my own voice in my head when trying to fall asleep, any similar experiences?

If you feel you could benefit from therapy I'd like to recommend Psychosynthesis. Psychosynthesis therapists help people to work with 'sub personalities' or in other words, the different parts of ourselves that are quite normal. This is nothing to do with labels like Schizophrenia. A psychosynthesis therapist would help you to work with this part of you....she is not all of you, only one part that gets activated at night...like an inner critic. You might ask what your inner critic's aims are for you.....she may actually be intending to keep you safe....but she's got a bit out of hand! We all have them...trying to get rid of her won't work. Recognition, acceptance and integration are the keys to being kinder to yourself. She may have served you well as a child but not so well now. Hope this helps a bit.

Try not to get into medication path.If you are prescribed antidepressants or antipsychotics better to know there is a system called tapering to come out of that medication.I strongly suggest you to ignore your voices.If you get into medication path you will loose natural appetite,libido, sleep etc.

Hi Barngirl,

First of all, given that you've had these hallucinations for many years, it's clear that they're not a sign of a brain lesion. These advance very quickly. I do actually know what I'm talking about here.

I had this type of hallucination on a regular basis till I was in my early 60s, and still occasionally get it now, at age 73. It's very annoying, isn't it? I didn't always perceive it as being my own voice, but it was most of the time. It used to say similar things to yours, but usually less threatening. Mostly it would be of the order of: "There's a spider in the bed" or "The house is on fire", but occasionally more scary. I wouldn't actually hear the voice(s) in the normal way, but I'd describe it more as "in the mind's ear".

I also had visual hallucinations when falling asleep - also in the mind's eye, as my eyes would be closed when they occurred. These would be much more threatening, usually sinister figures looming over my bed, accompanied by voices - not my own this time - saying things like: "I'm waiting for you". Guaranteed to keep me awake for hours!

These are called hypnagogic hallucinations, and they're actually nothing to do with mental illness - though not a lot of doctors know that, so it's probably best not to discuss them with your medical advisor if you don't want to end up on antipsychotics for life!

They normally occur in people who suffer regularly from sleep paralysis - which is the case for me. Having hypnagogic hallucinations was always a sure sign that I'd wake up later in the night experiencing the very different, and much scarier, hallucinations of sleep paralysis. I can't say I've ever heard of them occurring in people who don't have SP, but I guess there must be an exception to every rule. (Do you have SP, incidentally?)

Although hypnagogic hallucinations aren't a sign of mental illness, there's no doubt in my mind that they're more frequent, and more severe, in times of stress or anxiety. Ditto SP. In my case they peaked during the last few years of my mother's life, when she was going down to dementia and I couldn't get any help for her and was getting increasingly desperate. I slept in her house for several nights every two weeks, sometimes more often, and the hypnagogic hallucinations could keep me awake all night - not to mention the horrendous SP attacks which inevitably followed them if I did manage to get to sleep. I was 62 when she died, and these hallucinations have tailed off more or less completely in the intervening 11 years. The SP attacks are also becoming less frequent.

I can't give you a lot of practical advice, other than trying to look at what it might be in your life that's stressing you out. Because these hallucinations were part of the SP syndrome in my case, I also found it useful to avoid things that I knew triggered SP attacks in me. In my own case, the main one is getting too warm in bed, though it can be different for everyone. It might also be worth looking at other factors that are acting as triggers. A few examples can be: certain foods or drinks (and especially recreational drugs) taken too late at night; getting overtired; sleeping too close to electronic equipment or an electrical junction box; sleeping under overhead power cables. I'm convinced the latter contributed to events while sleeping in my mother's house, as overhead high-tension cables ran only about 50 feet from the house.

However, the main thing is to try and keep your stress and anxiety levels down - and especially the fear of the hallucinations, of course. It might be worth trying to get some CBT just for your anxiety levels (though I never did) but I'd advise steering clear of discussing the actual hallucinations with a therapist.