Thread: Auditory Hallucinations (during non sleep)

I can sometimes hear people calling my name even when I'm alone.

Obviously I'm not a doctor, seek medical advice, blah blah blah. My recommendation is to try spending say 10 minutes twice a day only in meditation. To start, perhaps just eyes shut, breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth, and how your awareness on the sensation of the breathing. This will do a lot in cutting out your stress. Try hard to reduce it - this I believe is your problem, combined with opening the doors to the LD world. 2. Spend time 'grounding yourself' through the day. Breathe, gather your awareness, and touch the ground, feel it, experience it, touch the walls, examine your surroundings in detail. Hope this helps.

In my first year of college i smoked a lot of pot, did mushrooms a couple times and was really stressed out. My mother is schizophrenic (it's got hereditary components). At first I didnt know what was happening, I would hear people talking about me and think they were real people, because they were always on the other side of a wall or something. At first it was only when i was high, but then it started sticking around after i stopped being high. It took me two days to figure out, after the hallucinations were there when I wasnt high, that I was actually hallucinating ... I figured out that they werent real because they would say things that would require them to be able to see me, and the only ways they could do that is if they had some tiny ass camera in the smoke detector and things like that, which i realized wasn't realistic. I was still skeptical for a while, when like a day later i was driving home with all my stuff, including my laptop which has wireless. I was in the car and I could hear them talking from the trunk, and again the only way that could happen is if they were transmitting to my laptop or something stupid like that... i didnt really believe they could but i didnt know what was happening so i was trying to think of everything possible... when i unpacked and saw my laptop was beside me, not in the trunk, i knew i was hallucinating. Thats when the voices stopped being external and started being entirely in my head. I could have complete conversations with them and they acted as i expected them to, generally in personas of people i knew. I had one incident of them saying that if i didnt drop out of school, they'd make me hurt someone (i never had suicidal anything) after i fell asleep. I was probably the most scared i'd ever been in my life. I didnt do what they said, and when I woke up I knew the voices had no power over me.

After a while of dealing with the voices, I came to learn a few things about them. First, they were always people i knew, but never people i trusted implicitly. Second, I never got them when I was in new places, only when I was sitting around in my room or somewhere i knew. Like someone else said earlier, I found them to be the product of my mind interpreting quiet noises such as fans as something else. Plugging my ears never helped, because when i plug my ears i can still hear something (kind of sounds like I'm under water). Dealing with my stress cut back the hostillity and intensity of my voices a lot. Sometimes (rarely) my voices arent hostile or negative (there's been a couple sexual ones which is kind of odd, but at least they're not yelling at me haha ... also rarely they help me avoid stupid (by calling me stupid for doing something, then i realize they're right and change what i was doing) mistakes that I actually know better than but make anyways because I dont think of them). A lot of my paranoias about my friends from school i let go of, and i feel a lot better about it. I had reasons to believe all of them, but if you search for evidence for something, you can ALWAYS find it. I find I can almost control my voices like I would a dream. I expect them to say things and they do, or I can force them to say things (i picture this as just assembling the sounds into whatever i want by force). I find arguing with them is pointless - you cant win a fight against yourself. If they harass me, i let it go. This isnt a voice, but a thought pattern ... I tend to think about what others are thinking about me in third person, like "he's so bad at doing that" or even positive things, but always using he, or my name. Whenever I do this, I cut myself short just by thinking "I" a couple times, and I dont do that nearly as much anymore. I can live with the voices, but it becomes extremely hard to focus when you're being harassed constantly, also it adds to my stress.

I went to a psychiatrist and so far I'm not actually classified as schizophrenic or anything like that, I've just had episodes. I take one of the smallest doses of an antipsychotic you can get, and i havent had any voices for a few months at least, i dont really remember the date of the last time, but I occasionally stop taking the medication just to see if i can deal with it on my own. Most recently I've been trying to change the nature of my voices from malign to benign with just willpower and postive thought, which I do think is possible, but its probably going to take a lot of work.

Hearing music or your name is one of the early signs of a mental disorder like schizophrenia, but in a lot of cases it doesnt go farther than that. pot and other psychadelics do (or did for me, but believe what you want) increase your risk of mental disorders like this (however pot isnt enough to cause schizophrenia on its own, you have to have some genetic background or something else), as does stress. right now, EVERY time i smoke pot, i start hearing voices and they will persist even after im not high anymore, with only one exception, in a case i was extremely relaxed and having a good time with my best friend. If you're having bad trips it's better not to smoke imo.

Attitude is everything. Life is awesome, and if you dont think yours is, find a way to make it awesome. If you dont know how, ask someone. If you've got the internet theres always someone to ask, and occasionally you'll find someone with a good answer

^ that is a trip!!!!!

Ever since I did mushrooms a couple times I randomly would have weird hallucinations. I would see some random thing floating in the air. sometimes I would actually see real energetic things though but mostly they were just weird hallucinations....
When I was tripping on mushrooms I kept hearing this gameboy music playing.... it was really weird. Also I might of said this earlier but once after a concert I felt half def in one ear and I heard this faint music in my ear. I though it must of been coming from somewhere but it was just me. And I couldn't make it stop. it was really weird.....

I've had experiences with auditory hallucinations since I was about 13 (I'm 23 now). However, many of them have been sounds that many people, not just myself, have heard at the same time even though they have no natural explaination. Recently, I hear someone calling "Hey!" in a very loud voice, or someone calling my name even though I am alone. I've always attributed these experiences with ghosts/spirits though, and not anything physically or mentally wrong with me.

I personally dont believe in ghosts or spirits, but I also think that there's nothing actually wrong with hallucinating in itself, it's just like having blue eyes rather than brown. It's just being different. I do think that only once you cant deal with the hallucinations because they are always negative and make you or others feel bad in some way they become a problem, like alcoholism or other things like that. It's only a problem if it negatively affects someone. If it becomes a problem that you cant deal with, then it becomes time to find help, like I did.

I guess none of this is likely to help the original poster, but for whatever its worth....

On rare occasions I have had auditory hallucinations. Its most common in the morning when I'm the most relaxed, and when there is a white noise source, such as a fan (like a burning bush), that I can pull sounds out of and selectively amplify. The cause seems to be similar to what creates my dreams, though its harder to do while awake. A particularly strong message might occur as an auditory hallucination rather than a dream. Another level of this is the paranormal manipulation of a physical object to produce an actual sound, not a hallucination.

Would seeing an aura be considered a visual hallucination, or would it be considered seeing astrally? In general, I would say that seeing or hearing things that aren't there would be bad. But some things that people don't usually see or hear are in some sense real. I don't know whether or not becoming able to see or hear those types of things is generally a good or a bad thing.

Problems with unwanted hallucinations would seem to me to be one possible side effect of cultivating the ability to astrally project. Drug use would be another cause, obviously, as well as genetic predisposition.

Nice Fractal Avatar. Did you do it yourself?

One evening in my bed I heard my entire family screaming in the other room. Freaked me out, to say the least. :p

Just throwing this in: Hearing Voices Movement - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
As TheShadow says - if you feel it's harming you, a very low dose modern antipsychotic can silence them without affecting you in a negative way, without you noticing it, even. All the best!

Please don't necro-post + off-topic.