Hallucinations

When an imaginary sensory experience is recognized and accepted as reality, and is acted upon emotionally, that constitutes an hallucination. Hallunications have their counterpart in dreams.We dream, for instance, that we are attacked, we are teror-stricken and start fighting back, but just then we wake up and realize it was only a dream and pooh-pooh it as such.

A person having hallucinations is experiencing a dream in the walking state.He imagines that he actually hears and feels a certain enemy of his attacking him and is ready to fight back, or he hears that someone near him has spoken ill of him, and is ready to attack that person.It is all in the patient's imagination, but he reacts if it were a reality.

High fever, disease or tumors of the brain can bring about hallucinatory symptoms. But in some cases, hallucinations arise as s result of a conflict in one's mind. And conflicts we all have, because the creator meant us to be that way.

It took millions of years for the human species to develop from the stone age cave-men to its present state of civilization, and the spiritual struggle is far from its goal as yet, we still posses many of our prehistoric instincts.These are in constant conflict with our higher conscience and our social environment.

There is a constant struggle between the sex instinct and the social inhibitions, and between the instinct of personal self preservation and the herd instinct or the good of the community.

I wish to note here that our spiritual or civilized instincts and habits are outgrowths of our primitive instincts, which means that the good in us is just as much a part of us as the unsocial or amoral is. As I said before, God created us that way  and he wishes us to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps to  a higher level of godliness, call it evolution, if you like

Until then we are always in a conflicting state of mind, but as grownups most of us learn to adjust ourselves and make some compromises between the warring instincts to become stabilized personalities.

If for reasons of a poor environment or because of a poor mental stock-in-trade, we are unable to make such adjustment, we are likely to fall into wrong, distorted and escapist ways of behavior which give rise to hallucinations