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Hallucination   /həlˌusənˈeɪʃən/   Listen
Hallucination

noun
1.
Illusory perception; a common symptom of severe mental disorder.
2.
A mistaken or unfounded opinion or idea.  Synonym: delusion.  "His dreams of vast wealth are a hallucination"
3.
An object perceived during a hallucinatory episode.



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"Hallucination" Quotes from Famous Books



... me up here. More to think about. But don't worry about me, doctor. I know this is the end. If I can't convince you, then all the world must think it hallucination. ...
— The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other Plays • Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson

... unaccountably so, I slowly descended to the street. The scene I had witnessed seemed to mark the defeat and annihilation of the forces of a kindred people, rather than the routing by our green warriors of a horde of similar, though unfriendly, creatures. I could not fathom the seeming hallucination, nor could I free myself from it; but somewhere in the innermost recesses of my soul I felt a strange yearning toward these unknown foemen, and a mighty hope surged through me that the fleet would return and demand a reckoning from the green warriors ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... quashed, even if it was begun. He must have been under an hallucination that he was a stern parent, cutting me ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge

... a pass. He did not know his man, however, who was Raoul Yvard; and who had come this way from Bastia, in the hope of escaping any further collision with his formidable foe. He had seen the frigate's lofty sails above the rock as soon as it was light; and, being under no hallucination on the subject of her existence, he knew her at a glance. His first order was to haul everything as flat as possible; and his great desire was to get from under the lee of the mountains of Elba into this very pass, ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper

... and stared. Merely that. He was subtle enough to shift the persecution from the province of the physical to the realm of the psychological. It was like being haunted. Even when I did not see him, I began to THINK that I saw him. He deliberately planted that hallucination in my mind. It is a wonder that I ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis

... whether I was under an hallucination or not, the information supposed to be derived from my uncle was strictly accurate in all its details. The fact that the disclosure subsequently became unnecessary through the confession of Weatherley does not seem to me to afford any argument for the hallucination theory. My uncle's ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent

... almost touching him. It was necessary he should move, forward or back, to give her room. But he did not move. His hands, outstretched before him on the coats, and sharp against the light, appeared to her to be shaking; but that was the hallucination of this frightful trembling that possessed her. She tried to say, "If you please—," but, dreadfully, had no voice; but made some sound; and he, most slowly, drew back. It was before him ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson

... an illusion, Dulaq reminded himself, a clever man-made hallucination. A figment of my own imagination amplified ...
— The Dueling Machine • Benjamin William Bova

... took on the semblance of Napoleon. My imagination was then full of Napoleon; and my father had suffered because of him at the battle of Waterloo. And as I sat in the gallery of the Senate, Webster, Calhoun, Hale, Cass, and Douglas reminded me of this hallucination. They seemed to me like flies at the windowpane of Texas and California and Oregon, beating their wings against the dark glass of the future. They were like insects, caught in the rich gluten of circumstances and buzzing as they sought ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters

... of the perception by the want excitement constitutes the shortest road to the wish-fulfillment. We may assume a primitive condition of the psychic apparatus in which this road is really followed, i.e. where the wishing merges into an hallucination, This first psychic activity therefore aims at an identity of perception, i.e. it aims at a repetition of that perception which is connected with the ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud

... no believer in ghosts, but I had to hit on some theory there and then. My nerves had been out of order for a month or two, and the long railway journey must have played havoc with them. The whole thing was a hallucination. So I told myself while pulling the coverings off the skylights, but somehow got mighty little comfort out of it; and I will not deny that I fumbled a bit with the padlock on the main hatchway, or that ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... was indeed the case, and that I was not the victim of hallucination, I advanced slowly in the direction of the sounds, but my footsteps reechoed hollowly from wall to wall of the narrow passage-way, and my coming brought the conflict to a sudden and ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer

... confidence in his fortunes had become widely disseminated. It was the general sentiment, even when Lee himself saw the end surely approaching, that all was safe while he remained in command of the army. This hallucination must have greatly pained him, for no one ever saw more clearly, or was less blinded by irrational confidence. Lee fully understood and represented to the civil authorities—with whom his relations were perfectly friendly ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke

... that wanted wisdom; but Adams found himself seeking education in a world that seemed to him both unwise and ignorant. The Southern secessionists were certainly unbalanced in mind — fit for medical treatment, like other victims of hallucination — haunted by suspicion, by idees fixes, by violent morbid excitement; but this was not all. They were stupendously ignorant of the world. As a class, the cotton-planters were mentally one-sided, ill-balanced, and provincial to a degree rarely ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... Valentine, half believing herself under the influence of some feverish hallucination; "what are you ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... down until Napier came and gave him a sedative. The doctor seemed as sick about Hal's inability to remember as I was, though he indicated it was normal enough in concussion cases. "So is the hallucination," he added. "He'll be ...
— Let'em Breathe Space • Lester del Rey

... bequeathed to writers on the Civil War are innumerable, but no one can read his correspondence at this stage without concluding that he was almost impossible to deal with, and that the whole of his evidence in his own case was vitiated by a sheer hallucination that people wished him to fail. He had been nearly two months in the Peninsula when he was attacked at a disadvantage by Johnston, but defeated him on May 31 and June 1 in a battle which gave confidence ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood

... gate-posts. He had taken thirty grains of quinine, and the drug was buzzing in his ears like a nest of hornets, making his hands and knees tremble, and causing a sickening palpitation of the stomach. Once, opening his eyes, he saw what he took to be an hallucination. Not far out, and coming in across the Jessie's anchorage, he saw a whale-boat's nose thrust skyward on a smoky crest and disappear naturally, as an actual whale-boat's nose should disappear, as it slid down the back of the sea. He knew that no whale-boat should be out there, ...
— Adventure • Jack London

... it was hallucination, is preposterous. Hallucinations that five hundred people at once shared! Hallucinations that lasted all through long talks, spread at intervals over more than a month! Hallucinations that included eating and drinking, speech ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... so certain is it that a divine deliverance is in store for this country in the immediate future. And, in every point of view, this explanation shows itself to be untenable. The supposition that a real Present is spoken of in ver. 14 saddles upon the Prophet an absurd hallucination; and nothing analogous to it can be referred to in the whole of the Old Testament. According to statements of the Prophet in other passages, he sees yet many things intervening between the Messianic time and his own; according to chap. ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg

... Here, here!" Seizing her hand, he pressed it hurriedly over his brow, which was hot, almost scorching. The blood beat rapidly through his throbbing temples. Fearful lest the approaching hallucination might prevent her benevolent designs, she soothed and coaxed him to lead the way, which had the desired effect; muttering as he went on, at times unintelligibly, at others speaking with ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby

... he marked his strange and novel detachment from the world of his upbringing. His hallucination of disillusionment had spread from himself and his church and his faith to the whole animate creation. He knew that these were the voices of "our feathered songsters," that this was "a joyous chorus" greeting the day. He knew that ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells

... of annexing Canada by force. And therefore, every farthing that you spend on your fortresses, and all that you do with the idea of shutting out American aggression, is money squandered through an hallucination which we ought to get rid of. I have not risen for the purpose of objecting to the second reading of this Bill. Under the circumstances, I presume it is well that we should do no other than read it a second time. But I think the ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright

... they were threatened by colorless economists who were mollycoddelistically making clear that the "stern reality" was the giant hallucination. ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell

... that Mr. Townsend is crazy. He is over seventy years of age and may be laboring under a hallucination. His story does appear incredible; there are elements of romance stranger than any I ever read about. Had the money been deposited with him for a few months, or even years, it would have been different, but a deposit to cover twenty years seems to me almost incredible; and then again, ...
— Two Wonderful Detectives - Jack and Gil's Marvelous Skill • Harlan Page Halsey

... head felt as if compressed by a circle of fire. He said that a voice kept muttering to him that his generative organs were abnormally deformed or the seat of disease. After that, he imagined that he heard a cry of "amputation! amputation!" Driven by this hallucination, he made his first attempt at self-mutilation ten days later. He was placed in an Asylum at Astino where, though closely watched, he took advantage of the first opportunity and cut off two-thirds of his penis, when the delirium subsided. Camp describes a stout German of thirty-five who, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... time Ellis was speaking, was debating in his mind whether or not he was labouring under some strange hallucination. "Whatever it is that you fear, do not talk about it," he said, as soon as Ellis had ceased speaking. "It will do no good, and can only make people think things which are very likely far from the truth. I would advise you not to talk even to me about it. ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston

... unstrung, to totter along the difficult footpath of life as he best may. Conscious of his own infirmity—that his tempered steel and elasticity are lost—he for ever afterwards looks wistfully about him in quest of support external to himself. His pervading and continual hope—a hallucination, which, in the face of all discouragement, and making light of impossibilities, haunts him while he lives, and, I fancy, like the convulsive throes of the cholera, torments him for a brief space after death—is, that finally, and in no long time, by some happy coincidence of circumstances, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... ... waited—and dropped his head on his pillow. "A hallucination of hearing," he thought. "Well, and what if ... what if she really is here, close to me?... What if I were to see her, would I be frightened? But why should I be frightened? Why should I rejoice? Possibly because it would be a proof that there is another ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... that price of course Fougeres earned nothing; neither did he lose, thanks to his sober living. He made a few excursions to the boulevard to see what became of his pictures, and there he underwent a singular hallucination. His neat, clean paintings, hard as tin and shiny as porcelain, were covered with a sort of mist; they looked like old daubs. Magus was out, and Pierre could obtain no information on this phenomenon. He fancied something was wrong ...
— Pierre Grassou • Honore de Balzac

... itself by night in dreams, which renewed our old relation in all its mysterious vitality. So strong were their impressions that each morning I expected to receive some token from him which would prove that they were not lies. As my expectation grew cold and faint, the sense of a double hallucination tormented me—the past ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard

... two generations after the struggle had been successfully closed. Amid the quiet hills of Vermont, the minds of both were affected for a time, with at least partial derangement. Dea. Boardman labored temporarily under the hallucination, that he was somehow liable to arrest, and prepared a chamber for his defence. He was obliged, for a time to be watched, though he was never confined. A journey to Connecticut, on horseback, with ...
— Log-book of Timothy Boardman • Samuel W Boardman

... she could be the same person and the same person as they who lost themselves in the crowd that night and heard and said words palpitant with fate. Perhaps there had been no such words; perhaps it was all a hallucination. He must leave her to recognize that it was reality; till she did so, he felt bitterly that there was nothing for him but submission and patience; if she never did so, there was nothing for ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... afforded an "evidence of his salvation from Heaven, with many golden seals thereon hanging in his sight." But, ere long, other temptations assailed him. A strange suggestion haunted him, to sell or part with his Saviour. His own account of this hallucination is too painfully vivid to awaken any other feeling than ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... hallucination poor Goody Billings, who had five children and a husband of her own, continued to give food and shelter to little Tom for a period of no less than seven years; and though it must be acknowledged that the young gentleman did not in the slightest degree merit ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray

... ascended from the groves below, wafted upward upon the perfumed and aromatic air; and the whole scene appeared more like a fabled Elysium than a reality of Nature I could hardly satisfy myself that I was not dreaming, or looking upon some fantastic hallucination ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid

... de Boismont, De l'hallucination historique, ou etude medico-psychique sur les voix et les revelations de Jeanne d'Arc, 1861, in 8vo. Le Vicomte de Mouchy, Jeanne d'Arc, etude historique et psychologique, Montpellier, ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France

... as he subsided once more into his chair, "this must be a hallucination, an offspring of an overworked brain; and yet there are strange things in connection with the mental organisation, and I feel as if I ought to take some steps. What a relief it would be, my boy, to us all, the clearing away of a load of ungenerous suspicion. But one ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn

... protector—in that light she regarded Cranley, when she was well enough to think consecutively. There could be no more complete hallucination. Cranley was one of those egotists who do undoubtedly exist, but whose existence, when they are discovered, is a perpetual surprise even to the selfish race of men. In him the instinct of self-preservation (without which the race could not ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang

... to this correspondence. The result was worth while. It bound Seward to his President with hoops of steel. For four long, weary, trying years he served his chief with a loyal devotion which did credit to both men. Thus the hallucination that he was premier was forever dispelled. The "Public Man" wrote: "There can be no doubt of it any longer. This man from Illinois is not in the hands of ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham

... I say of the Tulip bubble, of the Mississippi Scheme, of the Merino Sheep enterprise, of the Down-East Timber lands, of the Morus Multicaulis, of the California fever, and the Cuba hallucination. They are periodical outbreaks of commercial enterprise, unavoidable in the very nature of things, and never long, nor safely postponed; growing out of a plethora—never out of a scarcity—a plethora of wealth and population, and corresponding, in the regularity of their ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various

... not lacking in agreeableness. Through the rosy mists of the Burgundy there began to surge up other faces than that cold pallid little face which had hovered before him all the afternoon like a tantalizing phantom; at the Chartreuse stage he began to wonder what hallucination, what aberration of sense had overcome him, that he should have been stirred to his depths and distressed so hugely. Warmer faces were these that swam before him, faces fuller of the joy of life. The devil take all stuck-up ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... you meant to be called by that name? Nonsense, child—folly—moon-beam hallucination! Child! do you know that this is an unpardonable waste of time? Do you remember that opportunities of improvement are given you to enable you hereafter to secure an honorable independence? This accounts ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz

... if we want anything in those departments connected with engineering,—such as mining, mapping, surveying, etc.,—he will serve us, bedad, for nothing, or next to it. We suspect Major MacBlarney to be a civil engineer suffering under the innocent hallucination that he ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... will not pass the ordeal of comparison; that it is in its hues a perfect chamelion; that consequently it can never do more than lead to the most absurd deductions: that the most ingenious systems, when they have their foundations in hallucination, crumble like dust under the rude band of the assayer; that the most sublimated doctrines, when they lack the substantive quality of rectitude, evaporate under the scrutiny of the sturdy examiner, who tries them in the crucible; that it is not by ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach

... preternatural manifestations of such a kind—I had but that very day, and but an hour or two ago, passed supercilious judgment on what I thought the credulity of ignorant rustics. And yet here I was, the victim to some such hallucination—unless it was possible that I had really seen the figure with my bodily eyes! My knees were shaking under me as I managed to reach my room, my whole being agitated by an unaccountable ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett

... to be busy sawing trees. Some declare that his energy is due to an hallucination that they are German generals. Others say the whole story is a clumsy attempt to discredit ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various

... the evening paper. It was all about Charles-Norton Sims, the paper, though it did not mention him by name, but variously, according to the temperaments of its correspondents, as a condor, an ichthyosaurus, the moon, an aeroplane, a Japanese fleet, a myth, a cloud, a hallucination, a balloon, and a goose. As she read, she alternately frowned and laughed. Her brows would draw together very seriously, and then suddenly her red lips would part to let through a sparkling rocket of laughter, and then her brows would again knit in ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper

... you commences that great hallucination, which all must prove, but which fortunately can never be repeated, and which, in mockery, we call first love. The physical frame has its infantile disorders; the cough which it must not escape, the burning skin which it must encounter. The heart has also its childish and cradle ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli

... principles are such liberties taken with our authorities? What is the criterion by which it is decided that Christ said, 'I am a king,' but not 'My kingdom is not of this world'? Why must the resurrection have been only a subjective hallucination in the minds of the disciples? To these questions there is a plain answer. The non-intervention of God in history is an axiom with the Modernists. 'L'historien,' says M. Loisy, 'n'a pas a s'inspirer de l'agnosticisme pour ecarter Dieu de l'histoire; ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... had been projected and partly built by a syndicate of Denver capitalists, who were under the hallucination, then prevalent, that any railroad penetrating the mountains in any direction, and having Denver for its starting point, must necessarily become at once a dividend-paying carrier for the mines, actual or ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde

... deeper than the conscious mind's ideals, whether of beauty or goodness. Not to something above but to something beyond are we chained, for all that we forget our fetters, or by some queer trick of self-hallucination turn them into golden crowns. But perhaps the finer task of our humanity is to turn our eyes calmly into 'the dark backward and abysm' not of time, but of the eternal present ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry

... things, M. Taine goes all wrong. According to him, these portraits of persons who have lost their wits, "however amusing they may seem at first sight," are "horrible." They could only have been painted by "an imagination such as that of Dickens, excessive, disordered, and capable of hallucination." He seems to be not far from thinking that only our splenetic and melancholy race could have given birth to such literary monsters. To speak like this, as I conceive, shows a singular misconception of the instinct or set purpose that led Dickens to introduce ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials

... and got the thing, not until he touched it quite persuaded he was not the victim of an optical hallucination. ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph

... would never have suggested the legend and attributes of the god; but when the figure of the god was once imaginatively conceived, and his name and aspect fixed in the imagination, it would be easy to recognize him in any hallucination, or to interpret any event as due to his power. These manifestations, which constitute the evidence of his actual existence, can be regarded as manifestations of him, rather than of a vague, unknown ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana

... to ease the intolerable strain. Scott's anxiety concerning his debt gradually gave way to an hallucination that it had all been paid. His friends took advantage of the quietude which followed to induce him to make the journey to Italy, in the fear that the severe winter of Scotland would prove fatal. A ship of His Majesty's fleet was put ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott

... I always see myself nowadays? It is a sort of hallucination. I see a girl at the foot of a precipice. She has had a fall, and she is sitting up, feeling all her limbs. And, to her great astonishment, there is no ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... person who had witnessed the apparition, or, more properly, whose excited state had been the means of raising it, had only to return into the apartment, and tell his young friend under what a striking hallucination he ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott

... visions, and sexual connection plays an important part in his teaching and prophesies. The apostle St. Paul was also a visionary who passed suddenly from one extreme to another as the result of hallucination. Pascal, Napoleon, and Rousseau ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... I often thought, would I have done it, had it been leaping into the infernal Fire. Thus, in spite of all Motive-grinders, and Mechanical Profit-and-Loss Philosophies, with the sick ophthalmia and hallucination they had brought on, was the Infinite nature of Duty still dimly present to me: living without God in the world, of God's light I was not utterly bereft; if my as yet sealed eyes, with their unspeakable longing, could nowhere ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... long arm and knocked up the barrel of the rifle. In the same instant the Hunter's finger had closed on the trigger. The report rang out, shattering the night; the bullet whined away high over the treetops, and the great bull, springing at one bound far back into the thickets, vanished like an hallucination. ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts

... represented, that he had actually had a conversation with the dead Marteville, and had learned from him the whereabouts of the missing receipt. In the form his dissociation took he could no more escape such a hallucination than can the twentieth-century medium avoid the belief that he is a veritable intermediary between the visible and the ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce

... his enthusiasm of the summer had vanished, he felt a prodigious mortification in reflecting that Adele had been so closely the witness of his short-lived hallucination. It humiliated him bitterly to think that all his religious zeal had proved in her regard but the empty crackling of a fire of thorns. No matter what may be a youth's sentiment for girlhood, he never likes it to be witness ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various

... not be quite sure as to your entire sanity till you have had a long sleep. You have seemed a little out of your head on some points ever since our extended acquaintance began. You have appeared impressed or oppressed with the hallucination that this day—is it ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe

... state of the case never made its appeal to her. She was too much of a romantic, living, as many women do, in a cloudland of hallucination, until a lightning circumstance tears its rent in the vaporous fabric and experience thunders in their ears. Had she consented to the reasoning that she had but left the plying of one trade in exchange for another; had she admitted the fact that she had but abandoned one ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston

... the same plaintive tone and beseeching accent. Charlotte knows only too well what the wind wishes to tell her. It is a story of a ship rolling on the broad ocean, without sails or rudder—of a maddened crowd on the deck, of cries and shrieks, curses and prayers. Her hallucination is so strong that she even hears from the ship a beseeching cry of "Mamma!" She starts to her feet; she bears it again. To escape it, she walks about the room, opens the door and looks down the corridor. ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet

... perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, habits, moral dispositions, and natural impulses, without any remarkable disorder or defect of the intellect, or knowing and reasoning faculties, and particularly without any insane illusion or hallucination. It is often difficult to distinguish this form of mania from the moral depravity which we associate ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson

... looked in to have seen Burley hard-beset "by the coinage of his heat-oppressed brain," who would have asked whether he was a handsome man or not? It would be enough to see a man haunted by a spirit, under the strong and entire dominion of a wilful hallucination. So the integrity and vehemence of Dr. Chalmers's manner, the determined way in which he gives himself up to his subject, or lays about him and buffets sceptics and gainsayers, arrests attention in spite of every other circumstance, and fixes it on that, and that alone, which excites such interest ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt

... said Georgie, "I begin to think it's all a hallucination, and that there really isn't any Kate Ferris. It's strange, of course, but not any stranger than some of those cases you ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster

... paradise," where he heard "unspeakable words, which it is not possible for a man to utter," and the throne of God, with all the seraphim and cherubim, archangels and angels, became visible and their conversation intelligible to the enraptured and transported mystic, in a fit of hallucination, when the bewildered imagination sees objectively its own subjective phantasma, and hears from without, in supposed articulate sounds, its own silent thoughts. It requires no great stretch of the imagination to form a correct idea of the mystic eccentricities to which ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various

... hundreds of times, had Roger Lygon seen in his sleep—had even seen awake so did hallucination possess him—the new cattle trail he had fired for scores of miles. The fire had destroyed the grass over millions of acres, two houses had been burned and three people had lost their lives; all to satisfy the savage desire of one man, to destroy the chance of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... fell dead at the yard gate, the laird won the length of the house and fell there on the threshold. To the son that raised him he gave the bag of money. "Hae," said he. All the way up the thieves had seemed to him to be at his heels, but now the hallucination left him—he saw them again in the place of the ambuscade—and the thirst of vengeance seized on his dying mind. Raising himself and pointing with an imperious finger into the black night from which he had come, he uttered the single command, "Brocken Dykes," and fainted. He had ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... had been called in as experts on weather balloons, read this report. They said, "Definitely not a balloon." Dr. Hynek said, "No astronomical explanation." It wasn't another airplane and it wasn't a hallucination. ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt

... before their eyes of sumptuous entertainments, rich meats, and delicious wines. Captain Grey, who was then walking for his life, at a Barclay pace, with a very empty stomach, was probably labouring under a similar hallucination with respect to the country over which he passed; beholding flowery meads and fertile vales in districts which we fear would prove little attractive to a settler. He beheld fine flowing rivers and sheltered bays, which have ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor

... her from the buggy; her hands were on his shoulders; for a little delirious minute she was in his arms; he could not keep his hands from closing about her sweet body lingeringly as he lifted her; her eyes were looking into his, her face was coming down close to his; he had a wild fleeting hallucination ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young

... I set-to and sealed all the doors, except the main entrance, with tape and wax; for if the doors were really opened, I was going to be sure of the fact. I was going to run no risk of being deceived by ghostly hallucination, ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson

... it. The man had protested his sanity, but Deering had heard somewhere that a confident belief in their mental soundness is a common hallucination of lunatics. Still, the stranger's steady gray eyes did not encourage the suspicion that he was mad. Deering's own reason, already severely taxed, was unequal to the task of dealing with this assured and cheerful Hood, who looked like ...
— The Madness of May • Meredith Nicholson

... note from the popular point of view. Like Hoffmann, Chamisso takes his reader into the midst of current life, but, unlike Hoffmann, his moods are not the dissolving views which leave the reader in doubt as to whether the whole is a phantasmagoria and a hallucination. Schlemihl is genuinely and consistently realistic. It is a story in the first person and has a rigidly logical arrangement of episodes leading up to its climax. It does ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various

... scraps of political oratory, the few small voices that chance has selected out of a thousand million utterances to speak to later days, the most striking thing of all this web of wisdom and error is surely that hallucination of security. To men living in our present world state, orderly, scientific and secured, nothing seems so precarious, so giddily dangerous, as the fabric of the social order with which the men of the opening of the twentieth century were content. To us it seems that every institution ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells

... A hallucination is a deception of any of the five senses, in which there is no starting point but it is fabricated in a disordered mind. Illustrations of hallucinations are the hearing of voices when none are present, smelling of odors, the seeing of visions ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... when thought ceases, to our consciousness, to proceed from ourselves. It differs from dreaming, because the subject is awake. It differs from hallucination, because there is no organic disturbance: it is, or claims to be, a temporary enhancement, not a partial disintegration, of the mental faculties. Lastly, it differs from poetical inspiration, because the imagination ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... An eminent alienist of Chicago states that he has had a number of patients among neurotic children whose emotional natures have been so over-wrought by the crude appeal to which they had been so constantly subjected in the theaters, that they have become victims of hallucination and mental disorder. The statement of this physician may be the first note of alarm which will awaken the city to its duty in regard to the theater, so that it shall at least be made safe and sane for the city child whose senses are already so ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams

... that calmness which belongs to the earth, and resembles all plains; but at night, a sort of visionary mist rises from it, and if any traveler walk about it, and listen and dream, like Virgil on the mournful plain of Philippi, the hallucination of the catastrophe seizes upon him. The frightful June 18th lives again, the false monumental hill is leveled, the wondrous lion is dissipated, the battle-field resumes its reality, lines of infantry undulate on the plain; furious galloping crosses ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various

... sentiment, vaster than that of any other statesman we ever had. For the fifteen years up till about 1906, he seemed like the greatest man ever born a citizen of Canada. Before that period he was a romance. After it he was a national hallucination. The last three years of his life ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino

... a possible explanation. Finding none, he smiled at his own fancy, and then proceeded with his reading. But, again, the bell tolled, and he wondered whether anything he had eaten at dinner could be held responsible for the hallucination. Scarcely had he resumed his reading when the bell again tolled. He could stand it no longer, and must come upon the solution of the mystery. Bells do not toll at nine o'clock, and the weirdness of the affair disconcerted him. The nearer he drew to the foot of ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson

... inquiry," but rather the personal, present limitations of the senses of the average, and even of the scientific man. To undertake the explanation of that which at the outset would be rejected as a physical impossibility, the outcome of hallucination, is unwise and even harmful, because premature. It is in consequence of such difficulties that the psychic production of physical phenomena—save in exceptional cases—is ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... grades, as they advance from the normal and familiar to the undeniably startling. At the same time an account of the current theories of Apparitions is offered, in language as free from technicalities as possible. According to modern opinion every "ghost" is a "hallucination," a false perception, the perception of something ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang

... which has lured more than one white woman out into the golden wilderness to the wrecking of her soul; and which has nothing whatever to do with the pseudo-psychic waves which trick us into such pitiable hysteria and hallucination. ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest

... authorities, the Senator proceeded to say: "A grave hallucination in this day is to claim all power; and a minor error is that every thing which passion, or interest, or party power, or any selfish claims may represent to the judgment or imagination of gentlemen who belong ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes

... The Thorwaldsen Gallery of Copenhagen had ever dazzled his imagination. Bond Street was not Paris, certainly, but in the greatest metropolis of the world his memory would be for ever perpetuated. Turning to the dithyrambic utterances of the London Press at the time we can hardly wonder at the hallucination. ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... invaded the country he thought Hungary was lost. His despair darkened his mind and he sought death in the waves of the Danube. His family removed him to a private asylum near Vienna, where he recovered his mental faculties, and even wrote several books. But he was never entirely cured of his hallucination, and, exasperated by the vexations he was subjected to by the Viennese Government, even in the asylum, the great patriot put an end to his own life on April ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne

... towards you. But my errand is urgent, and I could not allow your neighbours or your household to disturb the few minutes' conversation which I am obliged to have with you. My friend Paul Mole," he went on, after a slight pause, "is in grave danger of his life owing to a hallucination on the part of our mutual friend citizen Chauvelin; and I feel confident that you yourself are too deeply enamoured of your own neck to risk it wilfully by sending an innocent and honest patriot to ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy

... life. This is the power in which Shakespeare is supreme; which Richardson proved himself, in his most powerful passages, to possess in no small degree; and which in Balzac seems to have generated fits of absolute hallucination. ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... insomnia (sleeplessness), mental depression, then active delirium with great restlessness, talking, muttering, hallucination of sight and hearing. He thinks he sees objects in the room such as rats, mice, or snakes, and fancies that they are crawling over his body, has them in his boots, etc. The terror inspired by these imaginary objects is great, and has given the popular name of "horrors" or "snakes" to the ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... lantern is so small and weak that I dare not trust myself very far. I shall do the thing more systematically. I have heard no sound at all, and could almost believe that I had been the victim of some hallucination suggested, perhaps, by Armitage's conversation. Of course, the whole idea is absurd, and yet I must confess that those bushes at the entrance of the cave do present an appearance as if some heavy creature had forced its ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle

... there is a department of medicine which deals with nervous diseases, such as insanity, double personality, severe nervous shock, hallucination, etc. This entire aspect of medicine is wholly psychological. But psychology can be of service to the general practitioner both in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. A thorough psychological knowledge of human nature will assist a physician in diagnosis. Often the best ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle

... not unjustly termed a monomaniac. Within the circle of his vitiated appetite he proves himself irrational. He becomes the puppet of passions which the sane man cannot so much as picture to his fancy, the victim of desire, ever recurring and ever destined to remain unsatisfied; nor is any hallucination more akin to lunacy than the mirage of a joy that leaves the soul thirstier than it was before, the paroxysm of unnatural pleasure which wearies the nerves that crave ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds

... what a fool, what a villain I was to think Mr. Levi was as great a man as you! I must have been under a hallucination." ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade

... nothing of it if Lady Mason had been seen there every day for a week together, and regarded Mrs. Furnival's suspicions as an hallucination bordering on insanity. A woman be in love with Mr. Furnival! A very pretty woman endeavour to entice away from his wife the affection of such a man as that! As these ideas passed through Mrs. Orme's mind she did not perhaps remember ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope

... minister, and two criminals, are condemned to be hanged on the same day. The writer shows them to us tortured by the most horrible anguish, that which immediately precedes death. The word "madness" appears on every page: mystical madness of hallucination that hears music and voices, such is that of the young revolutionary Moussya; then there is the brutal madness of her comrades Kashirine and Golovine, who are ready to scream with terror; the madness of the victims, the ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky

... hope breathes again, and she smiles like one who thinks he is going to hear that he will not die, but as the old pain returns when the last portion of the deceptive sentence is spoken, so despair came back to her when remembrance pierced the cloud of hallucination, and told her that all was not a dream—there was something that was ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore

... liable to the same hallucination, though, let us hope, in a more mitigated form? Have we never told a story as if it were our own, not from any wish to deceive, but simply because it seemed shorter and easier to do so than to explain step by step how it reached us? And after doing that once or twice, is there ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller

... product. Her work had a grimness about it, as though psychology was a dire obsession, especially abnormal psychology. One of her theme papers had been an exhaustive, mature but somehow overly determined, treatise on self-induced hallucination and auto-suggestion. He had not been too impressed because of an unjustified emphasis on supernatural myth and legend, including ...
— Strange Alliance • Bryce Walton

... least I felt that she was sincere. Still, I wondered what sort of hallucination Craig had to deal with, as Veda Blair repeated the incoherent ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve

... it is a strange kind of hallucination which has such physical accompaniments and consequences as those in the story—not wanting confirmation from witnesses—which has come ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... expense. He would take so much of the hundred dollars as might be necessary, and place it in the hands of the doctor at Bellevue Hospital to defray the expenses of Jacob's funeral. He would say nothing about it, however, till he had actually found the money. It might be a hallucination of Jacob's, and ...
— Tom, The Bootblack - or, The Road to Success • Horatio Alger

... and glaring upon them, we find it difficult to exaggerate the folly of the chief actors in those scenes of crime. Did not the penniless adventurer, whose keen eyesight and wise recklessness were passing for hallucination and foolhardiness in the eyes of his contemporaries, understand the game he was playing better than did that profound thinker, that mysterious but infallible politician, who sat in the Escorial and made the world tremble at ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... of age, was an immigrant out of Germany after the troubles of the Great War. He had been for a year or more a street pedler on the Bowery, where he sold souvenir buttons and various little trinkets. The old man appears to have been the victim of a harmless hallucination whereby he thought himself a person of Royal distinction and in his fancy converted the box of wares that he carried into Orders of Chivalry and decorations of Knighthood. The effect of this strange fancy was heightened by an ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock

... Newville it was no phantom, no hallucination, but a reality, an exigency, demanding calm reflection, wise judgment, and prompt, decisive action. They had talked it ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin

... expectation with doing common and long- abandoned tasks. They go back to the nets and the boats long since forsaken at the Master's bidding. That is not like fanatics. That is not like people who would be liable to the excesses of excitement that would lead to the 'hallucination,' which is the modern explanation of the resurrection faith, on ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren

... of the hair follicles, I think, and the great hallucination of haste under which we move and try to have a being is seated in the muscles of the diaphragm. Have I not found myself rushing for a hundred places by automobile that I never should have started for at all by hayrick or snow-plough, and thus had saved myself that time wholly? ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp

... have relentless enemies who seek my life. When I first told you of this you did not believe me. You thought I was the victim of an hallucination, else had I been more ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall

... but chiefly in a hallucination that possesses him. He thinks that he is still the master of Lone as well as the Duke of Hereward. He thinks that he lives in London, and in the most Objectionable part of London, only to gratify my 'eccentric whim' of being a journalist. And he daily and hourly urges me to ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth



Words linked to "Hallucination" :   visual hallucination, acousma, hallucinate, disorientation, trip, auditory hallucination, misconception, object, freak out, psychotic belief, delusion, pseudohallucination



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