A Life Hearing Voices: How I Manage Auditory Hallucinations

I think you are having a hard time really believing that people "hear" the hallucinations.

When they started for me it wasn't voices, but telephone's ringing. I never thought, "is that telephone really ringing or am I just thinking of a telephone ringing?" I never considered the sound was generated internally.

I just went and answered the phone. It was months of what I thought were random hangups before I realized that I was the only one who could hear these calls.

I suffer from tinnitus and hyperacusis. Part of all that is that I frequently hear phantom echos of certain sorts of sounds... most notably the test of the district emergency siren that's done every saturday, which I "hear" replayed in my head off and on for the rest of the afternoon. I even "hear" things which I know I can't hear without my hearing aids.

Another example is when I watch a lot of professional sports, like rugby. I've had the experience where I've watched a few games and then that evening I "heard" crowd noises and the indistinct chatter of the commentators (even to the point where I "could tell" that they were South African). This experience is so convincing I'm compelled to get up and check to make sure the telly is off, even though it's been off for hours.

Anyway my point is that it's entirely possible that people who experience actual full on auditory hallucinations "hear" voices that "sound" different than their voice and which "obviously" are coming from some external source... and that absolutely not making any sense but being nonetheless credible is part of the experience.

I gotta say as disturbing and embarrassing as I find my own experiences they're nothing to what is being described in the article, so I really feel for them because there's no way that is pleasant experience.

My youngest brother is schizophrenic. He describes it like hearing someone invisible talking. Not in a voice he recognizes as his own internal monologue.

We (for the most part) intrinsically understand the internal nature of naturally generated thoughts, even spontaneous ones. If someone played a recording of your own speech, would you have difficulty determining if you had thought the words or heard them?

Its been ten years or so since the more active parts of this took place, but to try to answer your question.

For a period lasting one to two years, with residual activity several years after that, i had pretty much full on auditory alterations every day. As in, i would think a thought (ego-based, considered my own) and an interloper voice would respond usually with a counterpoint of some sorts. Now it would be easy to say that "oh my thats just your unconscious manifesting itself", but that breaks open whole new areas of inquiry as to just how you can have a part of your own brain break away into what is considered a non-ego aspect capable of perfect responses and behaviour/expression mimicry of all the people you know.

And in a way that is a rehash of an inquiry into the nature of dreams, as that is what happens there as well (barring some novel non-local verifiable explanation into the things one encounters there, but lets not go there just for the time being...), but interacting with it in a waking state fundamentally breaks an aspect of the individuals common human experience up to that point which makes it very difficult to deal with. Especially if its an antagonistic environment, which it was for me a lot of the time. (Granted, there were also a lot of really magical and mentally powerful moments, but it usually required a lot of strenous ego-counter-thought to get there.)

It can in no way compare to "thinking internally", it is at most times a very distinct non-self-ego ego expressing itself (for me it was in the voices of everybody i've ever known, but thats probably a YMMV thing). The thing is, its kind of hard to explain if you've lived in your own brain your whole life, because once you experience it ownership and privacy relating to your internal monologue disappears, so it alters something very basic about the pre-voice mentality most people have.

What the clinical distinction eventually ends up being is hard to say. Eventually we might have the tools needed to monitor brain and matter activity whilst also having the knowledge required to translate brain/matter activity into our experience as beings and vice versa, but we're not really there yet.

Wish i could write it up better, but thats at least a first person attempt.

When thinking the voice is inside your head. A hallucination is inside your ear. It has the same sensation as a real sound.

I will sometimes hear voices distinct from my own thoughts. It is a different experience than thoughts that are verbalized in the head. I can clearly tell the difference between those two experiences.

I will sometimes experience an in-between state where my consciousness knows it is generating the voice at the same time it is experiencing it as a distinct voice. Sometimes I have access to the tuning knob, and I can turn it to modify how distinct I am experiencing it.

Both the experience of distinct voices and verbalized thoughts are also distinct from thoughts that have no verbal components. They might be in visual or tactile form. Sometimes they are in purely conceptual form with no sensory expression.

So not everyone experiences thoughts the same way.

"Is it a lack of agency or the voice sounding different or something? It feels poorly defined."

If you experience it, it is pretty obvious, though hard to describe.

"Thoughts seem to be happening all the time and are not always super directed (isn't the goal of mindfulness to get a better handle on this?)."

Goal of mindfulness is not to get a better handle on thoughts. That's a side-benefit of mindfulness meditation. The main "goal" of mindfulness meditation is awakening to true nature of being, and along the way, there are many useful and practical side benefits such as being better able to clearly distinguish how thoughts and mind works.

It apparently is poorly defined:

A paracusia, or auditory hallucination,[1] is a form of hallucination that involves perceiving sounds without auditory stimulus.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_hallucination

I would not consider what the woman in the article describes to be an auditory hallucination. She knows it isn't real. She doesn't perceive it to be actual sound. Yet, the Wikipedia article also talks about hearing voices as a form of auditory hallucination.

I have had actual auditory hallucinations a few times. The first time it was a medication side effect. I had taken too much decongestant and I would close my eyes and hear things, like people in the room with me opening drawers or something. When I opened my eyes, they were not there. So it was not real.

This has happened a few other times when I was basically very sick and stressed out. I once heard steps when no one was there. It was a bit like radio sound effect steps. It was disconnected from what it would have sounded like had someone actually been walking nearby and it neither approached nor receded, which is part of how I knew it wasn't real. I once heard someone say "Hello" and figured out this was not real, there was no one there.

Since I now know this happens occasionally, if I hear things that seem off in some way, I can check for corroborating evidence to see if it is real or not. It is very uncommon. I think it has happened like 3 to 5 times in the past 6 years. But if I am very sick, wonky things go on in my mind sometimes and I have learned to check on certain things.

I was homeless for several years. I camped in an area for 2+ years with a lot of birds. Birds, especially geese, can sound like indistinct human voices, especially a woman's voice. So during that time I regularly had to determine if actual real world sounds were human voices or bird voices because humans near my campsite were a potential threat to me. Birds were not.

That experience where I was literally hearing things, but struggling to determine exactly what the sound signified, helped make me feel comfortable double checking when I hear things and am not sure if it is real or not. If I know I am sick and under duress and what I think I hear seems off in some way, I just try to verify if it is something real or not.

Single data point: Many years ago, I suffered a severe concussion and was unconscious for a while. For a couple of days I heard voices calling my name even when alone.

While my inner dialogue is clearly internal, those voices were spontaneous, which felt eerily external. I think those were flashbacks of people talking to me while I was unconscious.

I’ve experienced this quite often: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia

Maybe an hour or two before falling asleep, I’d hear a dozen or so voices, chaotically making word play in reference to each other. The voices are all over the map: stereotypes of different eras of film and TV, men and women, all different ages. It’s immediately clear that each originates in my mind, and not the outside world. The jokes and quips come so fast and in such rapid succession that there’s no way I could consciously come up with the material - I’m just along for the ride.

This is usually accompanied with visions of different textures and color, faces, places and other things, a cacophony of brass instruments, sometimes full orchestral compositions, sometimes full radio worthy songs (vocal and instrumental) - I often wish I knew how to write sheet music, because some of the stuff sounds pretty good (I have practically zero music experience, aside from being playing the trombone for one year of high school to satisfy a course requirement).

>What's the distinction between 'hearing voices' and just thinking internally to yourself?

When you hear voices, it's just that, you can hear them. It's almost impossible to believe they aren't real, because they sound real. They have that quality of a real sound that nothing imagined ever has, for most people.

And everything in our lives has taught us to trust our senses. If you're crossing a road, if you see/hear no cars coming, you trust that with your life. If you see a car, you trust that. Imagine if one day you couldn't trust that?

I think why auditory hallucinations are particularly misleading/noxious is that with visual hallucinations, like seeing a car when there's none there, the hallucination is there in one spot. With hearing, there's no one spot to focus on - we can't pinpoint and look at the spot in the way we can with sight.

So then the mind tries to make sense of the voices, to be rational about them, taking into account every imaginable hypothesis (except not, unfortunately, that they aren't real)..which gets ever-more-complicated and soon is a 24-hour-a-day job. Ever-more-complicated conspiracy theories have to be built. e.g. I thought people were watching with hidden video cameras in my bedroom - how else to explain what they knew. Unfortunately my voices were all negative! After a year or two I starting taking pills which immediately stopped the voices and I returned from sleepless, shaking, total falling-apart madness to living in the real world.

Sometimes after that I'd faintly hear things and wasn't sure if I was hearing them or imagining them. But now I know that 'heard' voices probably aren't real, so they don't have that power, don't escalate. I guess it's like seeing ghosts. Put a ghost-believer in a scary place at night, they will see/feel something, panic, then probably see/hear a lot more stuff. A sceptic won't get agitated like that. So I guess I learnt to be a 'voice sceptic'. Because it's very difficult and unnatural not to believe what your senses tell you in plain daylight.

So for me, what happens is that out of paranoia I will end up attributing meaningful words and conversations to ambient sounds when I'm under the influence of a certain substance.

This substance also ramps up my paranoia.

Its something that many people disapprove of and on top of that using it creates a very potent smell that essentially broadcasts its use to everyone in the area.

And so out of paranoia I anticipate people in the distance are discussing my activity and complaining about it.

On top of this now I have a greatly enhanced sense of hearing so lots of low level ambient sounds become much more noticeable.

All this blurs the line between ambient noise and distant muffled conversations. And so because of my heightened paranoia, my mind subconsciously starts filling in the gaps with what I think theses people are discussing.

Even knowing all this, it still feels very real. But now I can recognize its happening because whoever I "hear" complaining has a very rhythmic cadence to every sentence they speak - mirroring the repetitive nature of ambient noise.

So the solution for me is to put on headphones and blast music in these circumstances where I would otherwise be tormented by ambient noise.

Philip K Dick experienced a voice which told him to clean himself up & get his finances in order. Also to have his kid see a doctor, "When this presence warned him his infant son had a fatal birth defect that required immediate surgery, Dick took the child to the emergency room. It turned out that the voice was right."[1]

[1] http://www.signature-reads.com/2014/12/poetry-prophecy-and-m...

[2] http://www.openculture.com/2014/05/philip-k-dick-takes-you-i...

I’ll see if I can find the source, but I remember reading an article that talked about how in some eastern cultures (Japan) hearing voices wasn’t considered a negative/psychotic problem and instead was considered a neutral-positive experience. The same article also mentioned that people in that country diagnosed with schizophrenia typically heard voices saying positive things, compared to western cultures where voices would say/suggest negative things

Edit: was Ghana and India not Japan, and study was very small sample size. Still a pretty interesting read: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/07/when-hear...

This is probably the most pseudoscientific/anti-intellectual comment I’ve ever read.

Also, check your family history. If you are a descendant of Arathorn, those spirits might be persuaded to be your personal army as atonement.