I prefer the word “confabulate”. When humans fill in knowledge they don’t actually have, but think we do, we call it confabulating. We all confabulate at a lo

I prefer the word “confabulate”. When humans fill in knowledge they don’t actually have, but think we do, we call it confabulating. We all confabulate at a low level, because it is intrinsic to how we store and recall memories. Our memories are compressed summaries whose details we fill out with defaults and guesswork subconsciously as we “remember”. This is why memories are rarely perfectly accurate. Some people confabulate more than others. And we all confabulate to a greater or lesser degree based on variable circumstances, emotions, motivation, fatigue and other mental states. “Hallucinations” on the other hand are what happens when our sensory processing becomes unmoored from actual memory or real sensory constraints. The brain creates an interpretation based on internal feedback without normal correction, drifting into false sensory experiences that are not actually reflective of reality. Dreams are a natural form of this where nothing we are experiencing is actually really happening. One is false memories, the other is false experiences.