Good news: I'm not crazy.

For about the last two weeks, I've been feeling a little anxious about driving places. Recently, each time I've been in the car, I've been hearing...something. Something that sounds like a voice, but I can't tell what it's saying. It's a muffled, low sound that for all the world sounds like a man's voice. This sound is not loud, and a lot of times it's drowned out by the sound of general traffic, the radio or Owen chattering away, but at other times, particularly at night when it's quieter out, it's undeniably there. The first time I heard it, I was listening to NPR and using my GPS, so I thought it was a malfunction on the radio. I thought that there was some muffled recording error on the talk show I was listening to, and forgot all about it...until I heard it again on my way home. That's odd, I thought. They usually are pretty good about picking up and correcting technicial errors on air. Then, I promptly forgot about it again.

Then next time I heard it, I was listening to a CD, but using the GPS. This time, I figured it must be the GPS doing something weird, like repeating directions sotto voix or some other malfucntion. But what was it saying? To find out, I held the GPS up to my ear while driving to try and figure out what it was doing. Here's a tip: Don't do this. I was listening so intently that when the woman who normally barks directions at me spoke up to tell me to turn left, it was directly in my ear and scared me half to death. I almost caused a 10 car pileup.

After repeated experiments with and without the GPS, I realized it was happening even in it's absense. I looked all over the dash to see if something was wrong with the radio. I started driving around with the radio turned unescessarily loud. And I started wondering if maybe I was even hearing the voice at all. My job isn't excessively clinical, but heck, I am a licsensed and practicing mental health professional. If there's one thing I absorbed from two years of dozing through grad school it's that hearing voices is Not Good. With a capital N and a capital G.

So it got to the point where I was approaching the car pretty warily. I even skimmed parts of my grad school DSM-IV just to see if it said anything about a location-specific auditory hallucination (it did not).

Until today. I left work a little early, and on my way home I took route 9 instead of the Jamaicaway like I normally do because I wanted to swing by Barnes and Noble for a few minutes. As those of you who are local can attest, route 9 at 4 on a Friday is a nightmare, and it ended up that I had to stop short behind a truck that decided to make a break across the lanes from the Chestnut Hill Mall driveway. The car lurched forward a bit and all of a sudden, in an extremely clear, deep male voice, I heard:

RECTANGLE.

Rectangle?

For a second I was confused. My auditory hallucination was....a man saying "rectangle"? bizzare.

I pulled into the Barnes and noble parking lot, and the mystery was revealed. Tuesday before last, I had to bring Owen into my office for a little bit for a short meeting I couldn't miss. I brought along some toys for him to play with, which I took back out of the car when we got home except for a shape naming puzzle which apparently got stuck under the backseat. When I stopped short, it dislodged and was out in the open, so I could listen to it malfunction all the way home.

rectangle!
rectangle!
rectangle!