Occasionally, but very rarely, pain is described as resulting from a hallucination. Other effects include fainting fits and tactile impressions. Noise would appear in some cases to produce visual hallucinations, by creating in the hearer a strong expectation of seeing something corresponding to it, or that may account for it. From "Phantasms of the Living" we glean the following:--
"Between sleeping and waking this morning, I perceived a dog running about in a field (an ideal white and tan sporting dog), and the next moment I heard a dog barking outside my window. Keeping my closed eyes on the vision, I found that _it came and went with the_ barking of the dog outside; getting fainter, however, each time."
A weak state of health on the part of the percipient would seem to be conducive to hallucinatory visions. Here is a case in point contributed to the "Society for Psychical Research Proceedings," vol. x., by a Professor G----:
"Saw an old woman with red cloak, nursing a child in her arms. She sat on a boulder. Place: a grassy moor or upland, near Shotts, in Lanarkshire. Date: over twenty years ago. Early autumn, in bright sunny weather. Made several attempts to reach her, but she always vanished before I could get up to the stone. Place far from any dwelling, and no spot where anyone could be concealed.
"[I was] walking; had been slightly troubled with insomnia which afterwards became worse. Age about thirty.
"No one [was with me]. I heard a vague report that a woman with red cloak was sometimes seen on the moor. Can't now remember whether I had heard of that report before I saw the figure--but think I had not.
"Saw many years ago (age about twenty-one), a dog sitting beside me in my room: saw this only once: was troubled slightly with insomnia at the time which afterwards became worse."
The percipient's own view, the collector tells us, is that the experience on the moor was entirely due to "nerves," as both then and previously when he saw the dog he had been much overworked, and in each case a severe illness followed.
Not always does a visual hallucination take the form of a living human form. Occasionally the object seen or the sound heard is non-human in character. In insanity and in diseases such cases are frequently met with, the hallucination being often of a grotesque or horrible sort. Thus we have a case in which a young child beheld a vision of dwarfish gnomes dancing on the wall. Among the phantasms of inanimate objects in the collection of the late E. Gurney were a star, a firework bursting into stars, a firefly, a crown, landscape vignettes, a statue, the end of a draped coffin coming in through the door, and a bright oval surrounding the words "Wednesday, October 15, Death." Geometrical patterns, sometimes taking very complicated forms, comprise another known type of hallucination.