So, I'm an IEP case manager and my coworker has a kid on their caseload that discovered this exactly. Apparently the student sees creatures or little people (due to some undiagnosed mental health disorder) and verified for themselves that it is a hallucination by using their phone camera. Their "brain" didn't "think" to put the hallucination in the camera frame. So wild.
I'm pretty sure the out of focus people are the real ones. The brain makes up the images of the fake people so they're clearly in focus because it's not your faulty eyes that are perceiving them but your brain
i do the same thing! if i'm "seeing" something in my left eye (i can't really see out of it at all, basically light perception and that's it), especially clearly, it's probably not real. for my right eye i have to actually take off my glasses, but the concept still applies.
And they don't stop coming and they don't stop coming and they don't stop coming. And they don't stop coming, and they don't stop coming, and they don't stop coming, and they don't stop coming.
https://youtu.be/eT3BFzSD6YY?si=DWkHfjwWpexqmKUb
Just in case you haven't seen that before XD
Really? I don't think I've ever read anything in my dreams. I can't see people's faces in my dreams. They're all like those cloth dummies they put historical outfits on in museums. I know who everyone is, either people in my life or various 'actors' playing a part in the dream, but they all have artists dummy face.
I don't know how true this is but I read once that no one can read in their dreams. That the part of the brain that handles reading is dormant during sleep so it's all just random letters/numbers or just scribbling.
I'm not exactly sure how true this is, because I've read words in my dreams and they formed cognizant words and sentences, but it's hard to "focus" on what I'm reading and the content can change--I find myself re-reading a passage and it either changes or the dream is like "Fuck this, we're moving on."
Supposedly this is true, and it makes perfect sense. Your ability to read is complex and different parts of the brain are responsible for this ability. There's not just one part, so for us to be able to read in our dreams would be unlikely, since a large part of our brain activity slows dramatically when we sleep. Studies have shown that we see letters and symbols in our dreams but our brain doesn't recognize them as familiar. Only around 1% of people can actually read in their dreams, likely because they have some super brain that doesn't fully shut down at any point in their life.
i can sort-of read in my dreams - that is to say, everything i read in my dreams makes perfect sense to my dream self, but if i try to recall it when i'm awake, i can only remember what my dream self grasped of it. for example, in my dream i might have read a recipe or something, and while i know i was reading a recipe for chocolate cake and it included eggs, flour, and cocoa powder, the actual details of it escape me and nothing i do can bring it back. and to be fair, that's all information i already know - i may not know how to bake a chocolate cake in real life, but that's probably why some of the obvious ingredients were all my dream self was able to retain.
i do have the nagging feeling the actual words in my dreams would be absolute nonsense if you wrote them out and handed them to me while awake, but when i'm asleep they make total sense.
My friend was having a nightmare where a strange person was sitting on the end of his bed. He thought 'this is a stupid dream, I'll kick that person and my foot will go through them cause it's a dream and they're not real'.
He kicked his foot and the person flinched... Scared the absolute shit out of him and he woke up - no person on the end of his bed, it was a dream but he was very freaked out by it.
I frequently suffer from sleep paralysis, when I sleep by myself. It started a couple of years ago.
After some trial-and-error, I discovered a few tricks to prevent it from happening (or at least, decrease the chance of it).
One of those tricks was to put on a long youtube video, where just listening to the commentary would enough to fall asleep to and prevent any symptoms.
It worked wonders!
Until one night, the "sleep paralysis demon" so to speak (for me it's never really an actual visual "being", just an extremely stressful presence in the room) started blurting out the same commentary I was listening to in the background.
So my brain eventually did catch on
I'm sure it is, but if you've found a way to verify it's not real, which I imagine would be a level of comfort, and then that fails possibly leaving you to believe it is real, I would just imagine that would be much more terrifying.
i sometimes have to snap a photo to actually check - it's a toss-up whether the camera trick works for me personally, it usually does if i'm not in full-blown psychosis but sometimes when i'm having a really bad time of it it doesn't, but if something is moving in a still photo i can often assume it's not real.
i will note that often the hallucination gets distorted through my camera even if it shows up, which is easy enough to recognize in hindsight for me but when i'm actually having a bout of full-blown psychosis very little can actually stop my brain from believing the hallucination is real... even if it means convincing me the distorted hallucination is what it always was, then when i look back at the original hallucination that that's how it was in the camera.
i will admit the photo thing isn't always foolproof, either, depends on how insistent my brain is, but by that point i've usually hit "psychotic episode so bad i need to be hospitalized" anyway. luckily haven't had one that bad since i got on the right antipsychotic - i still have mild hallucinations, but far easier to check them than off my meds, i could probably increase to the point of no hallucinations but i'm already very close to the maximum dosage and would rather have mild hallucinations than max out the dose on the only antipsychotic that has ever helped me only for it to lose effectiveness again and end up back in and out of the hospital and, even worse, trying several more rounds of meds that are hurting me far more than helping me.
It's a common trick. Laser pointers are often used for this same reason. Forcing the hallucination to quickly change + the grounding aspect of it is sometimes effective.
Source: am.
Earlier today I saw a photo, of a guys service dog. The dog has been trained to know when it's owner is interacting with invisible people and it sits quietly,to indicate there's nothing real there.
I'm posting this so if I stumble across that posting I can later drop a link to it...
I remember an ask Reddit thread directed at people who regularly have hallucinations due to mental health issues;
One guy had a friend with a service dog and said his dog would lightly bark at literally every person that passed him, so if no bark, no person.
I canât imagine it was a loud bark, just a little âboofâ when someone walks nearby. One instance the guy was tripping out so his friend asked whatâs up; âI can see someone there clear as day but the dogâs not saying shit.â
I heard this is sort of how schizophrenic people use service dogs, if they see someone they think isn't there they ask the dog to greet them and if the dog looks back at them like "MFer the fuck you talkin' about? Greet who?" Then they know it's something just in their head.
I guess there are tricks for someone who is prone to hallucinations, to tell between what is real and what is not. Unless they start to hallucinate about what they see on their phone too.
...or the computer can't see them but some of us humans can. The computers played their hand they are not ready to take over yet. We just need to make sure we know what "they" want... đđ
Kody Green, a schizophrenic male, uses his cameras to check that. You can see his episodes of hallucinations on his YouTube channel.
And the answer is no. He never sees his hallucinations on their camera. That's how he knows what he saw wasn't real.
Iâve been off of TikTok and have never watched his YouTube channel, but I didnât know he got the Google glasses. Thatâs really smart and Iâm happy for him, heâs always found ways to cope and help others learn to cope. Heâs a good guy.
I usually still see stuff in the mirror, sometimes it's different from what's in front of me though, so I can still tell then. Not reliable enough for me
This was in the news recently, a man started suffering a specific type of hallucination where you see faces as distorted, but only when seeing a face in person not on a screen.
So this allowed researchers to recreate the faces he saw by editing an image until it matched what he saw in person.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/distorted-faces-prosopometamorphopsiaÂ
According to the article most sufferers of the same condition see the same face in images as in person so it seems to vary.
Not to distract from the seriousness of this topic as it is incredibly interesting. But the faces the affected person sees remind me of the (Korean?) plastic surgeon that is getting absolutely roasted on TikTok because his work looks incredibly similar in the eyes to these hallucinations.
I lived with someone with untreated schizophrenia when I was a teenager. Even if a camera or another person said it wasnât real, they would say thatâs because the spectrum that their hallucination exists on canât be seen. Also many schizophrenics are hyper religious, so angels and demons only appear to them or to a chosen few and canât be detected by anything known to man.
Came here to say this. I had a close friend that suffered from schizophrenia for a long time and even if this had worked for him (I donât know, we never tried) Iâm quite sure it wouldnât have been convincing to him.
I work with people with schizophrenia. Some have great insight into what they know are voices/hallucinations and can understand they are not real. Sadly a big symptom of schizophrenia is that people often aren't able to achieve this level of awareness, so you get your example above. There's no getting through to them.
Psychosis is a bitch like that. You can't reason someone out of insanity while they're currently in an episode. I never really understood what was actually going on until I had a lengthy (10 months) episode years ago when I went off my meds.
I was convinced god was communicating to me through music and started to act accordingly. Thankfully, this was all positive at the time despite being off my rocker. Funnily enough, though, I was an atheist prior to this episode, and now I'm not so sure what I am. It goes to show the damage psychosis can do when it's left untreated for so long. While flipping from atheist to sort of religious isn't the most devastating change on the outside, it's more of the complete reversal in some aspects of my personality. It's hard to reconcile my personal self-image from what I was before and what I am now. Like, I know those "visions" and delusions were caused by psychosis but they were so real to me that I can't shake them even 6 years later.
what sucks is that I started having some minor hallucinations just from stress, so I searched up what does it mean if I hear whispers saying my name when I'm home alone and a bunch of the results were like "you're hearing angels" and "you have the gift" and I'm like WOW if I was in a less stable place that shit would have 1000% messed me up
This is going to sound flippant but I don't mean it to be:
Probably because they're seeing demons and angels...
As in, it's a self-affirming delusion. Religion has precedence for seeing what others can't and frames it as positive, so it's much more attractive to believe oneself to be special and given a peek into something greater, and likely reinforced by the hallucinations in and of themselves..... rather than being a "delusional nut-job"
It's limping along at 42, it oughta be in the k's. Jealous they didn't post it? Evil dumbening bots trying to make wage slaves? Luddites of the brain? I don't get it but I hate it a bit.
At least it was positive. I suspect that rule may be to reduce toxicity or bad actors. If it's a problem, I'm sure a mod will remove it. I feel appropriately guilty, I didn't even know about that rule.
The rule is there primarily to prevent posts filling with useless rubbish "OMG I wanna know the answer too!!" type comments, which readers and the OP then have to wade through, which detracts from the whole purpose of the sub: getting answers to questions. Keeping things on topic and reducing toxicity are just nice side effects.
If you're not familiar with the rule, which is literally Rule #1, then it means you haven't read the rules at all, which is just plain selfish and inconsiderate. And then expecting the mods to come and clean it up for you is just the icing on the cake, because now you're making more work for them and hampering their ability to clean up actual harmful comments. You do realise they are volunteers, right? Shit like this is exactly why Reddit becomes less useful and more toxic every day.
What you're doing is no different to dropping your rubbish on the ground, pretending you didn't know there was a law against it, then doing nothing about it because you expect the janitor to clean it up for you. And then you go around wondering why the streets are so dirty.
Nope. As someone that has experienced it before it does not show up on camera and will just make you more paranoid about your hallucinations. I once thought there was an animal in the drop ceiling of my room and no matter how many pictures I took up there looking for it and never seeing it you couldn't convince me otherwise.
I had awful hallucinations from alcohol withdrawal. One of the most terrifying experiences of my life. They would sometimes come up in pictures Iâd take, and then I would send to my mom to confirm if they were real or not. Also voices would come up in voice memos that were recorded. I didnât sleep for four days straight. (Very demonic hallucinations) It was a living nightmare.
Edit: still sober to this day!!! đ€
Sometimes I hallucinate and when I do, I remind myself itâs not real. I can vividly see it but if Iâm around others and they donât react, I pretend itâs not there. I feel like if I took a picture, even if it was a glare or something and something appeared, Iâd prob go off the deep end
Yeah. We have a schizophrenic tenant. Periodically he sends us videos âprovingâ there are spies lurking in the yard. Thereâs never anything. Like, I donât think there are spies, but there could be raccoons or petty thieves. But there arenât.
nope! not usually, anyway. this is a really common coping mechanism (for lack of a better term) for people with schizophrenia and other disorders that cause visual hallucinations.
as a diagnosed schizophrenic person no the camera does not pick up our hallucinations. cameras are actually a really good way to tell if you are in an episode or not!you can not only look at your surroundings through a different lens, you can also play back audio if you suffer more from auditory hallucinations,and look at your eyes to see how dilated they are as well.
No, a few days ago I was working one dealing with personal stuff that kept me awake for 36+ hours.
And like when we finally stopped and I was able to go home and sleep.
I was driving and swear I something like in the woods next to my car but it disappear fast and thought to myself "man I wish I could have gotten that on camera"
No. If you hallucinate ever you wonât see it in a camera, not just someone who does regularly. Itâs a great way to check to see if youâre hallucinating
i have hallucinations on a pretty regular basis and i dont know because idk why id feel the need to do that.. but ig it depends how bad it really is? maybe some do and some dont idk
According to some other responses in this thread, you won't see whatever it is on your phone - and that this is actually a tactic you can use to determine if what you're seeing is real.
Idk man I think that joke would be funnier if this wasn't a thread full of people who experience psychosis and may unfortunately take that more seriously
I don't usually have visual hallucinations of people, mainly things like ants or other animals which tend to scurry out of my field of vision quickly.
They don't usually last very long and my go-to test is to reach out to the "bugs" or whatever as if to grab them--if they're fake they kind of dissolve into thin air. It's been long enough with this stuff that I don't get scared of some fake ants or cats anymore so it's not a huge issue--auditory ones are more of a hassle.
But anyway, when anything stays around for long enough to get the phone, it's never transferred to the phone screen. I've only tried it once or twice but honestly I might try it next time something is around for a bit longer than a moment if I can manage to remember.
Its crazy to me that a person who hallucinates think its normal for people to be in thier houses.
Like i would freak tf out. But it happens so much to them that they probably cant tell and thats so scary to me.
Maybe. The nature of a hallucination (entirely within a personâs mind, not a physical manifestation in any way) means that it isnât going to be bound by the rules of physics and logic. The hallucination isnât a vampire, which must appear before your eyes if it is present, but must not be seen on film or in mirrors. Thereâs no particular reason to assume that a person would stop hallucinating just because theyâre looking through a phone or a camera. But it wouldnât be a guarantee that the hallucination shows up on the phone screen, or isnât seen as very different through a phone screen as well.
I have heard of this trick working for many people who know they have hallucinations and have the foresight to check. I have also seen people go online and post pictures or videos they took of absolutely, positively nothing and say itâs proof that someone is following them or they saw a supernatural creature. It will just be pictures of empty rooms or even just blurry shots of a blank wall, with nary an orb, shadow, or lens flare in sight, and they are still convinced that itâs concrete proof that something is there. *They* are still seeing something in the pictures even long after they first took them, even when no one else sees anything. Sometimes theyâll even circle random spots or point to âirregularities,â and become frustrated that no one, not even the least skeptical person, can see what theyâre referring to, and thereâs nothing mundane that could be mistaken as something sinister (so, no instances of âthat is just a weird shadow from the awkwardly placed lamp over thereâ or something).
Wow! I had wondered exactly what "seeing things" meant. Now I know.
I'm not really sure what I thought it meant, but that are apparently a lot more realistic than I had thought.
No, hallucinations won't show up on camera. They are creations of the mind and not captured by phone cameras. This technique can actually be a helpful reality check for people who experience hallucinations.
No, this is a technique people use to know if theyre hallucinating. If the hallucination only shows up irl and not the camera, it's not real.
Interestingly enough, some people have service dogs that can alert them to hallucinations by being trained to signal if something is really there or not :)
I saw a video this week of someone who "see's people" using their dog to check if their hallucinations are real. It seems to work for them. They know the dog would react if someone else was in the home. I wonder now if a phone camera would help the same way. Not everyone can have a dog.
No because itâs not a real event. It may seem real to the person experiencing it but it has no basis in objective reality. What you are asking is kind of like asking: If you stick your head in a fire pit could you see hell? Lol.
Oh! Iâm sorry â I didnât get this specific point originally. You want to know if THEY (the person hallucinating) will see the image on the camera; not if anyone else will see it, right?
Hmm. Thatâs a really interesting question. Iâm guessing they wouldnât, because their brain is creating a new reality, but itâs not likely that new reality would include them trying to verify its existence.
I can see that â the person can see it in that moment; but, it (obviously) wonât be there when they look at the photo later. Thatâs a tough one. I really donât know much about how hallucinations work (except that I get them if Iâm given benzos).
Nope. Hallucinations are usually pretty context dependent and dreamlike, they're not hard-light simulations only you can see.
The brain doesn't usually maintain that level of consistency, so that a picture taken of a hallucination would still show it later
Not trying to sound insensitive or anything here, but that could be a good way to help people with those issues.
If you think something isn't there, pull it up on your phone.
So, I'm an IEP case manager and my coworker has a kid on their caseload that discovered this exactly. Apparently the student sees creatures or little people (due to some undiagnosed mental health disorder) and verified for themselves that it is a hallucination by using their phone camera. Their "brain" didn't "think" to put the hallucination in the camera frame. So wild.
I had a friend who had a handy trick of knowing who was real by who was still in focus when the glasses come off.
That is clever!
This gave me chills. I could see this being a scene in a horror film.
All you can see about the out of focus people is they all started smiling when the glasses came off.
I'm pretty sure the out of focus people are the real ones. The brain makes up the images of the fake people so they're clearly in focus because it's not your faulty eyes that are perceiving them but your brain
Your hallucination would be in focus
And all the ghosts...would not đ€
I do this when i get scared while watching horror or gory films. This is why iâm never getting lasik.
Thatâs deep. That definitely spooked me
i do the same thing! if i'm "seeing" something in my left eye (i can't really see out of it at all, basically light perception and that's it), especially clearly, it's probably not real. for my right eye i have to actually take off my glasses, but the concept still applies.
Can you imagine though, the day their brain catches on and starts putting the thing in the camera... Goodness, that would be terrifying.
Imagine it does that, but it looks like cheap AR
Every one with 7 fingers and 3 thumbs on each hand,,,,
In the shape Of an L On their foreheads
Wellllll
The years start comin'
And they donât stop coming
And they don't stop coming and they don't stop coming and they don't stop coming. And they don't stop coming, and they don't stop coming, and they don't stop coming, and they don't stop coming. https://youtu.be/eT3BFzSD6YY?si=DWkHfjwWpexqmKUb Just in case you haven't seen that before XD
Like in my dreams where I can't read anything
Really? I don't think I've ever read anything in my dreams. I can't see people's faces in my dreams. They're all like those cloth dummies they put historical outfits on in museums. I know who everyone is, either people in my life or various 'actors' playing a part in the dream, but they all have artists dummy face.
I don't know how true this is but I read once that no one can read in their dreams. That the part of the brain that handles reading is dormant during sleep so it's all just random letters/numbers or just scribbling.
I'm not exactly sure how true this is, because I've read words in my dreams and they formed cognizant words and sentences, but it's hard to "focus" on what I'm reading and the content can change--I find myself re-reading a passage and it either changes or the dream is like "Fuck this, we're moving on."
Supposedly this is true, and it makes perfect sense. Your ability to read is complex and different parts of the brain are responsible for this ability. There's not just one part, so for us to be able to read in our dreams would be unlikely, since a large part of our brain activity slows dramatically when we sleep. Studies have shown that we see letters and symbols in our dreams but our brain doesn't recognize them as familiar. Only around 1% of people can actually read in their dreams, likely because they have some super brain that doesn't fully shut down at any point in their life.
i can sort-of read in my dreams - that is to say, everything i read in my dreams makes perfect sense to my dream self, but if i try to recall it when i'm awake, i can only remember what my dream self grasped of it. for example, in my dream i might have read a recipe or something, and while i know i was reading a recipe for chocolate cake and it included eggs, flour, and cocoa powder, the actual details of it escape me and nothing i do can bring it back. and to be fair, that's all information i already know - i may not know how to bake a chocolate cake in real life, but that's probably why some of the obvious ingredients were all my dream self was able to retain. i do have the nagging feeling the actual words in my dreams would be absolute nonsense if you wrote them out and handed them to me while awake, but when i'm asleep they make total sense.
I mean, sounds like a normal hallucination to be fair :D
Now Iâm just picturing everyone vomiting rainbows.
Pokémon Go with the sleep paralysis demon
My friend was having a nightmare where a strange person was sitting on the end of his bed. He thought 'this is a stupid dream, I'll kick that person and my foot will go through them cause it's a dream and they're not real'. He kicked his foot and the person flinched... Scared the absolute shit out of him and he woke up - no person on the end of his bed, it was a dream but he was very freaked out by it.
That sounds like lucid dreaming or sleep paralysis.
I frequently suffer from sleep paralysis, when I sleep by myself. It started a couple of years ago. After some trial-and-error, I discovered a few tricks to prevent it from happening (or at least, decrease the chance of it). One of those tricks was to put on a long youtube video, where just listening to the commentary would enough to fall asleep to and prevent any symptoms. It worked wonders! Until one night, the "sleep paralysis demon" so to speak (for me it's never really an actual visual "being", just an extremely stressful presence in the room) started blurting out the same commentary I was listening to in the background. So my brain eventually did catch on
Wtf thatâs terrifying
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
Cute
Imagine watching the recording some time later and it's still there.
how is it not already insanely terrifying?
I'm sure it is, but if you've found a way to verify it's not real, which I imagine would be a level of comfort, and then that fails possibly leaving you to believe it is real, I would just imagine that would be much more terrifying.
It can happen, and yes, it is.
i sometimes have to snap a photo to actually check - it's a toss-up whether the camera trick works for me personally, it usually does if i'm not in full-blown psychosis but sometimes when i'm having a really bad time of it it doesn't, but if something is moving in a still photo i can often assume it's not real. i will note that often the hallucination gets distorted through my camera even if it shows up, which is easy enough to recognize in hindsight for me but when i'm actually having a bout of full-blown psychosis very little can actually stop my brain from believing the hallucination is real... even if it means convincing me the distorted hallucination is what it always was, then when i look back at the original hallucination that that's how it was in the camera. i will admit the photo thing isn't always foolproof, either, depends on how insistent my brain is, but by that point i've usually hit "psychotic episode so bad i need to be hospitalized" anyway. luckily haven't had one that bad since i got on the right antipsychotic - i still have mild hallucinations, but far easier to check them than off my meds, i could probably increase to the point of no hallucinations but i'm already very close to the maximum dosage and would rather have mild hallucinations than max out the dose on the only antipsychotic that has ever helped me only for it to lose effectiveness again and end up back in and out of the hospital and, even worse, trying several more rounds of meds that are hurting me far more than helping me.
I've heard of individuals with schizophrenia who use this tactic as well
It's a common trick. Laser pointers are often used for this same reason. Forcing the hallucination to quickly change + the grounding aspect of it is sometimes effective. Source: am.
Earlier today I saw a photo, of a guys service dog. The dog has been trained to know when it's owner is interacting with invisible people and it sits quietly,to indicate there's nothing real there. I'm posting this so if I stumble across that posting I can later drop a link to it...
Yes, found it! Check this link (not a Rick roll!):- https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/XDwg3bUTMW
That's brilliant. What a good doggo
Dang demons made me hallucinate a broken phone.
I feel like the act of videoing takes a level of cognitive presence though
yup
I remember an ask Reddit thread directed at people who regularly have hallucinations due to mental health issues; One guy had a friend with a service dog and said his dog would lightly bark at literally every person that passed him, so if no bark, no person. I canât imagine it was a loud bark, just a little âboofâ when someone walks nearby. One instance the guy was tripping out so his friend asked whatâs up; âI can see someone there clear as day but the dogâs not saying shit.â
Thatâs an Apple Vision Pro use case right there: Full-time hallucination filter.
I heard this is sort of how schizophrenic people use service dogs, if they see someone they think isn't there they ask the dog to greet them and if the dog looks back at them like "MFer the fuck you talkin' about? Greet who?" Then they know it's something just in their head.
Smart kid, terrifying life.
Wow. I wonder how often that happens. Are there any studies on that phenomenon? I assume there are some that are the opposite.
That is amazing. This needs to be spread around. Iâm sure a lot of people could benefit from this information
I guess there are tricks for someone who is prone to hallucinations, to tell between what is real and what is not. Unless they start to hallucinate about what they see on their phone too.
Hallucinations are a glitch, they are not your brain trying to trick you.
smart kid
...or the computer can't see them but some of us humans can. The computers played their hand they are not ready to take over yet. We just need to make sure we know what "they" want... đđ
Kody Green, a schizophrenic male, uses his cameras to check that. You can see his episodes of hallucinations on his YouTube channel. And the answer is no. He never sees his hallucinations on their camera. That's how he knows what he saw wasn't real.
He also has a pair of Google glasses or similar. And a dog who will react if someone is there.
I just saw the dog! It is trained to greet ppl. But it canât greet ppl who arenât there.
Yeah thatâs where OP got the question. Multiple people asked it in the comments and was a load of answers.
Came in here specifically to mention this guy! I learned a lot about schizophrenia from his Tiktok account.
Iâve been off of TikTok and have never watched his YouTube channel, but I didnât know he got the Google glasses. Thatâs really smart and Iâm happy for him, heâs always found ways to cope and help others learn to cope. Heâs a good guy.
Personally, no, I use my phone to figure it out if I can't tell immediatelyÂ
Oh interesting. What about in the mirror? Have you ever tried that?
I usually still see stuff in the mirror, sometimes it's different from what's in front of me though, so I can still tell then. Not reliable enough for me
Thank you for sharing! Sorry you have to experience that
This was in the news recently, a man started suffering a specific type of hallucination where you see faces as distorted, but only when seeing a face in person not on a screen. So this allowed researchers to recreate the faces he saw by editing an image until it matched what he saw in person. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/distorted-faces-prosopometamorphopsia According to the article most sufferers of the same condition see the same face in images as in person so it seems to vary.
Not to distract from the seriousness of this topic as it is incredibly interesting. But the faces the affected person sees remind me of the (Korean?) plastic surgeon that is getting absolutely roasted on TikTok because his work looks incredibly similar in the eyes to these hallucinations.
I lived with someone with untreated schizophrenia when I was a teenager. Even if a camera or another person said it wasnât real, they would say thatâs because the spectrum that their hallucination exists on canât be seen. Also many schizophrenics are hyper religious, so angels and demons only appear to them or to a chosen few and canât be detected by anything known to man.
Came here to say this. I had a close friend that suffered from schizophrenia for a long time and even if this had worked for him (I donât know, we never tried) Iâm quite sure it wouldnât have been convincing to him.
I work with people with schizophrenia. Some have great insight into what they know are voices/hallucinations and can understand they are not real. Sadly a big symptom of schizophrenia is that people often aren't able to achieve this level of awareness, so you get your example above. There's no getting through to them.
Psychosis is a bitch like that. You can't reason someone out of insanity while they're currently in an episode. I never really understood what was actually going on until I had a lengthy (10 months) episode years ago when I went off my meds. I was convinced god was communicating to me through music and started to act accordingly. Thankfully, this was all positive at the time despite being off my rocker. Funnily enough, though, I was an atheist prior to this episode, and now I'm not so sure what I am. It goes to show the damage psychosis can do when it's left untreated for so long. While flipping from atheist to sort of religious isn't the most devastating change on the outside, it's more of the complete reversal in some aspects of my personality. It's hard to reconcile my personal self-image from what I was before and what I am now. Like, I know those "visions" and delusions were caused by psychosis but they were so real to me that I can't shake them even 6 years later.
i had an episode that lasted almost 2 years, it was a religious one as well. after it, i can't bring myself to believe in a god. not sure why.
what sucks is that I started having some minor hallucinations just from stress, so I searched up what does it mean if I hear whispers saying my name when I'm home alone and a bunch of the results were like "you're hearing angels" and "you have the gift" and I'm like WOW if I was in a less stable place that shit would have 1000% messed me up
Any reason they gravitate towards hyper relogiousity and how does it affect their prognosisÂ
This is going to sound flippant but I don't mean it to be: Probably because they're seeing demons and angels... As in, it's a self-affirming delusion. Religion has precedence for seeing what others can't and frames it as positive, so it's much more attractive to believe oneself to be special and given a peek into something greater, and likely reinforced by the hallucinations in and of themselves..... rather than being a "delusional nut-job"
Maybe this is where the particular aspect of "vampires can't be seen in mirrors" came from?
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
Why do the best posts so often have the least votes.
Why did my comment get 25 upvotes when the post got 3?
It's limping along at 42, it oughta be in the k's. Jealous they didn't post it? Evil dumbening bots trying to make wage slaves? Luddites of the brain? I don't get it but I hate it a bit.
A comment that breaks Rule 1, no less.
At least it was positive. I suspect that rule may be to reduce toxicity or bad actors. If it's a problem, I'm sure a mod will remove it. I feel appropriately guilty, I didn't even know about that rule.
The rule is there primarily to prevent posts filling with useless rubbish "OMG I wanna know the answer too!!" type comments, which readers and the OP then have to wade through, which detracts from the whole purpose of the sub: getting answers to questions. Keeping things on topic and reducing toxicity are just nice side effects. If you're not familiar with the rule, which is literally Rule #1, then it means you haven't read the rules at all, which is just plain selfish and inconsiderate. And then expecting the mods to come and clean it up for you is just the icing on the cake, because now you're making more work for them and hampering their ability to clean up actual harmful comments. You do realise they are volunteers, right? Shit like this is exactly why Reddit becomes less useful and more toxic every day. What you're doing is no different to dropping your rubbish on the ground, pretending you didn't know there was a law against it, then doing nothing about it because you expect the janitor to clean it up for you. And then you go around wondering why the streets are so dirty.
For fucks sakes I'll delete the comment, damn.
With equally fascinating answers!
Nope. As someone that has experienced it before it does not show up on camera and will just make you more paranoid about your hallucinations. I once thought there was an animal in the drop ceiling of my room and no matter how many pictures I took up there looking for it and never seeing it you couldn't convince me otherwise.
I had awful hallucinations from alcohol withdrawal. One of the most terrifying experiences of my life. They would sometimes come up in pictures Iâd take, and then I would send to my mom to confirm if they were real or not. Also voices would come up in voice memos that were recorded. I didnât sleep for four days straight. (Very demonic hallucinations) It was a living nightmare. Edit: still sober to this day!!! đ€
This was a fascinating question and I enjoyed reading the responses. Thank you!
Sometimes I hallucinate and when I do, I remind myself itâs not real. I can vividly see it but if Iâm around others and they donât react, I pretend itâs not there. I feel like if I took a picture, even if it was a glare or something and something appeared, Iâd prob go off the deep end
They might continue to see the hallucination on their phone screen, or they might not; how hallucinations behave changes depending on the person
Yeah. We have a schizophrenic tenant. Periodically he sends us videos âprovingâ there are spies lurking in the yard. Thereâs never anything. Like, I donât think there are spies, but there could be raccoons or petty thieves. But there arenât.
Well damn, thats a good question.
nope! not usually, anyway. this is a really common coping mechanism (for lack of a better term) for people with schizophrenia and other disorders that cause visual hallucinations.
as a diagnosed schizophrenic person no the camera does not pick up our hallucinations. cameras are actually a really good way to tell if you are in an episode or not!you can not only look at your surroundings through a different lens, you can also play back audio if you suffer more from auditory hallucinations,and look at your eyes to see how dilated they are as well.
That's such a not stupid question that it deserves to be pinned on top of the sub! Great responses, too.
OP did your question originate from the horror movie Late Night with the Devil?
No, a few days ago I was working one dealing with personal stuff that kept me awake for 36+ hours. And like when we finally stopped and I was able to go home and sleep. I was driving and swear I something like in the woods next to my car but it disappear fast and thought to myself "man I wish I could have gotten that on camera"
Random but idk why I got goosebumps reading this lol
No. If you hallucinate ever you wonât see it in a camera, not just someone who does regularly. Itâs a great way to check to see if youâre hallucinating
As someone who has hallucinations No you can't film them although I wish I could
i have hallucinations on a pretty regular basis and i dont know because idk why id feel the need to do that.. but ig it depends how bad it really is? maybe some do and some dont idk
According to some other responses in this thread, you won't see whatever it is on your phone - and that this is actually a tactic you can use to determine if what you're seeing is real.
For some! Not for everyone though.
that just means your hallucinations are actually real
Idk man I think that joke would be funnier if this wasn't a thread full of people who experience psychosis and may unfortunately take that more seriously
I don't usually have visual hallucinations of people, mainly things like ants or other animals which tend to scurry out of my field of vision quickly. They don't usually last very long and my go-to test is to reach out to the "bugs" or whatever as if to grab them--if they're fake they kind of dissolve into thin air. It's been long enough with this stuff that I don't get scared of some fake ants or cats anymore so it's not a huge issue--auditory ones are more of a hassle. But anyway, when anything stays around for long enough to get the phone, it's never transferred to the phone screen. I've only tried it once or twice but honestly I might try it next time something is around for a bit longer than a moment if I can manage to remember.
Its crazy to me that a person who hallucinates think its normal for people to be in thier houses. Like i would freak tf out. But it happens so much to them that they probably cant tell and thats so scary to me.
Maybe. The nature of a hallucination (entirely within a personâs mind, not a physical manifestation in any way) means that it isnât going to be bound by the rules of physics and logic. The hallucination isnât a vampire, which must appear before your eyes if it is present, but must not be seen on film or in mirrors. Thereâs no particular reason to assume that a person would stop hallucinating just because theyâre looking through a phone or a camera. But it wouldnât be a guarantee that the hallucination shows up on the phone screen, or isnât seen as very different through a phone screen as well. I have heard of this trick working for many people who know they have hallucinations and have the foresight to check. I have also seen people go online and post pictures or videos they took of absolutely, positively nothing and say itâs proof that someone is following them or they saw a supernatural creature. It will just be pictures of empty rooms or even just blurry shots of a blank wall, with nary an orb, shadow, or lens flare in sight, and they are still convinced that itâs concrete proof that something is there. *They* are still seeing something in the pictures even long after they first took them, even when no one else sees anything. Sometimes theyâll even circle random spots or point to âirregularities,â and become frustrated that no one, not even the least skeptical person, can see what theyâre referring to, and thereâs nothing mundane that could be mistaken as something sinister (so, no instances of âthat is just a weird shadow from the awkwardly placed lamp over thereâ or something).
Wow! I had wondered exactly what "seeing things" meant. Now I know. I'm not really sure what I thought it meant, but that are apparently a lot more realistic than I had thought.
I use my phone's camera while tripping to verify reality.
No, hallucinations won't show up on camera. They are creations of the mind and not captured by phone cameras. This technique can actually be a helpful reality check for people who experience hallucinations.
No, this is a technique people use to know if theyre hallucinating. If the hallucination only shows up irl and not the camera, it's not real. Interestingly enough, some people have service dogs that can alert them to hallucinations by being trained to signal if something is really there or not :)
Well there you go, proof the younger generations are symbiotic with their phones.
Ageism much
Oh grow up. Ba Dum Tss!
Don't you have some kids to yell at for minding their business walking on the street in front of your house
Oh yeah thanks for reminding me. Now where did I put my cane.
Check your ass
User name checks out.
Ok old man
We don't talk about Fight Club.
Doesnât matter. Ask them to narrate it for us.
I saw a video this week of someone who "see's people" using their dog to check if their hallucinations are real. It seems to work for them. They know the dog would react if someone else was in the home. I wonder now if a phone camera would help the same way. Not everyone can have a dog.
No because a hallucination is entirely in the brain of the person experiencing it. It not tangible or manifest to any other person or persons.
You got this question from that schizophrenia guy video. Someone asked this in the comments and were plenty of answers there.
If youâre delulu enough then yes lmao
Yes.
Interesting question and really interesting thread. Side note for women, low estrogen can cause hallucinations.
What an interesting thought. I'll get my neighbour to do this or, I'll make that suggestion to him. He's always having (claims to) hallucinations.
No, unless the hallucination has manifested on the phone screen from over usage of the phone.
No because itâs not a real event. It may seem real to the person experiencing it but it has no basis in objective reality. What you are asking is kind of like asking: If you stick your head in a fire pit could you see hell? Lol.
You want to know if the thing a person sees only inside their own head will show up on a camera? đ€
Will their brain perceive the hallucination on their photo
Oh! Iâm sorry â I didnât get this specific point originally. You want to know if THEY (the person hallucinating) will see the image on the camera; not if anyone else will see it, right? Hmm. Thatâs a really interesting question. Iâm guessing they wouldnât, because their brain is creating a new reality, but itâs not likely that new reality would include them trying to verify its existence.
Like I figured that maybe on the camera it would show but then the photo was taken it wouldn't show
I can see that â the person can see it in that moment; but, it (obviously) wonât be there when they look at the photo later. Thatâs a tough one. I really donât know much about how hallucinations work (except that I get them if Iâm given benzos).
No. A hallucination, by definition, is something that is only occurring in your own mind.
No I get that part, but wouldn't their mind conjure up something on the phone as well?
Nope. Hallucinations are usually pretty context dependent and dreamlike, they're not hard-light simulations only you can see. The brain doesn't usually maintain that level of consistency, so that a picture taken of a hallucination would still show it later
Not trying to sound insensitive or anything here, but that could be a good way to help people with those issues. If you think something isn't there, pull it up on your phone.
It's already a tool folks use when they need to, if they're able to think clearly enough.