Why are hallucinations scary

People with anxiety and depression may experience periodic hallucinations. The hallucinations are typically very brief and often relate to the specific emotions the person is feeling. For example, a depressed person may hallucinate that someone is telling them they are worthless.

Learn more about psychosis in depression. Withdrawal from alcohol can cause hallucinations, especially in people who experience a severe withdrawal syndrome called delirium tremens. A person with delirium tremens may also become very sick, vomit, or shake.

Symptoms usually disappear after several days. Dementia progressively damages the brain, including regions involved with sensory processing. People in mid to late stage dementia may experience auditory and visual hallucinations. Sometimes, they see people who have died. In other cases, their hallucinations may be terrifying and can trigger feelings of paranoia and panic that make it difficult for them to trust caregivers.

Sometimes hallucinations are a symptom of a seizure disorder. A person may experience hallucinations during or after a seizure. In most cases, treating the seizures prevents the hallucinations. Some people with migraines experience hallucinations during or right before a migraine. These hallucinations are often visual.

A person might see spots and colors that are not there or other unusual images. Some people experience hallucinations that doctors associate with sleep disorders. The hallucinations commonly appear as a person falls asleep or wakes. In some cases, the hallucination occurs with an episode of sleep paralysis , which happens when a person wakes up and is temporarily unable to move.

Treating sleep disorders may help ease symptoms. In some cases, knowing that the hallucinations happen because of brain changes during the sleep cycle can make them less frightening. People with hearing or vision loss may experience hallucinations.

This may be due to brain changes in sensory processing regions or in the visual or auditory information the brain receives. In some cases, hallucinations may not relate to an illness or drugs. Sometimes, suggestive forces trigger the hallucination. For example, in religious traditions, where hearing the voice of God is common, a person might report an auditory hallucination. A person sleeping in a house they believe to be haunted might hear noises or see ghostly figures due to heightened anxiety.

A hallucination is not a delusion, though the two are closely related. A delusion is a false belief, while a hallucination is a false perception.

Many people may have fallen for optical illusions and other mental tricks. However, a hallucination is more than an error in perception. However, I do not perceive them the same way as if my actual mother were talking to me. These experiences can occur at any time.

They are uncontrollable, and only subside with medication. They are a part of me, and I view them as natural as my left arm. My hallucinations and psychosis often occur as a result of a stressful build up. For example, my hallucinations were triggered once while on a trip.

I wake up in New York City feeling stressed and disoriented. I feel like I am two feet above, apart from my body. The women are shouting. Everywhere there is a body, a concrete structure, a storefront ready to interact with me.

I am not prepared for these interactions. I find it thrilling and exciting, but at the same time uncomfortable and triggering. Faced with all these stimuli, I cannot pinpoint where reality begins. The cultural and historical significance of this event are too much for me to understand, though finding myself in the middle of it, I consider myself a part of history.

My identity seems to blur. I walk away from the March and eventually get to the New York Public Library, where it is also crowded. I take out my journal, in which I begin to draw the very intense visuals that I see fluttering across my eyes. These images are a bright, colorful, engulfing overlay that takes me over. I become lost in them, and the only thing I can do is stand and watch them occur.

I see spiders crawling everywhere in my field of vision. I see people chanting, and I am paranoid that there is a mob wanting to overthrow the government. I draw these things. I send the drawings to a friend, and he says they are cute. But, to me, they are really scary. When a hallucination scene is unfolding before my eyes, the scene does not interact with anything of the environment, rather, they behave within the reality, as if I am accessing two dimensions at once.

My hallucinations never pick up objects or pay regards to any law of physics. What happens in our brains when we hallucinate? Voices in your head? Visions of things that aren't there? You don't have to have schizophrenia or take LSD to have a hallucination, and they don't always have to be scary either. Professor McGrath recently found that nearly 1 in 20 of the general population report hearing or seeing things — when fully awake — that others don't.

So what is a hallucination? It's a "false perception" of reality and it can occur with a whole range of senses, but the most common ones are visual and auditory hallucinations, said Professor McGrath.

Normally our brain is good at distinguishing between a sound or image that is occurring in the outside world, and one that is just a product of our mind. But occasionally something can go awry. One major theory is that hallucinations are caused when something goes wrong in the relationship between the brain's frontal lobe and the sensory cortex, said neuropsychologist Professor Flavie Waters from the University of Western Australia.

For example, research suggests auditory hallucinations experienced by people with schizophrenia involve an overactive auditory cortex, the part of the brain that processes sound, said Professor Waters. Similarly, people with Parkinson's disease appear to have an overactive visual cortex, which results in images being generated in their brain of things that aren't actually there. Psychoactive drugs could also upset the relationship between the sense processing parts of the brain and the frontal lobe in a similar way, said Professor Waters.

The big question is whether the same kind of processes are responsible for less extreme hallucinations. Hallucinations aren't always intrusive, negative and scary, even in conditions like schizophrenia. About 70 per cent of healthy people experience benign hallucinations when they are falling asleep, said Professor Waters.

This includes hearing their name being called, the phone ringing or seeing someone sitting at the end of their bed.