Hallucination vs. Dream

Hallucinations are usually "drug or event inspired". A bad hallucination may come about if the person is taking medication (legal or illegal) causing the brain sensors to "imagine" things.

Dreams is the brain releasing "stress" through imagining more [sic]plesant things but not always.

--

One thing I can think of off the top of my head is that one way to get hallucinations is through activation of 5-HT2a receptors (this is what all hallucinogenic drugs do). This certainly isn't occurring during dreaming...

--

A hallucination, in the broadest sense, is a perception in the absence of a stimulus. In a stricter sense, hallucinations are defined as perceptions in a conscious and awake state in the absence of external stimuli which have qualities of real perception, in that they are vivid, substantial, and located in external objective space. The latter definition distinguishes hallucinations from the related phenomena of dreaming, which does not involve wakefulness; illusion, which involves distorted or misinterpreted real perception; imagery, which does not mimic real perception and is under voluntary control; and pseudohallucination, which does not mimic real perception, but is not under voluntary control.^[1] Hallucinations also differ from "delusional perceptions", in which a correctly sensed and interpreted genuine perception is given some additional (and typically bizarre) significance.

--

I have used "dream" and "hallucination" too interchangeably. I should try to explain. You see, I have used a dream dictionary to speak of illusions existing in a physical space. Therefore, the illusions were hallucinations, very much Vicodin dreams.

I see the person I know to be "me" externally, outside the window or across the room, and the events span a wider space. I see the car accident on my street.

But no, the space is so altered that it maybe cannot be real space at all but based in the mind. Yet I am awake, and it is the drug's fault. Shall I call it an "imagination" ? But my imagination, I imagine (enough with the puns...), is full of glitter and fantastic creatures and light that is bright but does not hurt the mind. The imagination is a place of hope, even when it depicts sorrow.

I want to believe that these images are external. The man who came to stab me so often in my non-reality. It felt real, and my eyes were open to take in his details. I do not want to believe the stubble on his chin or that hateful look in his eyes came from my mind.

Let's say it came from the "mind" of the Vicodin. Or the mind that created Vicodin. A cruel creator that purposefully added a side-effect.

I cannot get the image of the bleeding monkey from my mind. If only I could properly verbalize the experience of his pain, which was so real but not true, then people would stop looking at me knowing that I am crazy, to some degree. Comfort comes in knowing that we all are, and we are not lonely.

A selfish thought.


Note: Remind me, I should examine House M.D. He has brought chronic pain to the public eye.