are my eyes deceiving me?

deceive | American Dictionary

deceive
verb[ T ]
us/dɪˈsiv/
to persuade someone that something false is the truth; trick or fool:
Some parents try to deceive school officials and enroll their children in other districts.
If you deceive yourself, you pretend something is true:
We should not deceive ourselves into thinking this will be the end of it.

deceive | Business English

deceive
verb[ I or T ]
uk /dɪˈsiːv/us
to use dishonest or illegal methods to get something or to make people believe that something is true when it is not:
These were fraudulent transactions aimed at deceiving creditors and investors.
intention/intent to deceiveA spokesman for the bank maintained that there had been no intent to deceive.
 flatter to deceive
to seem better than it actually is:
The FTSE-100 flattered to deceive, as it broke through the 5000 barrier only to fall back again.

Examples of deceive

deceive
The temptation to deceive arose again when we started our hospital duties with patients in our third year of medical school.
I do not mean that they have been intentionally developed to deceive anyone, or that contributors to religious systems were not, or are not, sincere.
We have already mentioned one - is it better to know a painful truth or to be happier but deceived?
Only when she hears his 'sincere' voice used frivolously can she comprehend that she was deceived.
Therefore, either it is not foreign to the goodness of an omniperfect creator to deceive him all the time, or there is no such creator.
All other choices imply that the central bank has tried to deceive the public and will therefore lead to severe punishment.
While providing new information based upon impressive original research, the collection tends to flatter to deceive.
He is pleased thereby for he sees that he was not altogether deceived, and that he only failed to see all the sides.
We argue that the subjects misinterpret this because the information to the visual system is ambiguous and also deceiving.
You may be deceived about lots of things concerning your mental image.
Worldly people speak soft words like butter and those who have not wisdom to discern what they are after are deceived and fall.
Second, does it contain any element, large or small, of deception - that is to say, does it deceive either the writer or the reader?
In fact, the explanations might be flatly wrong, though probably not with intent to deceive.
The agent who considers himself to be acting on the more specific, allegedly universalizable maxim is deceiving himself about his true principles of action.
But in many of these cases the child had been deceived too.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.