"Hallucination" is just a strange scientific word that seems to stigmatize experiences that are probably far more common than anyone admits. As a child it was

"Hallucination" is just a strange scientific word that seems to stigmatize experiences that are probably far more common than anyone admits. As a child it was understood to me that certain drugs (only the illegal ones) precipitated hallucinations and this was quite undesirable. After a lifetime of listening to disembodied music on radio, shows on TV, and sailing through Cyberspace, how can we not question reality as moderated through pixels or remote broadcasts... even just your printed paperbacks? Religions speak of voices/visions all the time and perhaps it's perceived as bunk when an oracle, a psychic, a shaman or a seer receives messages. But generally Western Medicine is concerned with dull-witted people hallucinating detrimental and dangerous things for them. Not people who are guided by encouraging voices or just hearing music in their head at a snap of fingers. One time after college, my mom just goes "don't you think listening to all that awful music is hurting you?" and I was like "welp, vicious cycle." For myself, I don't remember/experience dreaming and my visual "powers" are limited to watching the world go by, but my inner voices are myriad and a rich tapestry. Unfortunately they're overwhelmingly bad and evil and pessimistic, [they had eventually come to parity with the way people treated me in meatspace,] so I went through a series of physicians and medications as they attempted to exorcise those daemons by means of human chemistry experiment. Strangely I rarely had the experience as auditory or any sort of "sound in my head" so it's difficult to explain how they're there, and it was harder for me to accept that they were, and my intellect questioned the proposition that a pill could be a voice-killer like heroin is a pain-killer? And just like antimicrobials or pesticides, it's not easy to find drugs that quell only the bad voices, lol.