I was hired as an engineer managing fiber optic data transport for a cable company a year ago now. Day to day life goes as you might expect for an occupation such as mine; pouring over databases, spreadsheets, and designing fiber routes. Most people would find it terribly boring, but I actually enjoy it for the most part. It's really transcendental to be part of the incessant machine that is the internet. The majority of people don't give half a thought to the technical side of providing cable and internet services, but it's actually rather complicated.
Needless to say, my job function itself is neither stressful or problematic to me. I spend 8 hours a day in a very comfortable chair, at a nice desk in a cubicle with 5 other people who do the same thing I do. I keep headphones on when possible and listen to music when I can to pass the time more quickly.
The building I work in is...well, really awesome. It truly is an architectural achievement. It's very post-modern: most of the building is made of blue-tinted glass, with grey panels elsewhere outside. The floors are Italian marble inside, and the whole thing just feels very expensive. It's all for show, of course, as the company is going to be sold off when the price is right. The CEO is very open about this and says it often. Can't say I blame him. The cable industry isn't doing so well, and we're not staying ahead of the technology curve that other companies like Google or Verizon are standardizing. The building's got all the ammennities I suppose one could want, with a gym, full-service cafe, and best of all...free coffee.
I think you get the point here. I've got it easy as far as a job goes. At least, I did until recently. Now coming to work is complicated to say the least.
One Monday, I came into work feeling particularly groggy and bleary-eyed. I'm not exactly a morning person, and it usually takes one or two cups of coffee to wake me up. I had gotten maybe three hours of sleep the past night, and after my third cup of coffee, I started hating myself for my all-night marathon of Civilization 5 on my PC. I went to the break room near my desk to get yet another cup of coffee, and as I waited for a pot to brew, I noticed something I'd never seen before.
I mean, I've always known that there was a door in this particular break room, but I assumed it was a maintenance closet or something. The thing that I'd never noticed was the placard next to this door. It read “Quiet Room.” The first thing my thoughts drifted to when I read that sign was that it was a padded, white room for employees who temporarily lost their sanity. The pot of coffee I was brewing was going to take five minutes, so I decided to be brave and open the door. Looking back, I really wish I hadn't.
The Quiet Room is small. Maybe a 30 square foot space at the most. There is a small, black leather couch against the wall opposite the door, with a table next to it. Beside the door on one side is a sink and refrigerator. I thought the latter two details were strange until I came to the conclusion that these were here for diabetics or people with other ailments who need to administer medicine that needs to be kept cold. I wouldn't want to inject myself with insulin where other people could see either, I suppose.
Being exhausted as I was, I sat down on the couch while I waited for my liquid caffeine to brew. It was uncharacteristically comfortable. I could have fallen asleep right there if I allowed myself to, and boy did I want to. Sitting on the couch, I noticed that the door had a lock on it, and I knew exactly where I was going to spend my lunch hour later on. I found it regretful that I hadn't known about this room sooner. There have been far too many days where I would have loved to have a place to take a nap at work.
I went back to my desk, fresh coffee in hand, and continued working, albeit at a snail's pace compared to my normal work ethic. I took my lunch hour around 12 PM, and I made a bee-line to The Quiet Room. I promptly locked the door, took my shoes off, turned the light off and laid down on the couch. I immediately felt extremely comfortable. Like every optimal condition for sleeping was being perfectly met. There is a single vent in the ceiling that keeps the room just warm enough to make you sleepy, but it's never too hot. When the lights are off, the only reprieve from the embalming darkness is a small sliver of light coming in from under the door.
I forgot to mention this, but there are white noise generators throughout this building. It takes a little getting used to at first, but in a workplace that houses 350 people across 3 floors, they really are necessary. What I didn't understand was why there was one in this room. It seemed louder than the others in the building somehow. I figured it was just the small space amplifying its effects and wrote it off. After processing all of these details, I fell asleep and didn't wake for two hours. Let me just tell you something about myself : I'm a very light sleeper. If I set an alarm before I go to sleep, it wakes me up immediately every time. I slept right through this one, which naturally had me stressed out. I got up from the couch and turned on the light.
This part is a little hard for me to explain, but I'll do my best. When my eyes adjusted to the light everything seemed... different. Have you ever played one of those “edgy” indie video games where they over use pastel colors like it's going out of style? That's kind of how this was. It was almost like all of the edges of objects were blurred around the edges. I blinked a few times and rubbed my eyes, but nothing changed. I was a little alarmed, as this has never happened to me before. I shrugged it off after a moment, because I was an hour late from my lunch and my vision was the least of my worries. I have to say, I felt rested which was an improvement from the morning I had. I explained away my extended absence to my boss when I got back to my desk and got back to work.
The problem with my vision did not subside for the rest of the day. I didn't want to sound crazy, and quite frankly, I didn't want to deal with whatever might be causing this. I went to bed that night, and I slept a fitful, dreamless sleep. Another detail about myself: I always dream, every single night, and I sleep like a baby.
I awoke the next morning, and my first thoughts went to my vision. I rubbed the night from my eyes and my vision was back to normal, but I felt wrong somehow. I wasn't as tired as yesterday but I felt like something was missing. I couldn't quite put my finger on exactly what it was.
I went through my normal routine and drove to work. Halfway through the morning I started to feel tired again. I chalked it up to still not being caught up on sleep. I decided to spend my lunch break in The Quiet Room again. This time I brought headphones in with me, since the white noise generator was so loud in there. I flipped on Beethoven's “String Quarter in C-Sharp,” my go-to sleeping music, and tried to fall asleep. I was maybe 5 minutes into my music when I noticed something strange. Even with my very expensive noise cancelling headphones, I could still hear the white noise generator. I turned off my music, got up, and turned on the lights.
I could have sworn the device was flush with the ceiling tiles when I gave it any attention my first visit to the room. Now it was hanging from a metal wire maybe seven feet off the ground. The sound it produced was so loud now it was almost deafening. Determined to fall asleep, I put my headphones back on and turned them up even louder. Only seconds after doing so, a cacophony of beautiful symphony and maddening static continued to bombard my ears. Not only was the generator very loud, but there was something different about this one.
The sound was almost rhythmic. I'm going out on a limb here, but if anyone reading this has heard of Binaural beats, it sounded just like that. Here's a link if you want to see what i'm talking about.(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAyA7rfyF38)
These beats are supposed to stimulate your brain to feel certain emotions depending on how the sounds are manipulated. I've tried it before and I used to think it was a load of crap. I will say that as soon as I sort of realized that's what I was hearing, I became irrationally agitated. There's something about being subjected to that kind of noise that can put one on edge, or at least that's what my rational, conscious brain was telling me.
At this point, I started to feel not like myself at all. I felt like I was experiencing this as an outsider; like my body was just an avatar I was influencing but not controlling. I can't explain why I did this, as the white noise generator was both setting me on edge and thoroughly annoying me, but I turned the lights off, laid down on the couch, and fell asleep.
I didn't wake up until 6 PM. My shift ends at 5.
As you can probably guess, I woke up not only completely freaking out, but my vision was distorted again. Only this time, it was different. I looked down at my hands and they looked...wrong. There was nothing actually wrong about them physically, I suppose, but they made me angry. I remember thinking that they were too blurry and that upset me. I looked around the room and I couldn't see the edges of anything. The room didn't look like the square that it was anymore, just a continuous plane of white. The sink and mini fridge were just blots of metallic gray.
I looked at my phone. Using a phone in this visual state was almost impossible, but after a little while I was able to figure out what was happening on the screen. I had two missed calls and several texts from my boss and girlfriend. My boss was angry and my girlfriend was concerned. I never worked late. I called her immediately to bend the truth a little and tell her that a meeting ran late, and then called my boss to conjure up some lie about how I had a case of explosive vomiting and had to go to the hospital. I figured he wouldn't question that.
Once these issues, seeming very insignificant at the time, were taken care of, I brought the current situation back to focus. It was only then that I heard it. I wouldn't call it a voice exactly. It was more like something that sounded like a voice, but wasn't really saying anything. Like distorted mumbling, I guess. It was unsettling, that I was sure of. I wasn't as disturbed as I should have been, I suppose. It's not like any of these circumstances were normal. It's almost like I was expecting to hear this “voice.”
I had a sudden, compulsive urge to leave the room, and I followed it. And everything went black.
I woke up two days later in a hospital to the beeping and whirring of machines. The first thing I felt was not pain or panic, but anger. I felt so very angry, like I've never felt in my 22 years of life. I looked around the hospital room and saw my girlfriend asleep in a chair a few feet away. I still can't explain why I did this, but I screamed at her. I screamed at her to get the hell out of the room. She was startled to say the least and she seemed confused when she came to. I screamed as loud as my lungs could bear, and she tried to calm me down. I'm still horrified to recall this part, but I lashed out at her when she came near. I hit her square in the nose and broke it just like that. I have never laid a hand on my girlfriend. I've never even thought about it. The worst part is that in the moment it felt right. It felt like what I was supposed to do. By the time I could do any more damage, she had run crying from the room to get a nurse. Three nurses, a security guard, and a doctor charged into the room to calm me down. I thrashed at their attempts to sedate me. God, did I rage at them. I felt hatred like I've never known in my life. I landed a few blows on the security guard before they stuck a needle in my forearm. Then it all went black again.
I woke up late that night with constraints around my arms and legs. I was confused. I was scared. I was all of the emotions you might feel in a situation like this. Most notably, I was calm this time, but I felt tired. I felt tired like I hadn't slept in weeks. My girlfriend was nowhere to be seen, the same security guard I had landed a few blows on in the seat she had occupied next to me. When he saw me come to, he stood, expecting me to be just as violent as before, but then calmed when I didn't try to attack him again.
The details of the next few hours were blurry due to the after-effects of the sedation, but in the end the doctor, nurses, and security guard decided to not press any charges against me. I was given a full psychiatrist examination, and upon clearing it, I was let go from the hospital. My girlfriend didn't say a word to me the whole night. She couldn't even bear to look me in the eyes, and I couldn't blame her. I didn't know what was happening to me. I decided to take the next week off from work to recover from the incident.
I explained the past week's events to my girlfriend, and she didn't seem to buy any of it. The only thing I was successful in doing was convincing her that I was losing my mind. She's scared of me now, too. I would have thought the same thing if someone told me that they heard voices in a speaker at their job and it caused them to lose it. But it happened, and I'm not insane.
I don't know if I'm brave or stupid, but I still work the same job. I tried to find another at first, but nothing in the pay grade I was looking for was a good fit. People at work don't talk to me like they used to. Now I'm that weird guy who blacked out while taking a nap in a glorified broom closet and didn't show up for two weeks afterward. I'm different now, too. It's like I've been sucked dry of all the happiness in my life. I'm not enthusiastic about my work anymore. My relationship isn't doing so well.
The worst part is, I can't warn anyone about that room. How could I? I'd get fired if I told people what really happened. I mean, how do you even explain that to someone else? “Hey, don't go into the room with the comfy couch on the second floor. You'll go ape-shit fucking crazy and try to kill people if you do.”
I'm not sure what to do or think about any of this. I can't tell if this was a supernatural thing. It might almost be easier to explain to myself if it was. Ghosts or demons or something are almost easier to comprehend. Those things are “understood” to some extend. The possibility that sound can manipulate the human mind into doing horrible things...that's a much more disturbing thought that I'd rather not explore any further. Even more disturbing, I've realized, is that these white noise generators are everywhere in this building. There's not a single day that I don't consider finding somewhere else to work and telling everyone here about what happened to me. They deserve to know.
I tore the sign off the wall that reads “Quiet Room.” Let people think it's just a maintenance room. It's the most I can do for anyone at this point.
Submitted February 07, 2016 at 01:36PM by Imsoclastic http://ift.tt/1W1i5sC nosleep
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