"Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination." (George B Shaw, "Man and Superman", 1903)
"It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that 'it can't happen here' - that one's own time and place is beyond cataclysm." (John Wyndham, "The Day of the Triffids", 1951)
"An hallucination is not, strictly speaking, manufactured in the brain; it is received by the brain, like any 'real' sense datum, and the patient act in response to this to-him-very-real perception of reality in as logical a way as we do to our sense data. In any way to suppose he only 'thinks he sees it' is to misunderstand totally the experience of psychosis."" (Philip K. Dick, "Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality", 1964)
"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. [...] A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data." (William Gibson, "Neuromancer", 1984)
"He’d used decks in school, toys that shuttled you through the infinite reaches of that space that wasn’t space, mankind’s unthinkably complex consensual hallucination, the matrix, cyberspace, where the great corporate hotcores burned like neon novas, data so dense you suffered sensory overload if you tried to apprehend more than the merest outline." (William Gibson, "Count Zero", 1986)
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