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Bleuler wrote, “Almost every schizophrenic who is hospitalized hears ‘voices.’ ” But he emphasized that the reverse did not hold—that hearing voices did not necessarily denote schizophrenia. In the popular imagination, though, hallucinatory voices are almost synonymous with schizophrenia—a great misconception, for most people who do hear voices are not schizophrenic.

Many people report hearing voices which are not particularly directed at them, as Nancy C. wrote:

I hallucinate conversations on a regular basis, often as I am falling asleep at night. It seems to me that these conversations are real and are actually taking place between real people, at the very time I’m hearing them, but are occurring somewhere else. I hear couples arguing, all kinds of things. They are not voices I can identify, they are not people I know. I feel like I’m a radio, tuned into someone else’s world. (Though always an American-English-speaking world.) I can’t think of any way to regard these experiences except as hallucinations. I am never a participant; I am never addressed. I am just listening in.

“Hallucinations in the sane” were well recognized in the nineteenth century, and with the rise of neurology, people sought to understand more clearly what caused them. In England in the 1880s, the Society for Psychical Research was founded to collect and investigate reports of apparitions or hallucinations, especially those of the bereaved, and many eminent scientists—physicists as well as physiologists and psychologists—joined the society (William James was active in the American branch). Telepathy, clairvoyance, communication with the dead, and the nature of a spirit world became the subjects of systematic investigation.

These early researchers found that hallucinations were not uncommon in the general population. Their 1894 “International Census of Waking Hallucinations in the Sane” examined the occurrence and nature of hallucinations experienced by normal people in normal circumstances (they took care to exclude anyone with obvious medical or psychiatric problems). Seventeen thousand people were sent a single question:

Have you ever, when believing yourself to be completely awake, had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living being or inanimate object, or of hearing a voice, which impression, as far as you could discover, was not due to an external physical cause?

More than 10 percent responded in the affirmative, and of those, more than a third heard voices. As John Watkins noted in his book Hearing Voices, hallucinated voices “having some kind of religious or supernatural content represented a small but significant minority of these reports.” Most of the hallucinations, however, were of a more quotidian character.

Perhaps the commonest auditory hallucination is hearing one’s own name spoken—either by a familiar voice or an anonymous one. Freud, writing in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, remarked on this:

During the days when I was living alone in a foreign city—I was a young man at the time—I quite often heard my name suddenly called by an unmistakable and beloved voice; I then noted down the exact moment of the hallucination and made anxious enquiries of those at home about what had happened at that time. Nothing had happened.¹⁸

The voices that are sometimes heard by people with schizophrenia tend to be accusing, threatening, jeering, or persecuting. By contrast, the voices hallucinated by the “normal” are often quite unremarkable, as Daniel Smith brings out in his book Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Hearing Voices and the Borders of Sanity. Smith’s own father and grandfather heard such voices, and they had very different reactions. His father started hearing voices at the age of thirteen, Smith writes:

These voices weren’t elaborate, and they weren’t disturbing in content. They issued simple commands. They instructed him, for instance, to move a glass from one side of the table to another or to use a particular subway turnstile. Yet in listening to them and obeying them his interior life became, by all reports, unendurable.

Smith’s grandfather, by contrast, was nonchalant, even playful, in regard to his hallucinatory voices. He described how he tried to use them in betting at the racetrack. (“It didn’t work, my mind was clouded with voices telling me that this horse could win or maybe this one is ready to win.”) It was much more successful when he played cards with his friends. Neither the grandfather nor the father had strong supernatural inclinations; nor did they have any significant mental illness. They just heard unremarkable voices concerned with everyday things—as do millions of others.