MIND-READING BARISTA!?!

(Urban Scout circa 2001)

I recently finished reading Muses, Madmen and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination. I really enjoyed this book. Both because it gave me a broader understanding of hearing voices, but also because it reminded me of so many experiences in my own life of hearing things.

The book covers a lot of ground and honestly, didn’t really change how I feel about voice hearing. In fact, I thought that the spiritual component felt rather lazy. But the spiritual component doesn’t reflect the authors goal. His goal seems to bring people to understand that hearing voices doesn’t automatically make you a schizophrenic. I really enjoyed how the author tracked the word “Hallucination” over the last couple hundreds years to its modern view, showing just how much damage a single word can do to an entire profession. I also learned a great deal about Socrates (who heard voices) and Jeanne Dearc (who also heard voices).

I’ve had several instances of auditory hallucination during my lifetime. I’ve never thought of them as symptoms of schizophrenia, never as misfires of the brain, but always some sort of unexplained spiritual phenomenon. I still think of them as this, even when they seem to mean absolutely nothing at all.

“Peter”

Every once and a while I will hear someone say my name in my room loud enough for me to wake up, only to find no one there. Once I even heard it in my fathers voice. I immediately called my dad, thinking maybe he died or something, but he answered and said he felt great. I’ve woken to this in the middle of the night, and thought perhaps some spirit woke me because a killer had broke into my house or some other danger, only to find the house empty and boring. Perhaps these instances just occur as misfires in the brain. Signs of stress? I don’t know.

“Rats in the Walls”

For the period of several months during my childhood, I heard what I thought sounded like rats in the walls of my bedroom. I heard these sounds with my ears, not like a voice in my head. For some bizarre reason every time I brought my mother or sisters into the room to listen for it, the rats would stop. They never believed me, and to this day they still make fun of me for it. I’ve always felt baffled by it. I heard something. Towards the end of Muses, Madmen and Prophets the author writes of a man who went crazy. His first symptom? Hearing rats in the walls. Do voice-hearers commonly hear “rats in the walls”? I don’t know what this means, but it actually made me feel less crazy!

“Coffee Orders and Racism”

While working at my first wage slave job as a barista, I would work early shifts. During these shifts I would stand half awake by the espresso bar. I would hear a customer come in the door, and in my head hear them order. Moments later I would hear them actually say aloud what they wanted. By that time I had already nearly finished making their drink. This happened not every time, not all the time, it happened very rarely. But it happened enough times to notice. Once a non-caucasian man entered and ordered a regular coffee. As I started to ring up his drink I heard a rare racist word rattle through and over my own thoughts. I almost tripped on the way to the coffee container it felt so loud and intrusive in my head.

I didn’t think those words; they invaded my mind, just like the drink orders. They invaded my mind and trampled over my own thoughts in such a forceful and surprising way that it almost made me trip. Many non-caucasian people came to get coffee there, and it never happened with them. Why that man? Why that moment? Did the voices come into my mind? How can I explain the predictions of orders? Do people carry their own voices around them? Could the man have had some sort of racist ghosts following him, and when he came into a certain proximity with me, I could hear them too? Or perhaps I have ghosts following me from my own ancestral heritage? Scary thoughts to which I may never know the answer.

“Junk Room Skunks”

I had tried to write this screenplay for four years. I had sat down and written drafts and treatments and they went no where. Then one day, boom, eighty pages. The next day, eighty more pages. Done. It happened so fast, I felt like a court reporter taking down someone else’s conversations. I saw into a different world and took notes. I didn’t feel like I had made up the script myself. While writing dialogue between two characters I would laugh out loud at the things they would say to each other, hearing their words and watching them interact as though they actually lived out the life they did. This happens often when doing more creative type writing. I knew immediately that I experienced what writers mean by a “muse”. If I didn’t make up this story, who did? Where did it come from? Did it have a higher purpose? For a piece of writing to come into the mind this way, it would seem to have a higher purpose. And yet, the screenplay sits on a shelf, collecting dust. Did it have a point? Maybe the point had to do with me letting go of the ideas and feelings, or some kind of healing myself through the writing. I don’t know.

Vicodin

When I had my wisdom teeth pulled I took vicodin for the pain. It gave my insomnia and later turned into insomnia with auditory hallucinations. I laid in bed at my mothers house trying to sleep when I heard a woman screaming from outside. She screamed, “Oh my god help me! He’s killing me!!!” I had heard doors opening and closing in the hallway so I thought my parents hadn’t gone to bed or couldn’t sleep either. I felt surprised to find the house startlingly quiet. I woke my parents, who assured me they hadn’t opened or closed any doors while sleeping in their bedroom. With their window open, they hadn’t heard any screaming woman either. I waited until I heard the screaming woman again with my mom in the room. Sure enough, she could not hear her. I stopped taking the vicodin. The screaming went away. This points to a more chemically altered version of hearing voices. Did the screaming have any meaning beyond my mind needed to rest? Did I miss out on some important spiritual lesson here, or does this point to the meaninglessness of mis-fires in the brain? I don’t know, but I have a feeling I could glean some lesson out of it if I had an intact culture of people who have shared similar experiences.

This leads me to the short-coming of Muses, Madmen and Prophets in that it fails to explain voice-hearing in its explanation of hearing. Basically, hearing actually occurs in the mind. What you think of as sound your brain actually makes from a series of signals. From this scientific viewpoint “hearing voices” generally can only mean that your brain miscalculated or misinterpreted or made up data and made you think you heard a sound that did not occur externally.

If the voice of the muse didn’t feel like my thoughts and the coffee orders didn’t feel like my thoughts, where do these voices come from? It would seem all too easy to take a Freudian view of these and say that my own subconscious projected these things for me to see. He might say I have racist urges or some other b.s. But when you couple these experiences of voice-hearing with prophetic or mind-reading ones (no possible way existed for me to know these strangers coffee orders), Freuds bullshit psychology stops short of explaining any of it. Because if they came from the same place, and they didn’t come from my mind but other peoples, then my subconscious has nothing to do with it.

If Science says voice-hearing happens only within your own mind, then it would have to have come from within my own mind. While understanding how hearing works mechanically, it doesn’t really explain how I heard people order their drinks before they opened their mouths. Understanding how the brain made the voices doesn’t explain the prophetic aspect of coffee orders. Too bad I never exploited this… a mind-reading barista… Who doesn’t want that?!?