is it normal to have hallucinate in times of extreme stress?

what you hallucinate you a fish in the ocean do you !!! May be you hallucinated you where in the park !!

You need to see a psychiatrist to diagnose you properly. This is not something anybody on this app can be qualified to ethically give an answer to with such little information and context.

No, it's not "normal," but it might happen to some people

What you describe was not "extreme stress," by the way.  

This might be my last answer on yahoo answers. So I’m writing a novel. Fair warning.

Anyway, you can have hallucinations for many reasons which have absolutely nothing to do with “schizophrenia” which tends to be an overused lay term that is tossed around way too much by people who really don’t even understand what it encompasses, thus rendering it fairly meaningless.

As you suggested, an hallucination such as the one you had can also be from stress for example. People with PTSD for example can have hallucinations because they are often in a high cortisol “fight, flight or freeze” state of high alert which can be conducive to the brain creating such phenomena. 

You can also experience “hypnagogic phenomena” such as when you’re in that twilight state between being awake and falling sleep where your subconscious is more dominant and you sometimes hear conversations in your head,  but that does not mean you’re “crazy” either. 

It’s just a phenomenon that the brain is capable of producing. I experienced this once when I was younger and heard an actual conversation between then President Jimmy Carter and somebody else and it was very strange obviously and Jimmy Carter and the other person were definitely not there in the room with me, but that’s what it was...one of those “hypnagogic” phenomena. 

I also used to do extended juice fasting and I sometimes would hear words in my head that seemed to come out of nowhere and were just the result of changes that take place in the brain, maybe as a result of ketosis, when you go into a fasting state. 

Again, didn’t mean I was “crazy”.Having an auditory, visual, gustatory, olfactory, tactile or any other type of “hallucination” for that matter doesn’t mean you’re “schizophrenic” or “crazy”. If you constantly hear voices in your head that are ‘directing’ you to kill other people for example, then you might have reason to worry. But it certainly doesn’t sound like that’s the case from what you described.

The brain just happens to be a very complicated organ capable of creating unusual subjective sensory phenomena which can seem very real. Because in a sense they are. If you’ve ever been under hypnosis or seen others under hypnosis, they can actually see things that are NOT there (“positive hallucinations”) NOT see things that ARE there (“negative  hallucinations”) and the same goes for sounds, tactile, olfactory hallucinations, etc. 

I’ve even witnessed a grown adult being regressed under hypnosis to the point where he was re-experiencing events from his childhood and actually started speaking like he did when he was a little child again. It was not staged. He was really back in his  childhood again. That’s a multi-dimensional hallucination for sure. Very real to the person experiencing it as well while in that parallel state of consciousness known as hypnosis.

The brain is just so complex and not only is there conscious awareness but there’s our subconscious awareness which becomes more active under hypnosis and while dreaming, etc.

When I took that hypnosis certification course I saw many of these phenomena and experienced many of of them myself. In a sense ALL of these phenomena are quite real because reality is partly subjective to begin with. It’s our brains that actually interpret the input from our sense organs and even in the absence of such input our brains can still create a sound, smell, sight, tactile sensation, etc. that doesn’t actually exist in the immediate environment.

For example if you have tinnitus (like I do) your brain is actually creating that ringing sound that you hear. It’s not coming from your surrounding environment. Therefore, if somebody is standing next to you who doesn’t have tinnitus, they won’t hear it. That doesn’t mean it’s not “real” (it is to you) or that you’re “crazy” and they’re “normal” or you’re “schizophrenic” and they’re not, etc. simply because you hear it and they don’t. 

Your brain is just creating something different than theirs. You also don’t have the same face, body or fingerprints as they do. Everybody is unique and everybody’s brain is unique. That might be a good thing.

And now for something you might want to ponder if you’re in a philosophical mood some day. Is what we refer to as “objective reality” simply a collectively agreed upon “mass hallucination” created by all of our brains together? 

Why do members of some indigenous cultures think that when they are dreaming  they are actually experiencing reality and when they are awake what they are experiencing is actually a dream? 

Why do some hypnotists like to say that what we consider our “normal waking state of consciousness” is actually a state of habituated hypnosis and less valid as a model of “reality” than we would like to believe? What exactly is the nature of reality to begin with? 

Why did Native Americans go on their “vision quests” to intentionally have visions (hallucinations) feeling that these experiences would elevate them to higher levels of awareness and spirituality, whereas a mainstream western psychiatrist might consider such an elevated state of awareness and higher spirituality to be “pathological” and use that as a justification for prescribing a neurotoxic drug and/or committing the person experiencing it to a psychiatric ward? 

What’s behind the Hindu concept of “maya” (“illusion”) which purports that nothing actually exists in an objective sense but everything “out there” is simply a projection of our consciousness?

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

And where does “consciousness” come from anyway? Is it actually from within our brains or does it originate from outside of them?  How do you account for the documented phenomenon of people who have died momentarily while under surgery for example being resuscitated and afterwards they reported seeing themselves from a vantage point above their bodies, lying on the operating table while “flatlined” and were able to accurately describe to the attending physicians what was happening while they were temporarily in that state of death? But these things are topics for another day. 

Enjoy your amazing brain. It’s a versatile and wondrous organ. Don’t ever let a psychiatrist try to tell you otherwise and give you some kind of neurotoxic drug or drugs to damage it. Your brain is capable of providing you with a sense of wonder and awe  and allows you to fully appreciate this miraculous experience we call “being alive”. Don’t ever let anybody take that away from you.

maybe you should see a psychiatrist, you might need meds for that

No, it isn't.

However, people who have hallucinations think they are normal and natural.  They are not.

Were you smoking pot?  If so, there is your problem.

You sound pretty rational to me. I think it could br triggered from super depressive episodes. Or high stress or traumatic something. I mean... Could just be anxiety and over reacging and thinking. OCD people ive heard have obseive thoughts they cant control. That be my guess. You are just overly high with anxiety and stress. Nothing to be comcerned about. People get that way a lot in haunted houses. Whrre they think they heard something becsuse some reason they scare themselves into it and over active imagination. 

It's more paranoia than schizo. Sometimes when people are extremely nervous/anxious/stressed they start hearing/seeing things that become distorted. Ex: people who are scared of the dark and believe in ghosts could easily mistake a coat rack to be a ghost....or a pipe creak to be a ghost. Stress does all bad things to the body. You were paranoid because you knew you weren't supposed to be there so you got anxious. This is common for most people. Don't think you're going crazy. Stress just messes up the body in various ways.