghosts may be smelled, touched, or heard, yet they are more commonly seen for vision is the most idealistic sense. ”

“ Hallucinations (which are all in one’s eye or sensory centre, or cerebral central terminus) , cannot draw curtains, or open doors, or pick up books, or tuck in bed-clothes, or cause thumps—not real thumps, hallucinatory thumps are different. Consequently, if the stories are true, some apparitions are ghosts, real objective entities, filling space. The senses of a hallucinated person may be deceived as to touch, and as to feeling the breath of a phantasm (a likely story) , as well as in sight and hearing. But a visible ghost which produces changes in the visible world cannot be a hallucination. ”

“ Hallucination may be roughly defined as false sense impression. For example, the patient sees an object which has no real existence, or hears an imaginary voice. Hallucinations are termed visual, auditory, tactile, etc. ”

“ Lawyers lay great stress on the presence of delusions as indicative of insanity. An hallucination is a sensation which is supposed by the patient to be produced by external impressions, although no material object acts upon his senses at the time. ”

“ Yet dreams belong to the same order of mental phenomena as hallucinations, and are commonly so classed—such differences as exist being mainly due to the conditions under which the two sets of phenomena respectively occur. In fact, a hallucination is simply a hypertrophied thought—the last member of a series, whose intermediate terms are to be found in the mind's-eye pictures of ordinary life, in the vivid images which some artists can summon at will, and in the Faces in the Dark which many persons see before passing into sleep, with its more familiar and abundant imagery. ”

“ Without entering into any analysis of the various forms of hallucination of which many able psychologists and physicians of the insane have treated, let us turn to the more ordinary cases in which an image of the mind is projected on the external world so as to appear real. ”

“ Belief in ghosts, angels and demons is practically universal; and just here comes in the whole range of psychical phenomena, facts and fantasies, illusions, 17 hallucinations and delusions, rational volition, reason dethroned, and the Will in Subjection, already referred to.
As individual experiences, subjective or objective, all are real. The fear incited by illusions and hallucination, or by “seeing a ghost,” regardless of the fact of its actual existence, is as real to the individual as that of meeting a serpent in the grass, or a tiger in the jungle. ”

“ Now every ghost or wraith is a hallucination. You see your wife in the dining-room when she really is in the drawing-room; you see your late great-great-grandfather anywhere. Neither person is really present. The first appearance in popular language is a “wraith”; the second is a “ghost” in ordinary speech. Both are hallucinations.
So far Mr. Galton would go, but mark what follows! Everybody allows the existence of dreams, but comparatively few believe in dream stories of veracious dreams. So every scientific man believes in hallucinations, {68} but few believe in veracious hallucinations. ”