To preface this, I have been prescribed adderall taking the recommended doses for each day and I went a day without (this is a common occurrence, if one if wondering) and this happened that night/next morning when I woke up from sound of my son (who is a real person, age 6) yelling at a video game. This happens all the time, he’ll routinely play videogames if he gets up earlier than us… I turned to my wife who was laying beside me in bed and said, “hey, get up, you gotta take our babies to school” (she is a SAHM), this was an about the time the kids were required to be at school. She told me “I got them on the bus about 30 minutes ago! what are you talking about?” and I said “I heard (my son’s name) talking, I thought he was in here (our bedroom)”. She sighed or whatever and went back to sleep.
Now I’m laying there thinking I’m hearing things. I KNOW I heard, externally, my son’s voice and words that would make sense about what he’s been doing lately. But he wasn’t there. But I heard it externally. It wasn’t “in my head” as far as I could tell.
So, rather then freaking out over this, I thought it was kind of neat. So I decided to experiment a little.
I laid in bed and tried to go back to sleep, thinking this would provoke the hallucinations. And it worked. Several times when I was just about to go “out” I would hear an (external) sound or conversation that I KNOW didn’t really happen. But it wasn’t like an internal dialogue, i heard it as an external sound. Like my brain interpreted an internal dialogue as an external sound and so I thought it was. And the distinction was clear. It was weird, but kind of fascinating.
I haven’t experienced it since that night, but it was really eye-opening as far as audio-hallucinations go.
Maybe you really heard him, drifted off to sleep unknowingly and then woke up and thought no time had passed.
One time when I was younger and took LSD after all the visual part of the trip and everything was over I had a weird sort of comedown while trying to sleep. For literally 3-4 hours I heard voices and stuff like sound effects it wasn’t like imagining sounds it’s like I was really hearing it. It wasn’t scary to me at the time, just annoying, it was voices from cartoons I had watched as a child.
I occasionally have visual hypnopompic hallucinations, where I will see bizarre things, that aren’t simply my mind misinterpreting things (like shadows) which actually exist, when I’m about to fully wake up. For example, a couple weeks ago, I saw quite clearly a huge fat man with a big, glowing blue-white round face smiling and waving at me. Like you, I recognized this as a hallucination, but it was still difficult to shake until I’d woken up a bit further.
I used to be subject to auditory hallucinations when I was younger, like nine or ten years old. Back then, I lived in a large house with a finished basement, where my bedroom and a playroom was. The playroom would get very quiet, insulated as it was from the world in general, so when I was in there playing or reading quietly, my brain apparently had free reign to reinterpret any auditory input it could find. It would reliably reinterpret that scarce input to my mom shouting my name in an angry tone of voice, making me stop playing and listen for the second shout, which would never come. (And, believe me, if she really were angry and yelling for me, it would have come.) I was never much perturbed by those hallucinations, either, and as I aged they went away entirely.
I used to be able to do this in college my senior year, except with music. I would fall into some sort of state right between wakefulness and sleep and be able to conjure up original music as if it were playing in the room. It was a super neat sensation, and one I wish I could have more control of, but it only happened to me after something like pulling an all-nighter to finish a term paper in the nick of time or some other stressful and sleep-deprived situation. But, damn, do I remember it being really cool. Entire symphonies were being spontaneously composed in my head! But I could only keep it going for maybe a minute or two before either waking up or falling asleep. It was a very fine line to tread to stay in that state.
ETA: Reading above, I am reminded that I have also had the sleep paralysis “demon in the bedroom” type of situation. Happened in similar circumstances as the above, but absolutely terrifying. You feel like your conscious, but trapped in sleep paralysis, unable to move, and a threat of some sort is in your room ready to do you harm. The times I’ve had it, I could even swear my eyes were open and that I was looking at the room from my vantage point, desperately trying to wake up as there was an intruder at my door trying to get in, or something like that. Both of these I have not experienced in around 20 years. They all seemed to happen when I was around 18-25 years of age.
Well, I see words. When I am thinking, instead of visual pictures, I see the word in my mind. I am an artist. So I work in visual stimuli. I think my brain gets tired of pictures. I have recently began putting words on some my mixed media projects. I call it ‘word hallucinations’
I suppose it’s better than admitting I hear voices, I hope;)
Auditory hallucinations are surprisingly common. There have been other threads on this board discussing it. Something like half of adults have had some kind of hallucination at some point in their lives, and auditory is the most common.
I’ve had them too. No long-term repercussions…so far.
I believe I’ve mentioned on the boards before that I occasionally get a single, specific auditory hallucination while on the edge of sleep. It’s a woman’s voice–one that I do not recognize from waking life–softly speaking my name, in an inquiring tone. It sounds as if she’s asking if I’m awake, rather than calling me.
I’ll add I did have sleep paralysis quite often in my late high school and college years but it has tapered out over the last 15 or so years to where it only happens maybe once every 12 months or so.
In these moments, I’ll be in a otherwise mundane dream, say talking to my coworkers or something else equally boring, but this feeling of fright and dread washes over me and even though the situation I’m in is completely ordinary, I’m scared to death, like a switch has flipped and whatever brain-state you’d be in if you were in horrible, frightening, facing death situation becomes my brain-state in this mundane dream. Of course at the time, I don’t know I’m dreaming, but I’ll wake up with the same fright but unable to move. I learned to “scream” and it comes out as a moan, but often times it loud enough that my wife would hear it and she could shake me and wake me up fully. This has happened at my office job too and I eventually learned how to mentally ‘shake’ myself awake when coming to after nodding off and not being able to move.
think I have narcolepsy, but I don’t know for sure. I’m too cheap to get it diagnosed properly, but it’s mainly because the treatment would be the exact same as I’m getting now.