Hearing voices?

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I have an issue that I'm not sure is related to aspergers or if it's something else. If I have been around people a lot one day, I will sometimes hear voices in my head in the evening. It's fractions of sentences or words, it's not like they're talking to me, it's more like I'm listening to other peoples converstation. I know it's not real, it feels more like it's my brain that has problems with processing things. Is this something you have any experience with or know anything about?

Is this typically around the time you go to sleep or are about to fall asleep? If so, it is probably hypnagogia, which is fairly common and not really indicative of anything other than your mind preparing to enter a dream state. Have you ever heard that our dreams are fragments of our day that our brains attempt to make sense of? This might be why it seems related to what you have heard throughout the day.

If this causes you distress or doesn’t seem like hypnagogic hallucinations, you should seek medical help, just to rule out other causes.

It is usually around the time I go to bed, yes, so that might very well be an explanation. Sometimes it's making it hard to sleep, because earplugs doesn't really do much when it comes to your own head, lol. Thank you for your reply!

yeah I have the same. it's like your brain is flooded by information. usually happens before going to sleep / whilst waking up.

No problem! I have read that anxiety and stress can make it worse, as well as lack of quality sleep previously, so that could be a contributing factor. Hope you can find a way to manage it!

As a general rule, auditory hallucinations are symptomatic of mental illness. However, what you describe sounds more like others have already explained. Consider how one processes music. After a song has played, one can have fragments of it replaying in ones mind (not a good thing for a bad song).

It may be that the process of converting short term memory to long term memory requires a sort of fragmentation and replay.

Whenever I'm really overloaded with information and emotions (or have to listen to too much BS), I get what a regular psychiatrist would call "psychotic symptoms". Like the language processing going completely down and me being unable to talk or understand other people in meaningful ways (maybe talking jibberish) < this happend once.
Or paranoid and delusional stuff for an hour or so (happened just once) and visual disturbance and seeing in weird ways.

The doc that diagnosed me with Asperger's back in the day (and she is maybe the most prolific autism expert in Germany right now, but not then) told me, that although these seem like psychosis (read schizophrenia) they ARE NOT. She explained to me that it's "cognitive exhaustion" caused by being unable to handle too stressful situations.

Would be nice if the other idiot doc would think like this too, but obviously I don't have access to the autism expert mentioned above anymore (she is busy being a prof. in a very distant city), and the regular psychiatrists who have obviously never seen aspies keep pushing BS diagnoses on me. So please talk to the right docs for this if you are going to get help. Regular psychiatrists will put you on antipsychotics for this faster than you can say pupty pupsy pants. Not that antipsychotics are bad, but it makes a huge difference whether they put you on them for Autism or you get a free brand new diagnosis with it, which will cause lots of nuisance to put it in a very harmless way.

I can get auditory or visual hallucinations when stressed.
The visual ones consist of seeing moving objects out of the corner of my eye, which aren't actually there, aka imaginary cat syndrome.
The auditory ones are hearing alarms or voices.
It's all a bit weird and slightly scary.

That's very much like how my auditory and visual hallucinations seem to me; a little like the cheesy way that "life flashing before your eyes" is shown in films or TV shows - little snippets of half-remembered things that are being shunted around in my head that bubble up into consciousness every now and then. They definitely happen more when I'm stressed or tired; being in any kind of stimulating environment will always do it; it's almost as if it's a peek into all the filtering going on in my brain after I've crammed it full of unimportant details and unanswered questions.


I get those kind of partial brain shut-downs too (my melt-downs are mostly like total shut-downs too.) I think "cognitive exhaustion" is exactly what it is. I can force myself to tolerate sensory and social overload to a point, but once I'm past that point, whatever parts of my brain are overworked will just gradually shut off. Language is often the one that I notice fades first; it starts with just having a lot of difficulty finding everyday words, and progresses to the point where I can't comprehend anyone else and, if I try to speak, nonsense comes out (an attempt at my usual British English was once mistaken for Welsh!) But it can be almost any skill or memory that I can't access; for example, I might not know where I am even if it is a normally familiar place, or find that I don't know how to work my phone, or what my phone even is. I think of it as a kind of halfway-house between normal consciousness and the "fight or flight" response.

Yes I get this when overloaded or stressed. I am not mentally ill, I'm sure, but the voices don't actually have words - just accents, babbling. I have an indian one and a scottish one and a female asian one and various other jumbles. Sometimes from TV shows, for instance of late after binge watching Trailer Park Boys I have Bubble's voice. And Scotty from Star Trek. Its not all the time just when I am overloaded. I get the corner of the eye visual thing too.

Its amazing actually, understanding this in the context of my newly diagnosed ASD. Sensory overload - of course! I don't stim in the ways I have read other people do - but I do repeat words or phrases in my head over and over. I have some very annoying ones that I can't seem to get rid of, such as 'Teddy Ruxpin' - there now I've done it! Gah.