Hallucination / Haunting

In the play we wanted one of the characters to see a ghost of his girlfriend because he is guilty of what has happened. Which we could look into whether it is a hallucination or it could been haunting. I decided to look into both of these and see how it could relate to the piece.  I wanted to find out what Haunting is like and what happens when you hallucinate or what triggers someone to hallucinate.

I wanted to get a good understanding of how these both work and what happens if you do have anything happen to you like this. So once we have the play up and running and on its feet we all know how to create that feeling to the audience to help bring the price alive for them.


Hallucination : 

There are a lot of different types - audio, visual, olfactory, tactile, gustatory, thermalceptive, hypnagotic, pendicular and so on. Any sense in the body can trigger hallucinations. 

Basically a hallucination is just a misinterpretation of one's perception of reality. Its when the brain experiences a perception without any stimulus. And there are many many reasons why they occur. In fact we don't even know all the reasons. There are times when hallucinations seem totally spontaneous and they cannot be explained. Then there are even pseudo hallucinations, delusions brought on by delirium. 

Hallucinations do not work in just any one area of the brain. Rather a bad connection made between one area of the brain and the pre-frontal cortex, which deals with perception of reality and cognitive functions. 

How a hallucination works? Well here is an example say an area of the temporal lobe (which controls auditory abilities and hearing) sends the prefrontal cortex a signal without any external stimulus and cortex interprets the signal by alerting a person to a sound that is not really there. This is actually among the most common hallucinations and happens usually just before a person falls asleep. Its experienced lby ike saying you hear your name or thinking you can hear someone talk or even hear music. It happens because as the brain gets relaxed as part of the sleep cycle it enters whats called a hynagotic state, where the brain can experience predreams, or basically a type of hallucination. 

But hallucinations can happen for all sorts of reasons - drugs, dementia, a head truama, epilepsy, psychosis (ie schizophrenia), animia, sleep deprivation and sometimes they happen for no apperant reason at all. Just a glitch in the system.

What is schizophrenia?

Schizophrenia affects one person in a hundred at some point in their lives. The illness usually starts in the teenage years or twenties, and alters the person's experience and interpretation of the world. This may lead to delusions – strongly held false beliefs. Experience of hallucinations (particularly hearing voices) is a common experience, but disjointed and hard to follow thoughts, personality change, absence of emotion and depression can occur as well.

hallucination, the experience of perceiving objects or events that do not have an external source, such as hearing one’s name called by a voice that no one else seems to hear. A hallucination is distinguished from an illusion, which is a misinterpretation of an actual stimulus.

A historical survey of the study of hallucinations reflects the development of scientific thought inpsychiatry, psychology, and neurobiology. By 1838 the significant relationship between the content ofdreams and of hallucinations had been pointed out. In the 1840s the occurrence of hallucinations under a wide variety of conditions (including psychological and physical stress) as well as their genesis through the effects of such drugs as stramonium and hashish had been described.