The thesis I have presented does not, nor does it intend to, explain the phenomenon of hallucinations. Rather, it is intended to explain the paranoia, irrationality, and grandiosity characteristic of schizophrenia, even when it manifests itself in the most logical, analytical, and intelligent mind. This theory of a "private culture" that spontaneously creates itself in the schizophrenic mind has much explanatory value in cases where very intelligent and logical schizophrenics end up believing very irrational and illogical things—things not even an idiot would believe, if he is mentally healthy. This is one of the problems I began with in coming up with this theory—aside from the problem of human nature—and so this is the aspect of psychosis it explains.

I do not believe things like "disorganization in thought" or "an inability to think logically" can explain completely and satisfactorily paranoid belief systems that are often logically ordered and complex, and at the same time so absurd that anyone can see they must be false. Everyone’s thought is disorganized until it is put into logical analysis. If you do not think there is disorganization in your thought, notice where your thought wanders as you are drifting off to sleep tonight. If the thought, "The FBI is bugging me," simply ran through the schizophrenic mind again and again, and he did not infuse his experiences and world with altered meaning, it would be like a hallucination seen by a man on drugs: he would recognize it as a hallucination, and never be fooled. The very perception of the world must be different to the schizophrenic—just as it is different in different cultures—since his paranoid beliefs are most often not based on actual hallucinations, but grow out of experiences which are, in terms of their material properties, the same as they are to normal people. If his thoughts are merely disorganized, why doesn’t he write them down, and put them into logical order, as we all do when we wish to come to a logical conclusion? If he did this, he would end up basing his beliefs on experiences he has had—experiences whose meanings are perceived by him a certain way, a way in which the healthy mind would not perceive them.

Some paranoid schizophrenics have many hallucinations and few paranoid beliefs. Others, like me, have few hallucinations and many paranoid beliefs. It is unclear whether psychiatrists have grouped many different illnesses under the umbrella of "schizophrenia" or if we all actually have the same disease. There are other types of schizophrenia besides paranoid, so "schizophrenia", including all types, has an even greater range of symptoms and manifestations than are found even under the classification "paranoid schizophrenia", which has quite a degree of variation on its own. Since hallucinations, though I have had a few in my life, do not figure into my particular version of psychosis very much, I have not tried to explain them with my thesis. My thesis, I believe, explains my own case, and probably quite a few more; but it will not explain all cases. It does not, for instance, explain in any way the phenomenon of hallucinations. I leave that to the neurologists; my area of study is the nature of belief.

But some might suppose that, though this hypothesis does not explain the reason schizophrenics actually have hallucinations, it might be a tool for interpreting actual content of hallucinations. In order to explore this further, let us examine two hallucinations I have actually had, which I know for certain were hallucinations.

The first was auditory. I was lying in my bed in an apartment, feeling very disturbed and psychotic. I kept hearing an old man moaning and moaning from behind the wall. One might suppose that someone might actually have been moaning there, but I do not believe so. The moans were too anguished, exaggerated, and loud. I believed, as I was listening to the moans, that they were only hallucinations.

The next morning when I awoke, I sat up in bed and saw a small human figure on the ceiling, just at the point where the wall meets the ceiling. He was toying with a metallic box or object in his hands, moving it about and making clicking noises with it. I didn’t have my glasses on, and normally a figure that far away would be blurred, but this figure was clear. I stared at him for about three seconds before my roommate lit a match in the bed beside my own to light a cigarette, and the sound of the match being struck seemed to make the figure disappear. I knew it had been a hallucination.

Meaning is infused into our world unconsciously. But it leads to our conscious beliefs. Our conscious beliefs then determine how we interpret our world, and what meaning to impose on it. Thus does our world transform our meaning, and our meaning transform our world, in a two-way dialogue. Had the hallucinations been part of this on the conscious level, my conscious beliefs determining their content just as they determine how I see and interpret my world, one would think they would have figured into my belief system at the time in some way. But they did not. My feeling is that they were symbols from deep in my unconscious, something akin to dreams, which my conscious mind does not quite understand as fitting logically into a meaningful world.

Of course, a schizophrenic who is absolutely plagued by hallucinations will begin to form beliefs about them, such as "They are demons" or "They are government agents with magical powers." But this is merely the process of forming belief systems trying to explain the phenomenon of hallucinations, which the conscious mind does not quite understand. The actual content of the hallucinations will come from the unconscious, and not become the visual representation of the meaning we impose on the world with our more conscious belief systems and linguistic patterns of thought.

Take the very common auditory hallucination of voices telling the sufferer to kill himself. Even schizophrenics who do not consciously believe they want to kill themselves will sometimes have these. They are representations of an unconscious desire to kill oneself. Some psychiatrists view auditory hallucinations as thoughts that are actually heard. Just as our own thoughts will sometimes be represented with sentences held in our minds, the schizophrenic will actually hear these sounds. But I do not think this view is quite correct. Thoughts, after all, such as the thoughts expressed in the present essay, are formed by the conscious mind, and their content makes sense to my own conscious mind; I have the sense that I myself have created their content.

Every human being has the natural capacity to experience hallucinations. We all, after all, dream—and dreams are merely hallucinations which do not result from any disorder, and do not imply any sort of disease. My feeling is that the content of hallucinations comes more from unconscious symbolism, like dreams, than it comes from thought processes, or the meaning we see in the world that comes from our conscious beliefs.