Hallucination

Very much like real life, hallucination will cause you to percieve objects in a distorted fashion. Hallucination changes the appearance of both monsters and objects. You can easily cure hallucination with a unihorn.

Effects

Any objects will be seen as continually changing items of the same class, so a pick-axe may be seen as a sack or key, but not as a sword. This perception changes every time the screen is updated, so even selecting the object and pressing ; to see what it is appearing as will change it to something else.

One of the most dangerous things about hallucination is that it conceals what the actual monster is, hiding its peaceful/tame status from you as well. An easy mistake is to start hallucinating in a melee situation and lose track of which monster is your pet (easy to do when every monster appears to change every turn) and accidentally kill it.

It is also a bad idea to eat an unidentified tin while hallucinating. Your perception of the smell will be affected, and you might eat human or cockatrice meat without realising it.

The set of items chosen for monsters while hallucinating includes a selection of rather funny creatures, which will never be generated in the game. These include Barney the Dinosaur, King Kong, the Luggage, and the Mother-in-Law, among others.

Similarly, hallucination replaces standard messages with funny ones, such as "Welcome to experience level 4. You hear the studio audience applaud!" and "You are getting the munchies.".

Hallucination also prevents dying to a monster's touch of death ("You have an out of body experience.").

Hallucination abuses wisdom.

Exceptions

Items the player is currently standing on are not subject to hallucinogenic effects. If you kill a hallucinogen-distorted monster and step onto the square containing its corpse, the corpse will be accurately identified. This holds for other objects as well. Items in the user's inventory are also not subject to the effects. Also, the hero's sense of taste is not distorted, the hero is able to accurately identify what is in a tin by eating it.

Causes

There are a few different ways to hallucinate:

• eat the corpse of a yellow mold or violet fungus
• be subject to the explosion of a black light
• quaff a potion of hallucination
• have a glass orb zap your mind
• apply a cursed unicorn horn.
• Container Trap: "A cloud of bright blue gas billows from the large box."

Cures

Hallucination can be cured by:

• applying an noncursed unicorn horn
• quaffing a potion of sickness, potion of extra healing or potion of full healing
• praying (considered a minor problem)
• just waiting it out
• wielding Grayswandir makes you hallucination-resistant.

Strategy

Once you have a noncursed unicorn horn, hallucination is trivial to cure. Until then, you may wish to refrain from quaffing unidentified potions unless you have a safe way of curing hallucination. It is easy to avoid the other causes of hallucination except for an exploding black light. If you are aware of the light's approach (e.g. through see invisible, monster detection or noticing your pet fighting something invisible) you can blindfold yourself so that the explosion has no effect. Failing that, hallucination from a black light only lasts for approximately 100 turns, so you can shut yourself in a room and wait it out.

If you have quaffed a potion of hallucination and have no way of curing yourself, it is wise to leave your pet behind and stay away from large concentrations of peaceful monsters. Do not try to explore Minetown, and stay out of the Gnomish Mines if the dwarves or gnomes are peaceful.

SLASH'EM

In SLASH'EM, hallucination also distorts items you are standing on and your inventory, which makes it a crippling disability - however it is still only a minor problem in the eyes of your deity. It is therefore essential to avoid quaffing a potion of hallucination without a cure, and to remember the inventory letter of your unicorn horn or other remedy.

Eating a mushroom or a pink pill can cause hallucination, and applying a medical kit can cure it.

Uses

Reading a scroll of gold detection, food detection, or object detection will cause you to detect every object, including gold, on the level. This can be a handy use when the otherwise unfortunate state of hallucination overcomes you.

Recieving the Touch of Death while hallucinating will cause you to "have an out of body experience" and not die.