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So I am drifting off to sleep and I start to hear voices, only I can’t tell what they are saying.
This only happens at the transition between being awake and asleep, and yeah, it does sound like someone is speaking. No the “voices” don’t tell me to do anything, it’ sounds just like someone is whispering quietly off in a corner.
Now while this is happening I am reasonably sure I don’t hear the outside world 'cause if I listen for outside noises the other noises go away. As the previous sentence implies, I do have some cognitive functioning while this is happening.
So any ideas? I did wonder if it is possible to hear your own blood flowing to your brain?
Oh yes; I am looking for more information, not a diagnosis.
Do you run a fan in your room? Sometimes my fan will make it sound like very faint music is being played- I can even almost tell what song it is. But it’s just the fan. Might that be it?
Your description sounds like hypnagogic hallucinations. I have them, but mine are visual rather than auditory. (If you google 'hypnagogic hallucinations," you’ll also find that you might have been the victim of alien abduction! )
If the “voices” are preventing you from getting a good night’s rest, talk to your doctor. I talked to my doctor about the person standing outside my window (and my bedroom is on the second floor) and many things more weird than that.
I have the hypnagogic hallucinations, too, and mine are usually visual (for some reason, almost always centered around people breaking into my bedroom window. I swear that I’m not worried about people breaking into my bedroom!) Occasionally I will think I hear music in the distance as I drift off, but it is just my bedroom fan, like Alice said.
When you say that you hear the voices, do you hear them as though they came from outside of you or do you hear them only inside your head? If it’s the latter- I have those as I’m falling asleep, too. I like to think that I’m telepathically picking up on small parts of conversations that other people in the world are having right at that moment, but that’s probably not true.
I had the best one of these one time. I was falling asleep in my parents basement. I looked up and saw a three foot spider crawling above me on the ceiling. I’ve never moved faster in my life! Whatever sleep paralysis I was under was done in an instant. I bolted upstairs and slammed the door behind me only to see my mother sitting at the computer fiddling. I quickly realized that it wasn’t real, pretended like nothing was up and walked downstairs. The spider did not come back.
HHs can seem very real, definitely. I will often feel somebody getting onto my bed, and I can really feel the mattress sinking down, I swear it. It happens a lot more now that I have a cat- I will often feel her jump onto the bed then hear her out in the living room- but I had them even before I got a pet.
I have those too, and I’ve thought the exact same thing–gee, my ‘mental radio’ works really well. They’re startling real, but usually mundane. I never mentioned it to anyone before–voices in the head, and all…
Now that it’s summer and we occasionally have a fan on in the bedroom, I’m once again hearing music in the fan’s noise.
I’ve had the same thing happen to me, and sometimes for several nights in a row. I found that if I’m in a certain…oddly focused state, the voices get a little louder.
Though I can’t understand any words from it. It’s like general ‘talking noise’, like a white noise of voices you would hear when in a crowded room, the sounds of several talking at once.
I haven’t had any for a long time but I used to get snatches of conversation as though people were walking past my bed. Just mundane portions of dialogue a line at a time:
“I told her it made her look older.”
“Wouldn’t you prefer fish?”
“It’s not my job.”
I found them amusing but as soon as my concious attention switched to them they would stop.
When I first heard about them when training as a psychiatric nurse they were referred to as hypnagogic illusions because once you know about them you are readily able to dismiss them as not real unlike hallucinations.
Since this seems like an ideal thread, does anyone else sometimes get really weird thoughts when falling asleep? It only happens to me on occasion, but I’ll imagine several weird images that quickly move from one to the next. It’s hard to describe…almost dream-like, except I’m conscious of them. As soon as I open my eyes, they go away though.
Sometimes when I’m falling asleep I get a ringing in my ears. Interestingly if I focus on it I enter the dream state much quicker. I also notice that my hearing becomes much sharper when I sleep. It could definitely be either an artifact of the encroaching dream-state or of the bodies changing / relaxing aural sensitivity or both.
I was discussing something like this a couple weeks ago with my boss, who has a doctorate in sleep science. Apparently visual illusions are common and to be expected, but aural illusions are pretty rare.
I’ve had this for years, but only every now and then and it’s usually just one word or short phrase. But it will be just as I’m about to fall asleep (I’m not aware of ambient sounds anymore), and it will be a sudden, clear, conversation-volume voice that sounds like someone is in the room next to me. Sometimes it’s a voice I recognize, other times not. It always makes me suddenly aware of ambient sounds again, but doesn’t really wake me up. Hasn’t happened in a while, though – probably over a year.
Oooh, I like the idea of being rare.
While we’re talking about sleep issues, any idea (or would you mind asking your boss) whether somniloquy is more/less common than somnambulism? I know that neither is rare, but I wonder if one happens measurably more often.
I get aural hallucinations sometimes. They seem to be most common if I am napping during the day or falling back to sleep after being awake for a while. I also sometimes get the sensation of someone resting a hand on me, usually on my arm or leg.
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