Seems to me if they are the voices of the recently deceased, and the spirit world is not limited by distance (or at least I see no reason it should be), seems to me that the voices one hears would only rarely be in English. It’s only the first language of, what, 7% of the world population? You’re more than twice as likely to hear Mandarin Chinese.
In fact, after some mega-disaster like the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, with ~230,000 casualties in countries where English is uncommon (well, except India, I guess), I’d expect the Voices of the Dead to be incomprehensible to most listeners in North America.
Of course, this assumes the death rates are pretty consistent worldwide. Actually, in the more developed English-speaking countries, it’s quite a bit lower than, say, most of Africa and Asia. For random spirit encounters with the recently deceased, hearing one speak in English would be unusual.
Again, it depends on the fiction you arbitrarily choose to impose on the ‘spirits’. By another common theory, spirits are tied to the location where they died, or alternatively where they are buried. A person who is not sleeping in the room where somebody has died (or in a graveyard) would hear nothing - and if they did hear someone, it would be the same few someones over and over.
Presumably the dead don’t like to wander very far.
But, KGS, that give you an easy way to test your hypothesis! Rent a motel room someplace where the dominant language isn’t English. If you still hear English voices when you wake up, it can’t be the voices of the recently deceased!
You don’t even have to go overseas. In cities with large ethnic communities like LA or NYC, there are whole neighborhoods that speak languages other than English.
Well, see, here’s the problem. There IS a scientific basis for why people like strawberries. They are nutritious and sweet, and our tongues and the neural receptors to which they are connected recognize them as a source of palatable, non-toxic, vitamin-rich calories. Strawberry plants disperse their seeds by creating this tasty little false fruit, so there is an incentive for animals like us to eat them. We have, in fact, cultivated them to be larger and tastier; all the more reason why people like the way they taste.
So, you see, liking the taste of strawberries does, in fact, have a basis in science. Now, making a non-factual statement, like “Strawberries are the tastiest fruit” or something equally subjective, would not be fodder for science, but saying that you like strawberries does have a basis in biology. However, if you wanted to discuss strawberries, you’d post in IMHO, or maybe Cafe Society if you wanted recipes. Hell, you might even post in MPSIMS, if all you wanted to do was state that you liked strawberries. It’s certainly not a Great Debate.
How does this relate to claiming that hypnagogic voices are actually the voices of the dead? I don’t quite understand your point in making this comparison. I also don’t see the point of scolding people for actually having a debate in Great Debates. If KGS didn’t want a debate, he chose the wrong forum for his thread, wouldn’t you say?
Well, then, people who doze off in international airports should hear all kinds of languages. Ditto for people who travel for business or pleasure and frequently stay in hotels in foreign cities. Do American tourists in Berlin hear spirit voices in German? Surely most of the people who have died in or around Berlin over the last ~2000 years have spoken German or its root languages, or the language of various invaders, be it Russian or Roman. Running into a fellow American spirit should be about as likely as running into a fellow American tourist at the bar. Maybe those are the encounters the American is just more likely to remember, since all the locals (dead or alive) and their mumbo-jumbo heathen-talk just blend in together.
Ah, but he could declare that that spirits all speak ‘spirit-talk’, which everyone understands as their own language. Which would handily explain away if, perchance, his local spirit voices talked in english everywhere - even in remote places where nobody has ever died (like the south pole, or the top floor of a new 50-story highrise).
Ain’t inventing a fiction great?
Well, see, by most fictions either most people who shuffle off the coil shuffle completely off to another realm - or most living people aren’t very good at hearing the flesh-impaired, to the degree that most people don’t hear them at all. You know, 'cause otherwise everybody everywhere would be hearing thousands of spirits talking all the time, which the majority of people are fairly sure isn’t actually happening in reality.
And really, even if mediums are rare, any well-done fiction would probably also make spirits rare - because otherwise anybody who heard voices when falling asleep would never be able to get to sleep over the cacophony.
I’d apologize for the hijack, but it looks like this bus is already well on its way to Cuba.
This part caught my attention. I hope the e-mail you’re waiting on works out well, or that you at least continue to work for a venue through which you can tell your story.
I’m interested in learning more about parents/families who Gaslight their own children. What are the motivations for it? How do the children learn to cope and overcome such a f’d up upbringing?
It’s easy enough to find information on the more usual forms of abuse (a la Toxic Parents), but not on this rather more difficult to describe form in which the abuses are more subtle and premeditated.
Could some hypnogogic voices actually be the thoughts of other people, or dreaming in synchronicity, etc.? Those kind of thoughts are verifiable – any studies done on that?
The voices are not necessarily God, most likely not God, but God is allowing them. You want to see where it goes, talk to them, encourage them, meditate alone in the room where you hear them. They will get clearer and you will find out why.
Take every single argument against your original speculation and apply it to this one.
You can come up with an infinite number of increasingly goofy hypotheses but unless they’re more compelling than the existing explanations for the phenomena, you’re going to have to present much more evidence than “wouldn’t it be cool if”.
DNA allows for untold permutations of how a brain may form and who knows what potential the human mind may have?
At one time, gravitational attraction and orbital velocities, etc, were just interesting theories waiting for science to back them up, and dismissing anything about the human brain when we know next to nothing about it, is arrogance of the highest order.
And as for sensations or experiences beyond current scientific explanation, how many “normal” people have visited a place or building that has a ‘presence’ that almost takes you back to the time when the building or place was most in use?
If we could record a person’s thoughts, you would then have material evidence of an immaterial occurrence, or at least one that occurs on a quantum level, and we all know that strange things are possible when you get down that small.
Gravitational attraction and orbital velocities have never just been theories. Even before humans understood these things, the evidence has always been there.
As a skeptic of the highest order, I agree completely. There’s a vanishingly small chance that there’s something strange going on, and I’m not going to categorically deny that fact for a single instant.
But until somebody provides a compelling reason* to believe their pet theory, I’m not going to buy it. Not because it can’t** be true - but because there’s no reason whatsoever to believe that it’s true - and there’s certainly no reason whatsoever to think that the man behind the curtain that you’re telling me to ignore really isn’t involved.
and as compelling reasons go, “because it’s cool” only suspends disbelief for the duration of a movie or book, and no longer than that.
** except self-contradicory theories. Those really can’t be true - and don’t make good movies or books, either.
