in the in-between

The house where I spent most of my childhood didn’t have central air. I slept with my windows open and a loud box fan pointed toward my bed.

Most nights, I heard music in the fan. It sounded like a distant, ethereal orchestra. Sometimes, a dinner party.

There’s a name for this. Apophenia, Audio Preidolia, or Musical Ear Syndrome.

The scientific basis for the phenomenon is interesting, but also has very little to do with the experience itself. What it felt like to me as I lay in my bed on hot summer nights listening to the music was that I could hear another realm. I was suspended in between the heavy dense world of every day and this other, lighter world.

I’ve had other auditory experiences, often during the space in between sleeping and waking.

In addition to music, I’ve overheard boisterous conversations and heard voices speaking directly to me.

I enjoy these encounters and have never once suspected that I was hallucinating or experiencing psychosis. The scientific explanation, that the brain has a tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things, is fair enough, and comforting I suppose, but does not dilute the magic of moment.

Once, when I was walking alone in the woods in Wales, I heard nature music. It was tightly braided harmony, choral music, voices, that seemed to be sung from the moss and leaf - the trees. It was as real as any music I’d ever heard, unmistakable, and other worldly.

I will never forget that walk and will always think of it as the time I heard the fairies singing.

Of course most of the time when people talk about hearing spirit - guides, god, souls - they’re not talking about actual physical hearing. They’re talking about an internal, in the mind sort of hearing. I can’t imagine how awful it would be if that constant inner narrator was actually speaking out loud.

Recently, I was falling asleep and heard the fan music.

It was gentle and sweet.

I was reminded of all the music I heard in the in-between when I was a kid, in my pink bedroom out in the country.

I heard other things, too - cicadas, crickets, and the disconcerting booming sound every night at sunset that reverberated through my body. That one was something from the Armory. It’s something they’re doing at the Armory, was the primary explanation of unexplained phenomenon of my childhood, but that’s another story.

This story is about melody and metaphysics.