幻觉

• Pinyin: huàn jué
• Hanzi breakdown: 幻 = 幺 + 乚 (twisted thread, suggesting unreality); 觉 = 爫 + 冖 + 见 (claw + cover + see, suggesting becoming aware)

Meaning

Hallucination; illusion; delusion. A perception experienced as real but having no external basis in reality.

Used in medical, psychological, and literary contexts. Can describe auditory, visual, or tactile hallucinations caused by mental illness, substance use, fever, or exhaustion. Also used metaphorically to describe false impressions or misperceptions.

Examples

1. 长期睡眠不足可能引发幻觉，影响判断力和认知功能。 Chronic sleep deprivation can trigger hallucinations and impair judgment and thinking.
2. 服药过量后，患者出现严重幻觉，将护士误认为是陌生人。 After an overdose, the patient experienced severe hallucinations and mistook the nurse for a stranger.
3. 那段岁月已成为遥远的记忆，有时竟恍如幻觉一般虚无飘渺。 Those years have become a distant memory—sometimes they feel so unreal, like a hallucination.

Usage Guide

Context: medical, psychology, literature, psychiatry

Tone: clinical

Do Say

• 该患者被诊断为精神分裂症，长期遭受听觉幻觉的困扰，需要系统性药物治疗。(The patient was diagnosed with schizophrenia and had long suffered from auditory hallucinations, requiring systematic pharmacological treatment.)
• 极度疲劳时，人有时会产生短暂的幻觉，误以为看见或听见了实际上并不存在的事物。(When extremely fatigued, people may briefly experience hallucinations, mistakenly believing they have seen or heard things that do not actually exist.)

Don't Say

• 幻觉 interchangeably with 错觉 — 错觉 refers to misperception of a real stimulus such as an optical illusion, whereas 幻觉 refers to perception with no real stimulus at all

Origin & History

幻 (illusion/fantasy) + 觉 (perception/sense) — sensory perception that is illusory

Cultural Context

Generation: All ages

Social background: Universal