What is the difference B/W reality, imagination and hallucinations?

[Mr H]

Seems quite a straightforward question when first asked. The other stuff is in your head! But before I am seconded to a farm filled with funny animals etc.......

 

The question first came after an ayahuasca experience in Peru. My education prior was, you take some "drugs" and your brain imagines all kinds of stuff. But what does that mean? How does that differ from regular brain activity? And my bigger pondering, was,  what I had seen actually real?

 

I was totally convinced that the experience I had was just as real as my day to day reality, it just seemed to be using different sense mechanisms to perceive what was being presented - which I cannot explain that well(others in the gp often shared the exact same reality). But it just seemed a different type of reality with energetic beings and more symbols based. There was also a distinct knowing that this experience was real. 

 

I had heard Max Igan mention about his experience recently and he came to similar conclusions although he described it has seeing a greater bandwidth of light that we are able to see.

 

But it got me thinking about the imagination in general and the difference between that and so called "real" experience. 

 

In many esoteric teachings they mention an imaginal plane which exists in conjunction with the physical plane (as well as astral). And in the old christian thought movement, there was a great emphasis that what you thinketh you become, which later became known as the new age movement and in particular the law of attraction. So there seems to be some historic writings about the existence of the relationship between an imaginal and a physical plane. Yet we only consider one of them real. Why is that so?

 

If I look at the processes of each they are very similar in nature. Perceiving a human in so called reality occurs in the same way a so called imagined human appears allbeit on some occasions via different sense perception apparatus. But they appear in mind equally the same. I.e. I sense humans in reality via 5 sense perception which is experienced through mind and I experience imagined humans via mind.

 

How does one classify what is being processed is reality? And how do you describe the difference between hallucination, imagination and "reality"?