I’m schizophrenic and the majority of my hallucinations were visual. I would see horror type characters, cameras all sorts of weird stuff. Also some pretty benign things like bunnies.
It’s probably more common than is documented.
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When I visually hallucinate I see other people. They look like real people and they talk to me. I talk back and I only caught on to this when I had a conversation with a little girl who came into the room through a wall and a chair. Otherwise I would have never caught on and I figured out that other experiences were hallucinations thereafter. They were pretty scary.
I don’t appear to have them on meds so I take my meds religiously. I have a good habit of taking them every night but sometimes I forget whether or not I took them in the morning.
If I can’t remember whether or not I took them I take them when I remember just to be sure.
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@TomCat I have actually had this happen one time when I was 17 or so. I was walking through town and turned to look to my side and saw this guy and for some reason I thought something was odd about him so I turned back to see him and he disappeared into a wall. I thought for years that he was a ghost but now I realise it was probably a hallucination. Creepy though 
This happens to me too. Quite a lot in fact. At first I thought it was my eyesight. I usually mistake objects for animals or trees for people etc… kind of irritating.
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Most of the people I see talk to me and tell me to commit suicide. So the hallucinations are pretty unpleasant.
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@TomCat Oh gosh that must be so hard. Stay strong!
That’s what I mean. Something other than schizophrenia. I think the presence of visuals means exactly that. That it isn’t schizophrenia
And we come back to the question of what is sz exactly…
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I have no idea what it is
I kind of do and don’t understand this because people can only have visual hallucinations and still have schizophrenia right? So why is it a marker of not having it… 
Confused
I have no idea. I feel like mine are from frontal lobe damage. Most likely from drug abuse.
Not an expert on this but if you have bipolar rather than schizophrenia I guess you could consider yourself lucky
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DSM 5 (Star log)
Schizophrenia is the prototypical psychotic disorder. Not only is it the most common psychosis, but schizophrenia tends to involve abnormalities in all five of the emphasized symptom domains: hallucinations, delusions, disorganized thinking (speech), grossly disorganized or abnormal motor behavior (including catatonia), and negative symptoms. Like the DSM-5 neurodevelopmental disorders, schizophrenia is viewed as a neuropsychiatric disorder with complex genetics and a clinical course that tends to begin during a predictable stage of development. Whereas the neurodevelopmental disorders tend to begin during childhood, symptoms of schizophrenia tend to reliably develop during late adolescence and early adulthood.
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I have the impression that those with a mood disorder/sza have more and stronger hallucinations. Is it true?
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I see pretty much what you see, and I see shadow people, demons either on the wall or floor. I see angels here and there, fully formed but always in motion, and spirit not flesh…I have a companion angel who is at my right side, slightly behind my right shoulder but touching. I see, hear and feel his presence in great detail. He’s my most detailed vision. Then there’s the moving everything, vibrant, almost blinding, colors, spiders of various sizes and other creepy crawlies that I see and feel…
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I spend all day looking, hiding, eventually talking to the people and faces that kinda creep up on me while I’m in my house. Mostly it’s when I’m in my house, and it’s real quiet.
They’re pretty real to me.
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I’m Schizoaffective Bipolar type, and my visuals were shadow people, things moving in the corner of my eye or in direct sight, things breathing or sort of warping, dancing dots in my vision (I suspect from stress or bright lights). They were far more scary to me than auditory at times, mostly the auditory stuff for me was just people yelling, whispering, breathing, or for example dogs barking, and clanging noises.
This is all external, I also had “mental” hallucinations (stuff that occurs mentally or inside the head).
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I’m not diagnosed yet but see a pdoc. I have more visual hallucinations than auditory ones. They are mostly my cat. When I wasn’t on my meds, he used to only be there about 50% of the time I saw him there. A lot of the visions are from the corners of my eyes and disappear when I look over to get a better look or get scared and look at them. But sometimes I see them directly in front of me. Like the cat sitting in my chair, etc. I can’t tell if they are real or not, but they usually don’t last too long. So when they disappear, I know they are not real. I also see shadows and lights. Since I went to 10mg abilify, I rarely see anything that is not there and I never hear anything that is not there anymore.
My pdoc said the visual hallucinations are not that common, not unheard of, just not common.
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I’m diagnosed with schizophrenia paranoia. I’ve had visual hallucinations but they seem to be very rare. The ones I remember were shadowy figures mostly, spiders on the roof, and one nice one that was a religious figure that appeared in the middle of the night. I just went back to sleep. Luckily, they happen to me very rarely. I have suffered more from auditory hallucinations.
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Now that I am properly medicated, I don’t hallucinate anymore. But, when I was hallucinating. I saw shadow men in black trench coats and black fedoras following me everywhere I went. They carried black semiautomatic pistols and they pointed them at me. I was sure that these guys were assassin’s out to get me. A med increase got rid of them. Another time, I had to go off of my meds for 48 hours and I started getting constant auditory hallucinations. Along with that came closed eye visual hallucinations of gorgeous women who slowly turned into grotesque monsters. It was one beautiful woman after the other turning into horrible monsters. The last one decided to get into a fist fight with me, and I felt every punch. A shot of Zyprexa and Ativan took care of that.
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The most interesting visual hallucinations I had were visions. I could hold up a semi-transparent blanket or cloth and a vision would play on it like a movie. Sometimes I had to squint a little to see it well but they were very detailed, vivid, and clear.
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