What are Hallucinations Like

The most interesting type of schizophrenia is paranoid schizophrenia which usually means the person has hallucinations.  Hallucinations can be very scary and confusing but in some cases they can be very cool too!  Imagine if you really liked Spiderman, and suddenly you could close your eyes and imagine shooting spider webs everywhere and you could swing from building to building!  Wouldn’t that be great?

The problem is that sometimes people who are schizophrenic don’t realize that their hallucinations aren’t real.  That can be dangerous, especially if you tried to swing off of a building with your web!  But paranoid people can think that other people are after them and mean to do them harm, and if they think that is really happening, they may want to defend themselves.  This can be dangerous if they end up hurting someone else.  This is why hallucinations can be really neat or really scary and bad.  I don’t know if you can control them or choose them, so I’m sometimes glad I don’t have them.

There are all kinds of hallucinations.  You can see things with your eyes that aren’t there, or are some weird version of what is there, and you can even hear things that aren’t there, like voices or music.  I read that some people smell gross smells or something burning all of the time and that ends up confusing them.  You always hear about people talking about bugs crawling inside of their skin.  That is another type of hallucination that can happen.  I think it would be cool to hear some really pretty music all of the time.  It’d be like having an iPod in during class!