While you read this column, imagine that the words you are reading are being spoken aloud by someone else and recited in your ear. Imagine how disturbing that could be. Imagine the alarm you might feel for your own sanity.

Or, if you deem yourself a spiritual person imagine the words you hear in your mind give you special knowledge, accorded to you by divine providence.

That is the story Daniel B. Smith tells in his fascinating new book, Muses, Madmen and Prophets: Rethinking the History of Science and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination.

Smith has his own story to tell, which is how he ended up researching the subject in the first place.

His father heard voices all his life. These voices told his father to do small things like move a cup. Nothing prophetic, or harmful. Still, these voices bothered him. He wouldn't tell his wife about it or his son. He didn't want them to think he was insane.

Then Smith's father discovered that his father had heard voices all his life. The grandfather, as well, never mentioned this to his family. But years later, when the grandfather was retired in Florida, he wrote down his recollections and gave them to his son.

Daniel's father was very angry when he read about this. Had he known, he wouldn't have felt so desperate, so alone. Daniel's father, a respectable lawyer, suffered from depression because of his life-long secret. He even had a nervous breakdown at one point.

Nice voices

The difference between the two men was that Daniel's grandfather liked his voices. They told him which horses to pick at the racetrack and helped him win at gin rummy with his cronies.

Throughout the ages, people have no doubt heard friendly voices as well as vicious, troubling ones. They have probably heard voices that have instructed and enriched them. They have also heard voices that have driven them mad.

You don't have to be schizophrenic to be a voice hearer. This terrible, crippling condition has tormented people throughout recorded history.

By some accounts, about one per cent of people are afflicted, worldwide. Though people can hear voices and still not be tormented in ways that make them retreat into their own fantasy world.

Sometimes it might be hard to tell hallucinations from strong, emphatic self-speech. For instance, many people "hear" the voice of God or conscience, telling them to do (or not do) something.

This internal voice is powerful and can feel authentic. But it is not what specialists would call an auditory hallucination.

Religious injunction

The great religions of the West are filled with accounts of people hearing voices. God talked to Abraham, Noah and Jonah. He talked to Moses at the Burning Bush. The resurrected Jesus talked to Paul on the road to Damascus. The angel Gabriel spoke to the Prophet Muhammed. (The Koran is believed by Muslims to be a recitation of the word of God). Hinduism has a congress of many noisy deities. Aboriginal shamans listen to the voice of gods in plants and wild animals.

Often these prophetic figures didn't want to hear what God or an angel was telling them. Noah runs away from God. Moses tells God to speak to his brother (Aaron could talk to the pharaoh without stuttering).

In his book, Smith tells us that the Catholic tradition especially is filled with saints who hear voices. Joan of Arc defeated English invaders with the help of inner instruction.

Like Smith's grandfather, she liked her hallucinations. They took a common milkmaid and turned her into saintly warrior.

No Jonah's here

Smith himself hears no hallucinations, in spite of his strong family history. But he wanted to experience what it felt like. So he borrowed a tape from a mental health advocacy group called the National Empowerment Centre. Then he went about his day.

These tapes are given to police and hospital workers to try to show them what it's like to be schizophrenic. The voices on them mutter and sputter.

On this day, the voices accompanied Smith while, among other things, he ate his chicken salad sandwich at a restaurant. All told, it was a disconcerting experience.

Smith also tried to induce inner voices through the ancient route of silence. He found an aging hippy who rented out sensory deprivation tanks in his apartment. Smith floated in a bath of warm water in lower Manhattan.

He thought he might have heard something but nothing definitive. He was no Jonah in the belly of a whale. Only a writer conducting an experiment.

Lucky or mad?

Smith tells us it might be hard to hear voices of a distinctly prophetic nature, what with all the noise pollution in our everyday environments.

When the filmmaker Paul Hawker wanted to hear the voice of God (which he called "the Source"), he ascended a mountain in his native New Zealand. He stayed almost 40 days, as he recounts in his book Soul Quest, heard recently on CBC Radio's Tapestry.

While on the mountain, he heard the Source booming in his head, uttering lovely truisms. Still, that was not, clinically, an auditory hallucination. To hear a real, other voice, you have to be lucky or mad.

As for Daniel Smith, he is ambivalent about these voices. He seems both fascinated and wary, no doubt like so many people.

It is tempting to romanticize the experience of hearing voices. Almost 40 years ago, the literary critic Lionel Trilling chided the radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing for glamourizing the so-called madness of the counterculture.

Back in the '60s, holy fools proclaimed their views on street corners, often with the help of psychedelic drugs. Laing argued that many people who had gone mad could be, in fact, saner than normal, conventional folk.

Trilling's view was that anyone who saw real insanity, and the horrible toll it inflicts, would have no patience with this notion.

No doubt there are holy fools out there. And prophets who hear the voice of God or conscience or whatever they wish to call it.

And yes, you can be nostalgic about a dimension of human life that goes missing in this infernal nest of busyness we all seem consumed by.

Some call the absent ingredient spirit or meaning. The author Salmon Rushdie called it the "God-shaped hole."

Then again, some voice-hearers, like Daniel Smith's grandfather, have more amiable directives to deal with. Like the ones that help you pick out the right lottery ticket.

Speaking for myself, I'm happier to be in the tradition of the reluctant prophets. Spare me something portentous during this holiday season. I'd rather have a little inner peace and quiet for now.