A Silent Explosion

MY MIND PLAYING TRICKS ON ME

I once read about a study that found that a surprisingly high proportion of the 'normal' population reports having heard voices at least once.  Not inside their heads, but 'actual' voices, seemingly heard with the ears.  This is entirely credible, as it's happened to me, too -- and not once but a few times, as I remember.  Not conversations or sentences, and certainly not commands to pick up a heavy blunt object and nail the nearest person with it,^^ but just single, incomprehensible syllables shouted close to my ear, almost like a bark.  Just once though, I thought I heard my name spoken.

Then there was this other episode.  I don't know if it belongs in the same category as hearing voices, but anyway it was memorably strange.  I was lying in bed.  Whether waiting to fall asleep or just waking from sleep, I don't remember, but suddenly there was an explosion;  an intense blue-white light flashed, dazzling my eyes;  I was thrown like a rag doll, perhaps a couple of feet straight up into the air, fell back onto the bed, bounced, and fell back again.  There was a kind of throbbing sensation as I lay there, and I felt the bed waving and vibrating under me.  All without any noise whatsoever;  that's how I knew it was a subjective experience, not an actual disaster -- but what an odd hypnagogic/hypnopompic hallucination, if that's what it was.  Oh, and that old man image (Doctor Lao?^) is from one of my own paintings.

EDIT (March 4, 2012):  Actually, something like this has been written about before.  I don't know why I didn't remember it when I first wrote this post, but Robert A. Monroe, in chapter 12 of his autobiographical classic of occult literature, Journeys Out of the Body (1971), describes an incident that sounds very much like this.  He wrote that right after he lay down in bed, an explosion took place that hurled him clear across the room and left him tingling all over as if he'd been shocked with electricity.  Without a sound.  At first he thought there had been a real accident in the house, but then he looked up, saw himself still quietly lying in bed, and realized it had happened to his 'astral body',