3 Answers

  1. For some reason, the question was addressed to me, I will try to answer it to the best of my understanding. Criticism from more knowledgeable colleagues, such as practicing psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, psychotherapists, neurophysiologists, and other competent individuals, would be welcome.�

    So, before going directly to the answer itself, I would like to highlight three facts from which the answer will follow.
    1) We build our own subjective (!) a picture of the world based on the work of body analyzers (in addition to experience, attitudes, ideas, expectations, etc.), which are processed by the brain into a complete picture, which can be, among other things, emotionally colored.
    2) Consciousness often seeks to explain what is happening on the basis of experience and feels uncomfortable in the presence of incomplete, unexplained phenomena.
    3) Hallucinations are rarely a sign of a well-functioning, rested, and clear mind. Much more often they are manifested in overwork, chemical effects on the brain, with disorders of the nervous system and quite serious mental disorders.�

    What follows from these three facts? Let's take a simple example, such as that celebrated in the legends of the hippie era, the psychedelic revolution, and the rise of psychopharmacology. Any psychonaut knows for sure that his “journey” will depend on both his internal state and the effects of the external environment. That is, if he morally knows what he is doing, that he is safe and what awaits him – he will go on an amazing flight through the beautiful higher worlds and will communicate there with wonderful elves or touch gentle radio waves. If the same amount of psychoactive substance is taken by a person who is worried about something, upset about something, anxious or not knowing what will happen to him, or abandoned in this state in an unusual environment – all his experiences will be accurately and strenuously reproduced in full growth in consciousness. Thus, here we see a consciousness placed in unusual conditions, trying to build a picture of what is happening on the basis of its distorted sensations and explain them through a certain image.

    Also, for example, some patients in neurological or psychiatric departments may complain that they have some insects crawling under their skin and are terribly annoyed by this. Let's return to the above three facts. The person experiences persistent itching. He can't find a reason for it. Somewhere out of the corner of his ear, he has heard about scabies mites or watched a program about African parasites, and a caring mind gives him the crazy idea that this is exactly the reason for the itch that he was looking for. Normally, such a thought will go back to where it came from. However, if a person is systematically overworked, has high anxiety, is a heavy drinker, works in harmful industries, or God knows what else – they will say: “Yes. It is rare African parasites that crawl under my skin and I urgently need to tell the doctor about it. ” And if he had a dormant mental disorder, then he will not go to the doc, thinking that he was infected with an infection-his mother-in-law, who always hated him.

    Jokes are jokes, but the mind always tries to find the reason and a complete image of what it can not solve for itself. And it can do this in the form of both bodily sensations, and explanations of these very sensations, and voices, and even external elaborated images. And since this most often occurs against the background of a weakened or sick body, the image is likely to be, if not frightening, then at least alarming.

  2. Hallucinations are an interesting phenomenon. Most often, you do not feel the moment of transition, and, far from always, visions are scary, it is the feeling that you see a subjective reality that scares you.

  3. And really, why? What makes you think that most often it is scary? A completely different conversation is that hallucinations are scary for a person who is not used to them, regardless of the content. Over the course of our lives, we get used to always perceive the world in the same way, because most often we are in the same conditions. Any failures are unusual for us, it is alien to us, we do not understand what is happening to us. What we see does not fit in with the usual picture of the world, feelings are knocked out of bounds, we are allegorically transported to a strange city without shoes and without a penny in our pocket, we do not know what to do in such situations, we do not have conscious or subconscious attitudes to what is happening, so we are just afraid and wait for it to finally end

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