10 Reasons You Might Be Hallucinating

Ever feel like you're hallucinating and not sure why? You're not crazy, but you might be experiencing one of these 10 reasons that cause hallucinations! Join Hank for a fascinating new episode of SciShow!
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[alecrisser]

If you lie in bed and look at the ceiling of a totally dark room, after a while you'll see natural visual hallucinations due to sensory deprivation. It looks like big color and shape changing blobs, at least for me. As I understand if you fear figures, you may happen to see them especially when experiencing sleep paralysis at night. You can also see faces in trees or darkness as your brain attempts to make recognizable patterns out of shapes in the darkness. I'd imagine it would be quite scary to wake up at night experiencing sleep paralysis and see a face or figure lurking in the darkness, I suppose you could call that a form of hallucination.

[Mr.Cheeseburger]

I've luckily never hallucinated.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go feed my 20m tall Dragon

[Liutgard]

Surprised you didn't mention the hallucinations you can get from sleep deprivation. Grad school did that for me- I got to the point where I was constantly seeing things out of the corner of my eyes- and the world a bit wobbly. Years later now, I am struggling with sleep disorders, and sometimes go three days without sleeping. I'm about ready to buy myself a set of blinders, to see if that will help...

[starwookie]

Going by what you said, I believe the most common hallucination is the feeling of itching or bugs crawling on you. Anyone that has a fear of bugs or spiders as i do, knows the feeling they get when watching bugs or spiders on tv or YouTube. When watching YouTube videos about spiders i sometimes feel like something is crawling on me.

I know i am not the only one....

[abdullahkhan-elbx]

I hear my name sometimes even when I am alone

[LucysCorsetry]

8:10 Hallucinations of eyes and teeth = Cheshire Cat.

[ladyamaranth]

Sleep paralysis is the most terrifying thing in the world, people.

[johnschwalb]

sleep paralysisis horrible and terrifying being frozen looking around you seeing figures. I've had them yelling screaming at me it is scary. 

[micheletravis]

One pill makes larger, and one pill makes you small, and the ones that mother gives you, don't do anything at all.  Go ask Alice, when she's ten feet tall.

[forcelightningcable]

I’ve asked myself this question numerous times throughout my life.
The answer was usually acid.

[penisholder]

"but overactivity in this part of the brain can cause a person to hallucinate and start seeing faces"

All around me are familiar faces, worn out places, worn out faces..

[joewell]

Didn't mention how amputees get Phantom Pain. My dad who is a below the knee amputee often has the sensation of a stubed toe or cramps.

[danielhale]

Slightly related: When I dream, faces are usually missing.  I recognize people if they're ones I know, but there's no face present and I'm not focused on anyone's face during the dream (it doesn't seem weird at the time, and I don't look at the face to read emotion or recognize people).  I typically only notice that faces are not there as I'm waking up or the dream becomes lucid, and I try to analyze it visually or remember some image.

This also often happens when I try to imagine people/scenarios/fantasies while fully conscious -- it's very hard for me to imagine a face and hold the image clearly in my mind, and that's when I'm trying (if I don't try, the face is rarely part of the scene and it just feels natural that way).  I wonder if that's at all related to some of the stuff near the end of this video.  I once asked some of my fellow programmer nerds and they seemed to have something similar going on to varying degrees, so it might not be all that rare.  I recognize people visually in real life just fine, but I struggle to visualize even my mother's or father's faces in my head (and often can't).

I'm not entirely sure, but I'm pretty certain I can read in some of my dreams as well, whether it's normal sentences, numbers, or sometimes even computer code (I was always told reading in dreams is impossible).

SciShow: shed some light on this!

[valzugg]

"Take care of your brain so that it an take care of you" Wait.. so what am "I" then?

[Epicrwh]

I once had serotonin syndrome which caused a seizure, in the hospital they gave me adavan. I had several hallucinations like the walls boiling up into bubbles but what was so weird was how real they looked and felt. Whenever I would collide my eyes I did not fall asleep but I would hallucinate me in the same spot pulling out my phone and looking at it only to open my eyes to realize I had not done that at all. Also every once in a while I would hear voices or sounds that were not there. It was so incredibly weird.

[victorconway]

"If you've been under severe stress and hear someone telling you what to do only to find out no one's there"

Yep, I've definitely hallucinated once.

[tyvonable]

sometimes i hear somebody calling my name while nobody is home, or if somebody is home it is not them.

[RukiahTaicho]

When my first dog passed away, for the first few days after she passed, I could hear paws and claws pattering around the house sometimes, and we didn't have any other pet. It was weird, but oddly comforting.

[vixendais]

Sometimes when i yawn, i can taste different foods. It happens whether I'm hungry or not, near food or far from it. Some times i taste candies like lollipops or chocolate, or sometimes i taste meals that i haven't had in a while like meatloaf or chicken wings. It's weird, but my yawns taste good lol

[Someone-euns]

Sometimes, I will be sitting in my room, then I will hear my dad call my name, I'll go to his room and be like "Yeah?" And he says "What?" And I say "You called me didn't you?" And then he says "No." It happens every couple weeks :|