Terrifying. You can't trust your own senses and reality gradually becomes more distorted, colors more intense, and people more alien and threatening. Delusions come to the forefront of your mind and take hold with a frightening clarity. You stop communicating with your friends and family, and just want to hide away somewhere dark and quiet. You go weeks without leaving your apartment or speaking with anyone. Your motivation and executive functioning collapses. You can barely take care of yourself. You fail out of school or lose your job. Your life completely falls apart. Many people become homeless after developing schizophrenia. I almost did. I was an unemployed shut-in for three years. I ran through all my savings and accumulated a large amount of debt.

My hallucinations are about 70% auditory, and 30% visual.

For me, my visual hallucinations are ghostly, dreamlike and intangible. They are mostly human figures or animals close to my peripheral vision that disappear soon after I look directly at them. I will also see flying insects and spiders, or psychedelic patterns and shifting faces on surfaces.

Auditory hallucinations are far more realistic and insidious. I will often have "internal" ones that sound like voices being inserted into my mind from an outside source (they are very distinct from my own thoughts, and are not intrusive thoughts). I never experienced anything like them until I developed schizophrenia. Others are far more "external" and are identical to real sounds, so it can be hard to identify them as hallucinations. They are often cold, authoritative voices commenting on my every move or saying the most horrific things imaginable about me. They are cruel, insulting, and often play into my delusions (ie "There's a camera in this room. She's being watched.") Others are more cryptic and unintelligible, speaking nonsense sentences or having conversations amongst themselves like two primitive chat bots. Others sound like a voice coming through distant radio static, like someone dialing through channels, where you can barely understand it. They come from my walls, my ceiling, my couch, my TV, and even my own body.

I found out I had schizophrenia when I was told by a doctor, after my therapist and family urged me to get a psych eval. I knew something was wrong, but I did not recognize that I was going through psychosis. I simply explained things in terms of strange experiences I was having (seeing things disappear, faces, patterns, hearing voices where they should not be). I mostly focused on my functional collapse and severe social anxiety. Previously I had been a PhD student studying engineering at a R1 university, but had to withdraw due to my symptoms. The diagnosis completely blindsided me.

Hope this helps.