Echoes of Another Dimension: On Auditory Hallucinations and Exploding Head Syndrome

There appears to be nothing in the world more difficult to understand than the tool we use to understand the world, the mind. When we are alone, are we really alone? For some people, they’re never really alone. There is a chorus of anomalous noises and disembodied voices that follows them, even interacts and communicates with them. Is this the crosstalk of neurocircuits or the scratches and whispers of demons and guardian angels? Disease or somehow the echo of another dimension? Auditory hallucinations or false perceptions of sound involve the experience and sensation of words or noises that have no real origin in the outside world and are considered separate from the person's regular mental processes. Vanadium features video explorations of the many fascinations of Christopher Rankin. See more at: www.christopherrankin.net Conspiracy Brothers on YouTube Instagram @vanadiumpodcast @conspiracybrothers Twitter @realchrisrankin Christopher Rankin is a scientist and the author of Enter the Uncreated Night, Ann Marie's Asylum (Volume One: Master and Apprentice), Creating Monsters and his latest novel, Break the Bastion. He studied engineering at Rutgers University and received a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Enter the Uncreated Night Psychologist Oscar Loste is facing the most confusing and frightening case of his career. Six-year-old Beth Bardo is displaying bizarre behavior, including interaction with an imaginary friend she calls Mister Smiler. This invented character supplies Beth with an impossible degree of knowledge about everything from science to ancient cultures to Oscar’s own secrets. The little girl’s parents, a highly-educated couple who also happen to be one of the wealthiest in the country, seem as bewildered as Oscar over Beth. The more he gets to know the little girl and her family, the more Oscar slips into chaos. Self-medication with a mysterious cough syrup recently taken off the market is plaguing him with strange hallucinations and fueling his obsession with the case. As the chilling truth about Beth and Mister Smiler unfolds during her therapy sessions, Oscar must face consequences beyond his imagination. www.amazon.com/Enter-Uncreated-Night-Christopher-Rankin-ebook/dp/B00PMY57KM/ Break the Bastion Morgan Battle grows up in the shadow of the Bastion, the barrier between what remains of civilization and the void. A wall of titanium climbing over four-thousand feet tall, the Bastion is the world’s grandest structure and all that’s left to protect America’s East Coast from the ocean, which has become humanity’s most dreaded monster. Global climate change and fracking have reshaped the Earth’s landscape and raised the Atlantic over a thousand feet. The Bastion has held steady against the abyss for over seventy years. Morgan lives in the slums at the base of the colossal structure and he’s been chosen by its mysterious architect for a secret experiment, known as Strix. He meets the two other fourteen-year-old subjects, beautiful but brooding Callista and Lucas, a bullied boy afflicted with a puzzling and incurable illness. The experiment brings their lives together in extraordinary ways as they race to solve a frightening mystery and stop something sinister on the horizon. www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01KKUXMOU/ Creating Monsters In modern Philadelphia, where a deep economic depression has left the city near collapse and most of its inhabitants in gruesome poverty, Mitchell Gray, a twenty-year-old graduate student in a beleaguered university physics department, spends most of his time playing piano and touring the city’s worst slums in stolen cars. He is a technical virtuoso whose scientific ideas challenge the foundations of his field but he lives in hiding from one of the world's most powerful billionaires who is obsessed with Mitchell and determined to capitalize on his strange inventions. When he falls in love with an older woman, the wife of a wealthy pharmaceutical executive, their relationship inspires him with a mad plan to use his creations to change the world. With the help of a brilliant and neurotic chemistry student named Charlie Nolan and technology so advanced that it resembles magic, Mitchell devises horrifying yet harmless schemes and supernatural hoaxes, causing an uproar in the city. His nights as a modern day robin hood also raise the alarm of some of the real monsters in Philadelphia, including a mysterious child murderer rumored to possess supernatural powers, known only as "The Demon." Christopher Rankin's debut novel is a haunting story of love, friendship and survival in a world of revolution. www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006W41EYE/