Hallucinations and the paranormal

Hallucination. People don’t like that word. It suggests seeing things that aren’t there. It is incorrectly associated with madness. Yet I’m convinced it can hold the key to much of the paranormal. However, we need to reassess what hallucination is.First of all, provided you do not suffer hallucinations all the time, there is nothing strange about them. Further, to occasionally hallucinate is not to lose grip on reality. As we will see shortly, to hallucinate is a natural physiological function.Believers in classic interpretations of the paranormal offer another misconception about hallucination. They say there is a difference between seeing real phenomena and hallucinating. Is this the case, or do hallucinations come in degrees of severity?I suppose the best way to understand this point is to make a hallucination analogous to a dream. Most of the time we know we are dreaming, but in the lucid dream we experience something so ‘real’ we cannot make the separation between reality and dream.Like hallucination, a dream is a mind function, so if we can mistake a mind construct for reality in the dream, then it is natural to assume we can do the same with a hallucination.

From the 1950s onwards, test after test has shown a simple reality. Remove, or disrupt, our attention on the real world and a hallucination can easily be the outcome. From floatation tanks to sensory deprivation, this has been the case.From this we can learn something about the mind. Whilst the senses can be disrupted, the mind itself continually attempts to validate what it sees. Hence, if it has insufficient data from the senses, it will fill in the gaps itself.