Can hallucinations be prophecies?

I recently was driving around the streets of my hometown in Stockton, California, as I was stopped at a light, I glanced to my right and there was an older man sitting at the bus stop.  It had looked as if he was talking to himself, while he was yelling and pointing to something that seemed to not be there.  I kept glancing at him, but I couldn’t help think about Bessie Head’s first novel, A Question of Power.  Just like the man I saw on the street, she too seemed to be seeing images that were not visible to rest of the world. I thought to myself, what is that they see? Are these visions some sort of prophecies that fulfill the future?  Are they images that portray the truth?

Elizabeth’s internal drama becomes increasingly dominated by nightmarish hallucinations where she is torn good and evil. Elizabeth becomes a replica of her inner demons. The telegraphic messages that Elizabeth has with a god-like figure distantly resembling a man named Sello.  She becomes very interesting in the physical Sello.  Elizabeth engages in conversation with the white-robed monk whom she addresses as Sello, “He had introduced his own soul, so softly like a heaven of completeness and perfection” (14). Sello just like Elizabeth has his inner shadows, the evil Madusa, and his goodness is strangled with evil.  In some sense, Elizabeth and Sello have a life that is some what similar. They have both experienced inner dramas throughout there lives that have been overwhelmed by evil.   “God is the totality of all great souls and their achievements; the achievements are not that of one single, individual soul, but of many souls who all worked to make up the soul of God, and this might be called God, or the Gods.  She floated slowly back to everyday reality on this huge tidal wave of peace” (54). However, Elizabeth believes that everyone has a godly nature in them.  “God was no security for the soul.  She accepted Sello’s half-concealed revelation of the descent from Buddha to David of the Jews and balanced it against what was recorded of that tumultuous, turbulent life…” (65).  

Prophecies often consisted of a warning that God’s wrath would destroy the people if they disobeyed God or did not repent and they sometime foretell the coming of a divine figure, such as Jesus. Could Elizabeth’s nightmarish hallucinations be prophecies from God?  Sello is a hallucination that is formed for the goodness of God.  I believe that the hallucinations that are formed in Elizabeth’s mind are substitutes for all people who were missing in her life.  Elizabeth grew up without a father or a mother, and she was never accepted into the African culture.  Since, Sello is a descended of Buddha to David of the Jews; he is prophesizing that Elizabeth needs to change her view on her dramatic life.  Elizabeth needs to accept the challenges in her life, because she is stuck between good and evil.  She has experienced a great amount of evil throughout her life, and needs to learn to accept the evil as challenges.  God is presenting all these prophecies from figure-like images to challenge Elizabeth to make her a strong person.