How to Use hallucinatory in a Sentence

hallucinatory

adjective
  • Those were the days of people taking hallucinatory trips all the time, so it was all tied up that way.
    — Jordan Runtagh, PEOPLE.com, 27 Nov. 2019
  • Some books enter you like a hallucinatory drug and, for a time, overtake you.
    — Joan Frank, Washington Post, 1 June 2023
  • Images flit by as if in reveries, many of them like scenes from a hallucinatory novel.
    — Becca Rothfeld, Washington Post, 13 July 2023
  • And the hallucinatory spirit that has made a fool of many a mortal is making a monkey of me.
    — Mark Seal, WSJ, 19 June 2018
  • The kids treat it like a designer drug, filming their hallucinatory freak-outs on their phones.
    — Will Bedingfield, WIRED, 21 Dec. 2023
  • The episode is funny, scary, gruesome in the right parts, and hallucinatory like the best horror movies.
    — John Wenz, Popular Mechanics, 12 June 2015
  • Some of the poet’s most hallucinatory imagery seeps through the corners of the screen.
    — Siddhant Adlakha, Variety, 2 June 2026
  • Campaigns can be hallucinatory affairs, and this one was full of bizarre moments.
    — Chris Megerian, Fortune, 19 Sep. 2025
  • As the film goes on, his memory starts to come back, very slowly, in hallucinatory flashes.
    — Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 23 Mar. 2024
  • Also, maybe, how someone might look coming off a whole bunch of anti-hallucinatory drugs, no?
    — Maggie Fremont, Vulture, 27 Sep. 2021
  • Images of the items are projected on the sides and back of the stage, to sometimes hallucinatory effect.
    — Roslyn Sulcas, New York Times, 10 Dec. 2017
  • There are whispers of witchcraft in the company, where dancers die in gruesome and hallucinatory ways.
    — Don Steinberg, WSJ, 27 Oct. 2018
  • Its seven scenes form a hallucinatory series of episodes from Benjamin’s life.
    — New York Times, 24 June 2018
  • There, a drug dealer gives him a Shirley Temple that is laced with something hallucinatory.
    — Jack Smart, Peoplemag, 3 May 2024
  • Lavant does his makeup and changes his costumes in a limousine, en route through a hallucinatory version of Paris.
    — Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 6 Mar. 2021
  • The result is near hallucinatory in its effect, as if walking through an art museum filled with masterpieces that have lives of their own.
    — Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter, 18 Sep. 2023
  • Tipping takes the notion of a spiral in football and runs with it, creating some of the film’s most hallucinatory effects in the process.
    — Jim Hemphill, IndieWire, 22 Sep. 2025
  • The second gallery pushes the all-is-one inside-outness to a hallucinatory crescendo.
    — David Pagel, latimes.com, 13 June 2018
  • By the end, the movie takes on the hallucinatory feel of an existential horror film, less about where anyone is going than what keeps them moving at all.
    — Yvonne Villarreal, Los Angeles Times, 17 Apr. 2026
  • Full of humor, fear, and sorrow, her shifting, hallucinatory world transforms the lives of everyone around her.
    — Hugh Hunter, Philly.com, 4 Feb. 2018
  • But many are as dark and hallucinatory as the book deserves, offering brilliant new takes on the world of Wonderland.
    — John Brownlee, WIRED, 2 Nov. 2006
  • Aside from a hallucinatory second-act reverie that gives Jones a production high point, waiting for the end times proves less tuneful.
    — Naveen Kumar, Variety, 22 Oct. 2023
  • Even the conservative movement couldn’t stomach bigotry this lurid and hallucinatory (or at least, not when it was directed against some of their own).
    — Eric Levitz, Daily Intelligencer, 27 Mar. 2018
  • The large-scale mural is a first for Hughes (inset), who renders her landscapes in vivid, hallucinatory colors.
    — Mark Shanahan, BostonGlobe.com, 13 May 2018
  • The people who have been to one of these Bowery Ballroom shows talk about it in even more surreal, almost hallucinatory terms.
    — Nick Robins-Early, Vulture, 14 Feb. 2025
  • Both for the islanders and for us, the summer shimmers with a hallucinatory mixture of languor and emotional speed, as summers do in childhood.
    — Lillian Fishman, New Yorker, 27 June 2026
  • Bradlow and Crowley conceded that agents can be error-prone, even hallucinatory, and on a mass scale, that could lead to widespread errors.
    — Nick Lichtenberg, Fortune, 26 Mar. 2026
  • Though in a film where hallucinatory visions of wildfires attack Robert’s dreams, another tragedy is never not around the corner.
    — Ryan Lattanzio, IndieWire, 26 Jan. 2025
  • In the hallucinatory new scenes, the connection between Lee and Allerton goes to places the earthbound book could never take it.
    — Ira Silverberg, Vulture, 27 Nov. 2024
  • Just imagine if Walt Disney had, at a tender age, gotten lost in a magic forest, dropped acid, and made hallucinatory love to a white mare.
    — Jason Kehe, Wired, 21 Aug. 2020

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'hallucinatory.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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