What is hallucinating?

Please feel free to move/delete/edit this posting if it doesn't belong here. I am posting here because hallucinations can fall under many different diagnosis terms...

My questions is what exactly defines a hallucination? For instance... I myself have different varieties (I believe) of hallucinations. I have seen things and felt things that I know are not real. I have felt a spider crawl on me and felt and saw it bite me and watched it and touched it to see if it was real. It felt like it was there but I knew I was hallucinating. The spider eventually disappeared. I've seen large buffalo get hit by cars, things like that. Situations and visuals like these have happened numerous times during high stress.

What about the times where... Walls breath, you can see the ground shift, you are in a small room and you feel like it's moving under you like you're in a storm on a boat?

Or even less obvious as these.. Where you see things out the corner of your eye... You think you hear muffled noises all the time... Like when you leave the building and think you hear the phone ringing as you step out, when you open the door the phone isn't ringing... I go on cig breaks at work and every cig break I open the door 5-15 times to listen because I think I hear the phone...

So what is the difference? Are they all hallucinations? Is there a spectrum of hallucinations like there is dissociation? It's rather confusing when you always have experiences with the hallucinations listed directly above but only occassional experiences with the first description... Sorry if I'm making no sense, it doesn't make sense to me either lol! Thanks for any replies!!!

Maybe they go from mild, to extreme? I'm not having them now, thank-you Zyprexa!!
Best of luck.

Purpleflyingmonkeys

Very interesting. The stuff like thinking you hear the phone or seeing things out of the corner of your eye, i think that is normal. The walls breathing and room undulating like on a boat sounds like dissociation. The spider and buffalo sound like hallucinating. You said that happens when you are under stress. When you are under stress, are you getting enough sleep? I ask because when i dont get enough sleep, i start seeing things that arent there

purpleflyingmonkeys - everything you wrote about in general can be a hallucination or a mental disorder problem or a physical health problem or even a medication problem and for some people if they have used drugs or alcohol they can be side effects from past or present usage.

the only way to know for sure which they fall under is by the person having these problems is their contacting their treatment providers. treatment providers can take into consideration the persons health history and other information about the person coupled with diagnostic tests, then when all is said and done tell the person which they are experiencing - hallucinations, health (physical or mental or both) or anything else it may be.

in me those things you wrote about were part of my having -

bipolar disorder
seasonal depression
DID
medication reactions
A kind hearted friend spiking my drink at a party
Anxiety
not eating correctly on my busy days
not getting enough fluids while traveling
sleep deprivation when I have to man the phones for a week at a time

only a treatment professional can diagnose people. but in general a hallucination is anything thats not a reality. it can be a smell, something you taste, some people can even see their hallucinations and hear them and I have a schizophrenic who says he can hold, touch, converse with his hallucinated alter ego. who am I to say he cant right, All I know is that when his medication is working he doesnt have hallucinations.

by reading your past posts these can be just about anything in you and you know me I dont go around diagnosing online, I give you my standard suggestion -

you may want to consider contacting your treatment providers. they can talk with you and do some tests that will tell you what the problems are called in you.

Thank you once again Amandalouise I am going to be discussing the things going on to my primary doctor when I see him in January, I guess the wait will give me time to get everything together? It's going to be a LONG session. I've had a very strange life with very strange things happening physically and mentally with me. But I do need to get it figured out.

I've been keeping a list in my journal and getting a lot better at writing and remembering to write in it. I'm making the list of things to talk to him about, and the rest of the journal, I'm hoping once I get a t to be able to show them this to see if I'm crazy or not.

I get these "ideas" all the time. The ideas are about mental disorders, they are about hallucinations, they are about the after life, the here and now w/out of body experiences... A lot of theories and such on those type of topics, so I wanna run it by a t to see if I'm nuts or not because I have written things in this journal only to weeks later stumble across something very similar to what I had in my journal and it was written by a greek philosopher or something... So I'm curious.

That's the reason for this thread mostly. I've been looking into hallucinations more. Lately I've been thinking on hallucinations vs. imagination and hallucinations vs. "ghosts" (I have my own theory on "ghosts") and such so this post is just getting ideas from others on what hallucinations are.

Thank you KJ44 and likewater! KJ, I'm glad to hear medications are helping your hallucinations. I don't remember the names because it was 10+ years ago but when I was on meds for hallucinations they never worked for me. But maybe I should consider trying again. I'll write down the name you mentioned and look into it, who knows it might work? They never have before so I've kinda lived with them. But it's alright, they're not the biggest problem I am trying to solve internally And likewater... My sleeping hasn't changed much. It's pretty interesting that hallucinations can be caused by lack of sleep, I completely forgot that one. Now you have me a brand new topic in the hallucination field to think about for the day. Hallucinations with dreaming and day dreaming and such... Interesting things...

I was informed once that an hallucination is when the brain is connecting synapses together within the physical terms of the brain. Many things can cause an hallucination, but the person who informed me of this worked within medical studies, so at the same time they said that we are still learning the inner workings of the brain.
We do have so much to learn still, we are such a young race (humans).
I would guess that to gather as many different views and opinions would be helpful to understanding why our brains do the things they do.
I hoped this helped.

PurpleFlyingMonkeys - I thanked you for your post because I regularly see the ceiling breathe and feel as if I'm being spun around or rocked back and forth (although I'm completely still) during times of stress, illness, or depression. I always figured it was normal.

I remember at one point talking to my pdoc about hearing voices asking innocuous things such as "are you getting off the bus here?" he called it a non-psychotic hallucination. it still scared the crap out of me though. in that case, it was directly related to my depression.