The Dorm Whispers

For the longest time, I convinced myself there had to be a perfectly reasonable explanation for what I was hearing. University dorms are noisy places, people stay up late, walls are thin, and random sounds carry through the halls. That's what I kept telling myself every night. But after a few weeks, I realized whatever was happening wasn't coming from outside my room.

It always started the same way. I'd be lying in bed, right on the edge of falling asleep, when I'd notice what sounded like several people having a quiet conversation somewhere inside the room. I could never make out actual words, just the rhythm of voices speaking softly to one another. It sounded as if two or three people were standing in the corner, trying not to wake me. The strange part was that the moment I became fully alert or sat upright, the voices immediately stopped. Not all at once, but gradually, fading into faint whispers that seemed to linger for a few seconds before disappearing completely.

At first I blamed everything I could think of. I unplugged my laptop, turned off my phone, and even checked to make sure my alarm clock wasn't picking up a radio signal. There was nothing in the room capable of producing sound. I asked people in neighboring rooms if they stayed awake talking late at night, but they all insisted they usually went to bed before I did. Even on nights when the entire floor was silent, I'd still hear those same distant conversations beginning the moment I started drifting off to sleep.

The part that always unsettled me wasn't the voices themselves, it was the timing. They never happened while I was fully awake during the day. They only appeared during those few moments between being awake and asleep, almost as if they were waiting for me to let my guard down. Every time I'd jolt awake, they would immediately become quieter, like whoever was speaking had noticed I could hear them. I eventually moved out of that dorm for unrelated reasons, and the voices stopped completely. Looking back, I still don't know whether it was some strange sleep phenomenon or something I'll never be able to explain. All I know is that, for an entire semester, it felt like someone was holding conversations in my room every night, and they always stopped the instant I listened too closely.