Recently, I’ve been starting to get more hypnopompic hallucinations. I was always confused how people couldn’t differentiate between hallucinations, there must be something that throws them off?
I was waking up the other day on the couch and noticed by sibling beside the couch with their head against the wall and side-eyeing me and talking. It freaked me the heck out and it was not until later that I realized I was hallucinating. The shading, the composition, the weight, the voice in relation to how close they were to me – it was all very realistic, nothing seemed off.
How does the brain make hallucinations so real and understand how to make hallucinations interact with the 3D environment? What exactly are hallucinations?
Like, I don’t understand why I’m not able to see through (or what’s on the other side of) the hallucination because technically, nothing is there.
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The brain is already quite familiar with how reality appears considering it spends every waking moment interpreting reality. It knows how light and shadows work in a 3D environment because you have spent your entire life in a 3D environment with light and shadow.
But, another factor at work is that your brain is generating its interpretation of a scene which doesn’t exist. Those sensations didn’t happen at all, your brain is generating them from whole cloth. They are “realistic” because your brain interpreted them that way; it wasn’t evaluated based on its merits, it was formed already rubber-stamped by your brain as believable.
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