posted January 25, 2010 02:58 PM         

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Nearly 1 in 10 seven- to eight-year-olds hears voices that aren't really there, according to a new study.

But most children who hear voices don't find them troubling or disruptive to their thinking, the study team found. "These voices in general have a limited impact in daily life," Agna A. Bartels-Velthuis of University Medical Center Groningen in The Netherlands wrote in an email to Reuters Health.

And parents whose children hear voices should not be overly concerned, she added. "In most cases the voices will just disappear. I would advise them to reassure their child and to watch him or her closely."

Up to 16 percent of mentally healthy children and teens may hear voices, the researchers note in the British Journal of Psychiatry. While hearing voices can signal a heightened risk of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders in later life, they add, the "great majority" of young people who have these experiences never become mentally ill.

To further investigate how common these "auditory vocal hallucinations" are and whether they are associated with developmental and behavioral factors, the researchers looked at 3,870 Groningen primary schoolers. All were asked whether they had heard "one or more voices that only you and no one else could hear" in the past year.

Nine percent of the children answered yes. Only 15 percent of these children said the voices caused them serious suffering, and 19 percent said the voices interfered with their thinking. Boys and girls were equally likely to report hearing voices, but girls were more likely to report suffering and anxiety due to the voices.

While past studies have linked complications in the womb or during early infancy with the likelihood of hearing voices, Bartels-Velthuis and her team found no such relationship. The researcher said that she and her colleagues had expected that hearing voices would be more common among urban children than among their rural peers, "but to our surprise, the contrary was the case in our sample. We have no explanation for this finding."

Although urban children were less likely to hear voices, they were more troubled by them, the researchers found. They were more likely to report hearing several voices at once, voices speaking for a longer time, and voices that interfered with their thinking.

This greater severity suggests that the urban children who heard voices might be at higher risk of going on to develop psychotic illness, the researchers say.

Bartels-Velthuis and her team are now conducting a five-year follow-up study of the children to see how the voice-hearing plays out and what effect, if any, it has on behavior.

SOURCE: The British Journal of Psychiatry, January 2010.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100125/hl_nm/us_children_voices

Raymond

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"Nothing matters absolutely;
the truth is it only matters relatively"

posted January 25, 2010 05:03 PM         

All of this could fit with Indigo,Crystal personality type which seems mainly to be about metaphysically oriented types that include many that are neurodivergent.

any ways..I don't trust psychiatry for obvious reasons that I have discussed about in the past.

As long as psychiatry exists,I keep any metaphysical experiences that I have to myself.

Raymond

------------------
"Nothing matters absolutely;
the truth is it only matters relatively"

posted January 25, 2010 06:30 PM         

quote:

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every child should have at least one imaginary friend and if they are not really imaginary, all the better...i agree with lexx that the discouragement and negation of these experiences is criminal. every child i have known has had SOME sort of communication with the "other side" at some point in their younger lives.

whether they are remembering other lives or communicating with other dimensions i say let them!!

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Raymond

quote:

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As long as psychiatry exists,I keep any metaphysical experiences that I have to myself.

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posted January 26, 2010 02:16 PM         

Since I was young, I would sometimes hear someone's words immediately before they spoke them. I never was amazed or freaked out about this. When it was happening, I would feel numb - very passive and receptive. When it ended, I'd go back to feeling like myself & wouldn't give any thought to those telepathic moments.

Then when I was in my early 20s I had a dream at the same time the event I was dreaming about was occurring. This event was something unique, something that only happened that one time & that I had no way of knowing would be occurring. After that dream, the rational side of my mind finally fully accepted that there's a universal consciousness that we're all within. Our individual self can tap into that consciousness (or it can tap into us).

I think that's also how synastry works, but I won't get into that now.

Last year I heard a voice when no one else was around. That's the first time that happened to me. It felt real, but it's impossible to prove it as real w/o someone outside myself to confirm it.

Something that's helped me accept all this is that in the past few years I've become close friends with 2 people who have similar experiences. They're both sane. One has a Pisces Moon; the other has Sun cnj Neptune (I have that too).

Just last week I was at work and heard a colleague call my name from another room. I walked in and said, "Hey, you called?" She was visibly freaked. "I didn't say anything but your timing is crazy! I was thinking about you and just about to call you!"

posted January 26, 2010 04:40 PM         

i remember my daughter freaking people out by finishing their sentences for them at an early age. her preschool teacher - fortunately not too much in the box! - was flabbergasted by some of the things she said...

posted January 26, 2010 04:45 PM         

Your thread has jogged my memory & brought the present into focus.

My son has just had his 9th birthday on the 8th Jan & with that has come some new developments....

This week he has started running to me asking me why I called him ( I didn't).

What is happening to him has happened to me when I was young & kept happening all the way into my 20's. I had no one to teach me about it & suffered great fear & confusion about losing my mind.

What I know now is that my angels & guides where trying to get my attention when my mind was in a meditative stage ie; vacuuming the house etc. With my son it happens when he is exercising on the Wii fit.

What does make me happy is that I can guide him & calm his fears because he is a very sensitive boy with some wonderful gifts.

posted January 26, 2010 04:45 PM         

Also, I have several times heard my mum call my name, and I made it a habit to pick up the phone, call her and ask if she had called for me.
And she would always tell me that my Dad and she had either talked about me, or that she had been thinking of me, wanting to call me.

It doesn`t even feel weird to me. It`s some kind of very natural easy communication. Very quick and direct.

But I cannot really direct it, if it happens. Last time someone I heard someone call my name, I was in a hotel, and I really heard that guy call my name; a guy who doesn`t even know my name. lol
Turns out later, that he coincidentally had been in the same hotel as me, at the same night. lol

posted January 26, 2010 07:37 PM         

In addition to other stuff, I was annoying others because they said I was responding to what they were thinking rather than what they were saying, and I recall saying (totally trashed), "Oh, I wonder how you were speaking without your lips moving." A sober guy who lived nearby was freaked because he claimed I was reading his mind (and I did feel certain he left fast because he was scared I was about to discover some dark secret) and attributed it to my being possessed by demons.

That was pretty minor compared to everything else though. One odd bit was how there was an "understanding" so that it was like someone or something Greater was speaking (without words) with me, and I kinda felt it was me, but not a part of me that was normally me if that makes sense. It would be like memories would pop up to be examined by someone else and I was telepathically urged by this force/being/aspect to look at it and say what I observed. In some ways memories were made better for it, and I also realized that I loved learning but hated school in large part because school got in the way of my learning.

posted January 26, 2010 11:08 PM         

I've always sensed spirits and just known they are out there since I've been really young.

Speaking of people discouraging what we see, hear and sense...a couple of different people said it was "the wiring" when I told them I had a ghost who was turning the lights on the stairs on when I knew I had turned them off. I just mentally said "nevermind" to myself after they tried to disprove what I told them.

I'm very empathic and sense a lot. Always have. I also tend to turn streetlights and parking garage lights on when I walk by.

posted January 27, 2010 03:18 PM         

For me:

*Neptune cnj Sun, trine Moon, semisquare Asc (orb with Asc is just a few minutes)
*Pisces SN
*Pluto (chart ruler) cnj Sun/Moon mp in the 12th house
*Uranus in the 1st cnj Mercury, exactly square Moon.
*Pallas in a 0 degree t-square with Moon and Uranus (apex). Pallas exactly trine Pluto, cnj Psyche, sextile Neptune.

posted January 27, 2010 03:32 PM         

I have nothing there, but I do have Saturn exactly square it. Saturn rules my 3rd house and exactly sextiles my Mercury.

Oh, and my progressed new moon has been there since I was 10 and will be there until my late 30's. Whatever that means.

DD -
Don't you have stuff going on at the SGC too? Neptune on your ASC surely contributes too.

quote:

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And I was feeling like the world was behind a veil and everything somehow slowed down and I also would have this feeling of numbness, until the moment was gone

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Love that! That perfectly describes how it feels for me too.

posted January 27, 2010 03:35 PM         

quote:

---

One odd bit was how there was an "understanding" so that it was like someone or something Greater was speaking (without words) with me, and I kinda felt it was me, but not a part of me that was normally me if that makes sense.

---

Ok, if you don't have a strong Neptune, I'll eat my socks!

I'm glad you brought up drugs. Sometimes I wonder if drugs are a shortcut to a real mystical experience. Like you hearing people's thoughts. The wall between you and everything else was diminished. Chemicals bathing your brain weren't making you feel as if that was happening; it really was happening.

And that's what can make drugs feel so good, because they bring us so intensely to that mystical state that in regular life feels just out of reach.

Maybe the potential trouble starts because drugs bring us there dishonestly. It gives us the physical correlation of the mystical experience, so that we can have that state of mind.

Going about it honestly, we'd create that state of mind ourselves - produce our own drugs, so to speak - and then feel the high that goes with that state. If the mind isn't really ready and directing that experience, the experience may be "real" but it's not true. People can lose their selves to chasing after that state, because they don't realize that they don't need the drugs to get there. They don't recognize that state as always being within them.

posted January 27, 2010 03:47 PM         

Jane,

you are me, aren`t you?

It`s strange, I sometimes seem to operate from some place, that is neither really located in the spiritual sphere (if it was, I would be dead, I think, or astral travelling), nor in the physical realm.
Like last thursday and then the whole weekend. People even looked at me as if I was a ghost. lol

And then sometimes, usually when I had been taking a nap in a streetcar, and I get out of it, I sometimes feel like the world I am looking on is almost surreal. It`s difficult to explain.

But I was like you, Jane. I let my spiritual experiences exist in the realm of night (my dreams) and mind, and I tried anything to avoid letting spiritual experiences somehow touch my physical life. But for some time now, those two "worlds" seemed to have merged.

astrological:

Sun exactly conjunct Mercury on the GC, sextile Psyche in Aquarius in 3rd house

Neptune conjunct Mars, NN and ASC, and squaring Jupiter in Pisces in 3rd house
Jupiter in Pisces rules my ASC, too.
Mars is in 12th house and rules 4th house.

Ruler of 12t house is Pluto, which sits on the MC, sextile Neptune and NN and squaring Venus.

posted January 27, 2010 04:28 PM         

Yin -
What do you mean by "see" things? Like spirits or premonitions?
I've never experienced anything like that. My "sensitivity" (I don't know what to call this) is primarily feeling and secondly aural, not at all visual. Well, except for that dream, but that was more tapping into someone else's mind.

The hours of fun I will have studying which astro aspects go with being visual or aural! *rubs hands with glee*

DD -
But I was like you, Jane..

Duh.

Yes, I know what you mean (of course) about that disorientation when returning to the physical. Transitioning back into the active, hustling bustling world can feel funny. Not that the quieter, spiritual sense ever goes away.

posted January 27, 2010 05:03 PM         

I think there is a Super Galactic centre, somewhere in Libra, I believe.

And yes, getting back into the "real" world is not always a smooth transition, but I feel that I carry more and more of my spiritual experiences into the physical dimension, too.

For visuals - if you like asteroids, try Merlin and Aura.

My Merlin is conjunct Sun and Mercury, sextile Psyche