Likewise, my report that I heard my mother today - she died in 1977, or tasted the icing on the cake that was not present in the room, should not result in a finding that I have experienced an hallucination, because it could not reasonably be concluded that either my mother's voice, or the taste of the icing on the cake, was created by and within my mind and had not existed outside of my mind, as the definition of hallucination requires. Extrinsic to my mind and in the real world of people, events, and objects, I would have had to have been taught the concept of "mother" and to have been introduced to my mother. I would have had to have learned about voices and to have originally heard my mother's voice, learned the meaning of "icing" and of "cake", been introduced to the taste of icing, and to have remembered all of that, in order to have heard my mother today or to have tasted the icing.
Just as the physics principle, "the relativity of simultaneity", explains our perception "now" of a black hole originating in the remote past in a distant quasar 13 billion light years away (long since extinct), so my present, real time hearing of my long-deceased mother, or the taste of the icing on the cake not present in the room, did not originate in my mind, but presumably came from other times and places - therefor an experience failing to meet the required element of the definition of hallucination, that the experience be created within the mind and lack an external stimulus or referent.
Likewise, even terrifying experiences do not qualify as hallucinations, psychiatry having neglected to demonstrate that they lack an origin outside the beholder's mind, in the imagery provided by prior life events carried to the present by explicit or subliminal memories of that imagery. Imagination is not hallucination. What is lacking is a showing that those experiences fit the definition of hallucinations, painful, fearful,or disturbing as they may be.
The essence of my position is that ALL hallucinations are a figment of psychiatry, a myth. Absent psychiatric evidence to the contrary, they are conceptually like all other experiences; there are not two kinds of experiences - hallucinatory and non-hallucinatory, and they do not originate in the mind but originate in the imagery provided by prior experiences in the real world and should not be differentiated from other experiences. In content, each experience is uniquely different from all other experiences, may be coped with in different ways, may engender different behaviors, and thus may be experienced by the actor and by witnesses in different ways.
By way of illustration, the sexual encounter of an adolescent boy with a female resulting in a nocturnal emission, is a “real” experience even though there is nobody present but the youth himself alone in his bed, clad in his wet pajamas, during the entire episode, just as hearing my dead mother is a “real” experience; likewise tasting the icing on the cake that is not there; likewise seeing the extinct quasar - all of these are members of the single class of things called EXPERIENCES, and none of these provide a legitimate occasion for pathologizing human experiences, even though some experiences are quite upsetting and engender behavior that is disturbing to observers.
Noting, again, that by definition hallucinations require that they be created by and within the mind and have no external stimulus or referent outside of the mind, and coupling that with the lack of psychiatric evidence that any experiences have ever fulfilled those conditions, we are left with the reality that the existence of hallucinations has not been established. The use of technical psychiatric jargon, buzzwords, or other word magic fails to bridge that gap. The shortfall is one of substance and not one of form. Psychiatric verbigeration which seeks to pathologize human upset and disturbing behavior, only begs the question and constitutes tendentiousness.
The question [Why I heard my dead mother today?], or [Why I tasted the icing on the absent cake?] presents an interesting subject for analysis and investigation. Absent psychiatric evidence, however, invoking the concept of hallucination, remains a figment of psychiatric wishful thinking, introduces intellectual contamination, and gratuitously employs mythology to support the existence of schizophrenia or the like. See Thomas S. Szasz, SCHIZOPHRENIA: THE SACRED SYMBOL OF PSYCHIATRY. As with the spurious use in physics of luminiferous ether, that of the fantasized existence of hallucination, only muddies the waters.