The Apprehensive Aparition

 Waking from a frightening dream, hearing noises; how far does it go when your scared and alone. With all the hidden terrors in all world hallucination is far most the worst. One day realizing that your conscience has gotten louder has got to be the most frightening sounds you could ever experience. Hallucination is defined as sensory perception in absence of external stimuli. There are three characteristics: thoughts or memory images, perhaps when they are as vivid and immediate as perceptions, are experienced as if they were perceptions; they are externalized, or projected, being experienced as if they came from outside the person; and the mistaking of imagery for perception is not corrected in the light of the other information available.

Like hallucination, pseudohallucination has been used to describe imagery as vivid and immediate as perception but not mistaken as such. They are more likely to be seen in response to isolation or an intense emotional need: for example, shipwrecked sailors may visualize boats coming to their rescue well before this actually happens. The fanciful elaboration of perception of external stimuli-for example, faces seen in the fire-is illusion. A patient who suffers from delirium tremens as a result of alcoholism may see such frightening things as red spiders or pink elephants, or they may feel that lice are crawling over their skin, because hallucination although usually visual may be experienced through any of the senses. The imagery of a vision is experienced as if it came from outside, although not from ordinary reality as perception does.

  Young children often fail to distinguish between imagery and perception and suppose that what they imagine is external and perceptible to others; but as they grow older, they become better at making the distinction. Adults sometimes fail to make the distinction, especially at a time of high expectation. A widow mourning her husband¹s death may see him or hear his voice or footsteps repeatedly after his death, resulting in a Œsense of presence¹, which fades with the passage of time. In a wood at night, dark shadows are seen as lurking beasts. Waking from a frightening dream, a person feels that what he has experienced has happened in reality.

Mistakes like these are corrected when the person recognizes that they conflict with the information or the views of others. Normally imagery is continually reappraised in the light of the further information becoming available; and further information is sought by testing reality. Hearing a noise, a person makes a small head movement and tests whether the change in the strength and character of the noise conforms to his expectation. Perceiving someone in a crowd as an acquaintance, a person looks again or asks a friend for conformation. Macbeth in Shakespeare¹s play, while planning to murder Duncan, hallucinates a dagger, and asks: ŒArt thou not, fatal vision, sensible to feeling as to sight? Or art thou but a dagger in my mind, a false creation, proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

Further more, hallucinating whether it is drug enduced, from pure exhaustion or even from a mental illness is my hidden terror. As the world becomes more stressful and full of complications this problem affects more and more people. I would never wish this experience on anyone, I hope that soon people will only see reality and not it¹s alter.