Hypnagogic Voices

I once followed my tomcat F.A. around the house as he stood in every corner in turn, looked at me and said 'Hiya!' in a high-pitched voice. Eventually he said a very long 'hi-YAAAAAAAAAAAAA' (think Miss Piggy) and threw up a tapeworm.

I then said 'hiya' many times............
 
My girlfriend lives with her mother in the middle of the Welsh countryside. Last Saturday night her mother came into the house looking rather concerned. She had been at the bottom of the drive locking the gate when something growled at her.

She didn't know what it could have been but it certainly scared her. A search found nothing and the following morning no footprints could be found. The following evening my girlfriend was sitting in one of the fields, drinking a coffee and generally enjoying the calm evening air. Suddenly she heard what she took to be the same growling. She sat absolutly pettrified that some sort of ABC was going to jump out on her. She didn't dare to get up iand run in case it chased her, she simply didn't know what to do.

As she was considering her options the growling continued, slowly getting higher in pitch when suddenly it had changed from a 'growl' to a 'moo'.

Turns out it was a cow, most likely on heat, in one of the neighbouring fields.
 
Injured rabbits also emit a human-like scream (hit by car, bird of prey or fox attack, etc...)
The owls in our yard have "treated" us with several nocturnal
rabbit kills... scares the bejeezus out of us everytime!

TVgeek
 
Sheep coughing at night make a really odd noise, too. I mean, its the same noise that they make in the day, but at night it just seems more weird.
 
strange voice

This is not a call from the dead, but I feel it might be related.

When I was about 8 years old, my mother had a very strange experience. We lived in the suburbs in a three bedroom house. My room was just across the hall from hers. It was bedtime, and I had been tucked away for the night. Mom clicked on my night-lite and closed my bedroom door.
She went to her room and lay down on the bed. She had just closed her eyes when out of the blue she heard a child crying in her ear "Mommy! Mommy help me!" When asked later, she said it was a real sound. Not an imagined voice or a mental trick. An actual voice of a child pleading into her ears.
Panicked, she jumped up out of bed and ran into my room. To this day I vividly recall her bursting in and asking me what was wrong. You dont tend to forget incidents like that. I was bewildered. I told her I had been laying there about to go to sleep and hadnt said a word. Which was the truth. I was fairly freaked out at the time by my mothers pale face and shocked demeanor. I slept in her room that bight!

A side note to this story. My mother had two children. Myself and an older brother. However, I learned years ago that she had actually been pregnant a third time. Sadly, it turned out to be a miscarriage. My theory is that perhaps the voice was that of an unborn child grasping for its "mother". Maybe trying in vain to get a foothold into this world. Or, at the very least, to find some solace in whatever void it lingered in.

Hope this wasnt too off topic.
 
weebesom said:
Also sometimes I hear music playing faintly and it stays at the same level even when I put my hands over my ears. I don't mind that either.
And... the other night I was just dropping off to sleep when a really loud zapping noise in my head woke me up. I was extremely peeved.
Click to expand...

Reading this post reminds me of the strange but gorgeous music i hear in my head when i wake up sometimes. I know it's internal and not external, but everytime i hear it, i fall in love with it - i like to think it's the soundtrack to my dreams... Strange thing is, as soon as i move my head or think about anything else, it dies away, so i have to lie stock still and try and keep my mind empty (not hard, in my case...) - anyone else have similar experiences...?:)
 
I used to get what sounded like someone shouting in my ear - not my name or anything just a kind of 'HEY!'. On one occassion it was a sound like a loud note from a trumpet or some kind of brass instrument. This kind of thing usually happened in my parents' house and nowhere else.

It seems quite common to hear music. This is particularly interesting to me because of something I experienced when I was working late (about three AM) & was very, very tired but definately not asleep. I heard this Oasis song playing - I think it was 'Champagne Supernova'. It started quite unexpectedly and played the whole way through, at a fairly low volume as if from a small speaker somewhere in the room.
What seemed odd at the time was that my brain had obviously 'sampled' the song in its entirety and was able to replay it, even though I would have been hard-pressed to remember all the words let alone every single note. Apparently most people can remember all kinds of detailed information under hypnosis which they're not able to consciously recall, such as the number of paces between their front door and the bus stop, or whatever.

Another odd thing is when I've heard music in my dreams, that is music I already know, but it sounds absolutley fantastic, as if it was being produced by angels or something. I remember one time waking up after hearing music (I forget what it was) turning the radio to hear the same piece of music playing.

Maybe the radio was switched on but with the volume turned right down and I'd been able to pick up the very faint sound from the speaker even though it was inaudable to me when I was fully awake?
 
It happens to me occasionally. I'll occasionally hear my name being repeated. It's usually when I'm in a nearly silent environment. It seems to be perceptual tagging, because it has never happened in complete silence. The only time that I'm sure that it was a paranormal occurence and not just my imagination was the sound of someone talking in a foreign language and a horse running (My neighborhood was once an Indian village.) I looked out the window and saw something running away into the woods. It's possible that it was just a strange coincidence and I was a deer running, but the voice and sound seem to confirm that it was real.

-Ian
 
I've heard this too, along with a variety of other strange clanks and bongs before I go to sleep, but then again, I am mad.
 
Just to add my two pen'orth....

I've heard similar things as well, but only when I was really depressed and living in a room in a shared house whose previous occupant was a little "scary"; it may just have been that my subconscious made the connection an decided to have a laugh at my expense.

It does that occasionally.
 
Re: Voices from nowhere

LouS said:
I'm sitting there and all of a sudden theres an eerie human whistled tune comes over the modem/pc speakers (definetely not the modem whistles)
Click to expand...
Could be the Lincolnshire Poacher!

(Sorry, still fascinated by numbers stations, even though when I bought a multi-band SW radio I could only find some crappy "time signal" stations!)
 
Don't know if this falls under the bracket of hypnogogic voices or not but a couple of years ago I had a puzzling experience.

I was visiting a friend who lived in Islington about a ten minute walk from Highbury station. We'd arranged to meet up a few days before and hadn't spoken to each other in the meantime. As I rode up the escalator in the tube station, I suddenly heard my friend call my name very loudly and clearly - and with an edge in their voice, as if they were concerned or warning about something. I assumed my friend had decided to meet me at the station and looked about for them but there was absolutely nobody around. A little spooked, something made me head to the nearest phone box and ring my friend - she answered in floods of tears, she'd just had a colossal row with someone, could I come round ASAP ?
 
This or something similiar maybe in this long thread so please excuse me if it is. But many years ago part of my job was listening on various radio channels for messages, often I would do this when I was exhausted and after a certain point you had to be replaced because you started to "hear " so many strange voices and things. So if you want to hear strange noises get tired and listen to a white /pink noise source at a volume to your own taste. ( Possibly using a very very low level (way below concious hearing threshhold) of speech inserted into the noise source to "seed" your brains pattern recognition.)
 
i sometimes get what you have described - occasionally i have heard my name being called and on several occasions in the past when we are expecting visitors i hear them coming into the house, being greeted by my parents etc and go downstairs only to find they havnt showed up yet! in the past i have also heard our piano being played and more recently i have had auditory hypnagogic hallucinations during the night.
 
I used to work in a cotton mill[Ee, when I were a lad], , and the noise of the machines became so monotonous, that I began to be able to pick out the sounds of my favourite music from the din around me. As the sound mainly consisted of what is known as white noise i.e. hiss, which is considered to be the sum of all sounds and frequencies [ like white light is considered to be the sum of all colours] , I suppose it stands to reason that every song, phrase or whatever, is somewhere contained within that noise, and the brain can filter out whatever sounds it feels are appropriate to any given situation.
When everything is silent, we can usually hear the blood rushing around our bodies, and this manifests itself as white noise. Whilst not meaning to dismiss this phenomenon altogether, I feel that this idea may have something to do with at least some of these manifestations. I have been a practising occultist for many years, so I do not have the blind skepticism that some may feel is apparent from my previous statements, but I do feel that a healthy skeptisism is desirable in all aspects of strangeness.
 
ho lordy this kind of thing has happend a few times to me...the worst time was when i just woke up and couldnt move..i looked towards the desk in my bed room and saw my self sat on it crying..the worst thing about it was the fact i looked at my self and said in a loud voice WHY WONT YOU LISTEN ANYMORE..scared the shit out of me...it realy did....ho and this is not a joke...goddamn creepy..there have been other times as well ..i think it's sleep paralysis
 
Like BBQ_Bob i sometimes hear a voice when i'm drifting off to sleep..Almost always my Father, just calling my name as if i had wandered off to far, and he was getting me to come back from somewhere. Perhaps i wandered to close to the edge of a cliff on a family picnic when i was little, and its stuck with me ......but for 25 years? Weird !!!
 
Yes this has happened to me, but to break from the usual in bed and quiet etc.

This happend once whilst i was driving.

It had been a long day and I was very tired, Isuddenly and very clearly heard a voice shout my name, realised i had nodded of and was just drifting onto the grass verge.

I couldn't place the voice but i know if i heard it again i would recognise it.

A group of us went for dinner with a friends new fiance some time after, he suddenly turned round to me and said the voice you heard was Harry, he's with you all the time and watches your back...

I've never known a Harry who was dead at the time of the incident.

Funny how you read some of this stuff and think me two...
 
I've been attempting to document my hypnagogic voices recently. By sort of half-concentrating on/half-ignoring them, it's possible to catch complete sentences and wake up enough to write them down. Here are a few of the more substantial ones.

1. Your time is digital, time-face! I can't recall much about the voice itself now, but this was said in a sort of mocking tone.

2. I've got to find Oldman's quest and find it. This was said in a very theatrical older man's deep voice. The word 'find' was elongated and was said in a strange falling pitch.

3. Looking through the bell-drum. Said in a voice similar to my own. It was repeated over and over in a rhythmical way. There was an increasing amount of pitch-shifting effects applied, like an echo but each repeat was of a rising and falling pitch.
 
The first time this happened to me i was just drifting off to sleep when i heard what sounded like people in the next room talking to each other. The only phrase i could make out was, " Elder deserves to die". i never found out who Elder was!
Then, yesterday morning i was getting back to sleep after seeing my son off to work at 7a.m. i heard what sounded like a group of people passing by on the road outside our window. We live in a rural area, not much traffic, but neighbors do go for early morning walks and sometimes have noisy conversations. But this went on and on. They sounded angry and one man yelled "Asshole!" (i didn't feel this was directed at me) i heard a woman yell something about a judge. i tried to ask my husband if he was hearing this, but i couldn't speak or open my eyes. This made me realize i must be dreaming, but it didn't seem like a dream. i was horrified to realize i was hearing these voices loud and clear in my own head, and the realization didn't make it stop. They continued until i forced myself to wake up. i felt shaken all day, expecting the voices to return at any time, and wondering if i'm finally going off my nut!!
 
Hypnagogic imagery and voices can occur not just moments before/after sleep but also during the waking days. It has been shown that REM sleep deprived subjects can experience auditory and visual hallucinations whilst apparently awake. For case studies see accounts of Randy Gardner and Peter Tripp who both underwent sleep deprivation exercises for charity.
 
For years I've suffered from various phantom voices shouting my name. Normally it's when I'm wide awake and not in the least tired. On a sidenote I've had bursts of loud white noise just as I doze off. It's normally loud enough to "wake" me.
 
hey you

I hear various familiar voices calling my name a few times a year but try to appreciate it as part of the fauna of sleep, if that makes any sense. If these voices say anything else I don't remember it.
 
Ditto...

I have also heard my name being called. Sometimes loud enough that I actually get up and check the house. It has happened while I am awake and alone, and also while I am about to fall asleep. I read one post of someone who saw a bright light flash when it happened. This happens regularly to me when I am falling asleep and I hear any loud noise. I have also heard conversations but only when my mind is clear. Especially falling asleep. I suspect that this is caused by people unconciously projecting their thoughts out (like a radio signal) and when my mind is clear enough I pick it up, as sometimes the voices seem to be arguing. I have heard male/female voices, and others which I could be sure of the sex. I HAVE heard things clearly spoken that friends have later verified that they were thinking at the time, but never said aloud. Perhaps some people simply broadcast their thoughts at crucial emotional times, or maybe they do it all the time and your mind has to be clear enough to hear it. Thoughts?
 
Like most people I too have experienced these auditory things, mostly either vague snatches of nonsense or my name being called or spoken sometimes. But here's an interesting thing somewhat similar.

If I am dreaming and there are printed words in the dream, like in a book or something, no matter how hard I concentrate on the words or sentances I can not make out what they say. I can see the print quite clearly but can't understand it, like how I'd asume someone who couldn't read would see printed things. I've been having some experience with lucid dreaming for many years but even then I just can not understand what is written although it does seem to be written in English, the language I know. Conversations in my dreams are clear enough to understand, but for some reason the printed word is not.

Maybe this tells something about how a brain works while dreaming or something.
 
Hi Rexmundy

Reading in lucid dreams can be very weird indeed. A few years back I thought that I was sitting up in bed reading a book, it felt like I had been reading for a couple of hours. As I looked at the pages I realised that they had gone blank. Odd, I thought. Then the bedside light began to fade to a soft red glow that lit the whole room very weirdly then blinked out.
Clearly I had been dreaming but was completely unaware that I had fallen asleep.
 
rexmundy said:
If I am dreaming and there are printed words in the dream, like in a book or something, no matter how hard I concentrate on the words or sentances I can not make out what they say. I can see the print quite clearly but can't understand it, like how I'd asume someone who couldn't read would see printed things. ...
Maybe this tells something about how a brain works while dreaming or something.
Click to expand...

I get usually get the same sort of effect, although occasionally find that I can read things, but that the text changes as I read it. I also find that I can see clock faces and hands, but for some reason I can't make out what time it is.
 
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