Hallucinations

Depends what the hallucinations are and whether your character recognises them as such.

I mean if he's being chased down the road by a murderous Mars Bar then he might twig....If it's just a conversation with someone who isn't really there he might not.

One of my MCs has hallucinations but although he doesn't recognise them as such, it's reasonably easy to clue the reader in ( because it's been established that the people he is talking too are really very dead)

The trick there is how to work in clues so the reader knows, but the character doesn't

ETA: I have had hallucinations ( both drug induced and not-quite-sane induced) but almost every time I knew them for what they were. Still pretty freaky nonetheless.

I've had some hallucinations, and I have to say: the drug induced ones I was always sharply aware it wasn't real. The sleep deprivation and fever-induced ones...I was hard-pressed to figure out what was real and what wasn't. I had a conversation with a bag of Legos once while sleep-deprived. They were terribly witty, the kind of plastic building blocks you'd like to be friends with. Seriously. I still remember parts of that conversation and at the time, it did not seem odd that a bag of Legos would want to hang out with me and chat.

You could always try the Hollywood approach, of having believable hallucinations and not telling the reader it's not real until at least halfway through the book...

I'm thinking A Beautiful Mind here...

And keep in mind that where there are hallucinations, delusions are usually there too, without medical intervention...

Hallucination: hearing the trees whisper to you.
Delusion: thinking the trees are trying to kill you.

I'd agree that drug-induced hallucinations are usually easy to tell they aren't real... for most drugs anyway. But they can then give you delusions which seem very much real, even though what you're basing the delusion on (the hallucination) you know is fake.

Hope that helps.

What about he sees Sunderland win the Champions League?

Paul said:

What about he sees Sunderland win the Champions League?

Click to expand...

He'd know that was a hallucination. Completely unbelievable

Uh, like, read up on hallucinations?

I had hallucinations on a prescription drug (it was at toxic levels because of a weird metabolism of it I have). They came at night at the same time.

They were very odd. I recognized them as not real a bit into it, but not at very first. The incredible silence was the hint in mine, to start with:

My brother was standing over my bed. I asked him what was up and he just stood there like a zombie. I put my hand up and he disappeared.

The family cat jumped up on my bed and sat on the corner, but he made no noise and didn't cause the bed to move a bit. With this one, I had to figure out if it was real or not, because it was after my first one. So I'm staring at this Cat Or Not Cat sitting on my bed, kind of scared of what would happen next.

In later days, there was a rat climbing through a real potted plant I had in the room. Except it would be too heavy to climb on branches so thin. Totally noiseless, it writhered all around those branches. *shudder*

There was a space monster thing, too. That one sounds kind of silly but it was as creepy as the rest.



[BTW, yes I told my shrink I was having hallucinations at night and a scary-racing heart in the daytime. He kept calling them 'bad dreams'... until I fell into a coma!!]

Last time I took cold medicine, the disembodied head of the black rabbit of Inle started bouncing around the living room. I knew it wasn't really there, but it still freaked the crap out of me.

Time before that (I hate taking cold medicine) it started with all the clouds in the pictures on the walls blowing by in their picture frames. Then it began snowing from the ceiling. I knew that wasn't real either. That was probably the least freaky hallucination I ever had.

Did anyone else make those big drawings in school (I'm talking early school here, like kindergarten) where you would lay on a large piece of paper and have someone trace you? When I did that, we decorated the traced-images with pencil crayon coloured clothes and hair and whatnot. I had mine pinned to my bedroom door for a while. Then one night I saw something that was either a dream or a hallucination....the 2-D "drawing" of myself stepped down from the paper and walked sideways out the door. I thought it was real, and I was horrified, and the next day I ripped the drawing down.

Another time, when I was older, I was running a high fever and hallucinated that a poster on my wall was talking to me and petting a dog. I couldn't hear any voice though, it was just moving its mouth and I knew it was saying something. I also thought that was real, at the time.

I remember one of my childhood friends hallucinated that all the doors in her house were falling on her when she took some medication once. I'm fairly certain she thought it was real and was actually running away from the doors crying.

You can go to the Erowid web site, and there you can click on almost any type of drug, natural and/or man-made drugs/herbs and read actual users descriptions of what happened when they experimented with said drug/herbs etc.

as for my own experimentation, I found that the drugs(LSD, peyote, pot, has, etc) always just amplified the general mood that I was already in.

When happy made, the drugs made me happier, giddy-er, sillier.
When sad, the drugs made me even more down, depressed etc.
When angry they made me even angrier, more paranoid etc.
when horny, etc

Up through my adolescent years, I had Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. (I know, it's a Wikipedia link.) I didn't know what it was called then, and I was too freaked out by it to tell anyone.

Gothic, when I was 12, I had a horrible car accident and had some surreal morphine-induced hallucinations.

Everyone remember Gulliver's Travels? Yeah, the little gnome dudes marched to my hospital bed, and proceeded to throw their grappling hooks over me. Then they lined up and heaved-ho'd on my broken leg. I was absolutely terrified, and yelled for the nurse. She bolted in, with a harried look on her face, trying to reassure me there was nothing there. I was completely taken in.

I was in traction, a process where broken bones are slowly pulled apart with counterweight. Apparently there were ten extra pounds on the weights, slowly pulling the bones apart.

Guess who got a hot-nurse spongebath and a Wildman Mark Merrill signed-photo with Sable? THAT was not a hallucination ;-)

Hallucinations, like dreams, are very personal. They can be lucid or erratic/dreamlike. There are some specifics with certain drugs, if you're writing about LSD, Vicodin, etc. it's probably good thing to do some research; ask people who have experiences. Some drugs don't create hallucinations.

Other than that, like I said, it's a personal thing. Everyone's experience is different.

BTW, I've heard Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was a product of Lewis Carroll's drug use and hallucinations!

^^^ So true.

The drug in mine was a tricyclic antidepressant, and obviously it's not supposed to be used at those kinds of serum levels.

Hashish? The only other drug hallucinations I've had, and the little dashes that made up the numbers on the alarm clock started dancing around merrily

When I was a kid and had a fever, the door to my room would always shrink and shrink in the dark. I'd never heard of the Alice in Wonderland thing! How interesting.

How else do you explain the caterpillar sitting on a MUSHROOM smoking a hookah?

That's why I can't wait for Tim Burton's version!

I have hypnagogic hallucinations from time to time. Someone is standing by the bed. I usually wake up hitting my husband, trying to wake him up so he can see them. They come in batches and then I won't have one for months. When I "wake up" I'm already in motion, trying to get away from them, usually screaming and punching poor hubby. Odd thing is I have no physical manifestation of fear-- my heart rate's the same, my breathing's the same... just my mind is freaked.