Dear Julia:

The other day I was on my way to the grocery store with my cousin when all of a sudden on the outside of my right ear, I started to hear bells ringing! The ringing continued on and off for a good forty-five minutes. At times the tones would be different, some ringing higher and lower than others. The grand finale went off with a sound of a dong ringing in my ear. I have had direct and indirect voice contact before. In fact, as I'm writing this, I'm being reminded that I was once awakened by bells that sounded like alarms going off all around my head. Would this be my spirit guides warning me about something, or just a friendly reminder that they are near? Love and Light!
Brigette

Dear Brigette:

While many people have had similar experiences, naturally you'll want to rule out any potential medical reason for this ringing in your ears before pondering the various metaphysical possibilities.

I think you should ask yourself what you associate with these particular sounds, as there may be a personal reason this particular sign is being used. Do these bells sounds familiar in any way? If not, what do you associate with ringing bells in general? Who do you associate with ringing bells?

Meditate and just let your mind wander, paying attention to any thoughts that come up. For example, if you see a mental image of the church you attended when you were a child, it may be that someone you knew from that church is in Spirit and trying to get your attention, or it may be that you are in need of spiritual community and being called to find a church or group to participate in. It could be that someone you knew who is in Spirit now was a bell ringer of some kind, or loved to hear church bells ringing or something like that.

This could also be a sign from a past life. Let's say in a past life you were very devout and were often called to go to church by the ringing of the bells. Hearing bells now may be a sign from your higher self that you need to give more time and attention to your spiritual life, or it could simply be a past life memory beginning to rise to the surface.

This memory could have been touched off by all sorts of things in your present day life. It could be as simple as you reaching the same age now that you were when something important happened in this past life. It could be that you've met someone from that past life or are having an issue from that life come up again. Perhaps your cousin was with you in that past life, and said something seemingly innocuous as you were heading to the grocery store that triggered this memory.

Bells are traditionally used to call people to come, to communicate with people, to warn of danger or to wake people up. Thus hearing bells ring is often a sign that we are being spiritually called in some way, or need to stop and pay attention to what's happening around us or beneath the surface. Since you were driving when you heard these bells, they may have been designed to warn you to pay attention to what was happening around you. As what you describe sounds like cathedral bells, however, I'm more inclined to take a spiritual view of this experience.

Often people hear bells ringing like this when a spirit guide is trying to get their attention. While they may telepathically send us this sound in order to ring us up, it can also be a natural byproduct of a sudden shift in the psychic atmosphere or a shift in our own vibration as a result of their attempted contact.

In general, when we hear disembodied bells ringing, they are designed to get us to pay attention to what is happening deep within or on a subtle level. Whether spirit guides or our own higher selves are behind it, we need to stop and get quiet so we can hear their messages.

When loved ones cause this sort of phenomenon, it's also a call for us to pay attention. Spirits may try hard to get through to us without success before they hit upon this method. These bells may be telepathic and only experienced by one person, as the ones you heard were, but they can also be physical sounds heard by everyone in the vicinity.

For example, many people awaken in the middle of the night to hear a phantom doorbell ringing. This is usually caused by a loved one in Spirit visiting and wanting to wake us up to let us know that they are there. The perfect time for spirits to communicate with us is when we're in a dreamy alpha state, which is why we tend to hear these bells at night.

Sometimes this doorbell is only heard by one person, but at other times, everyone in the house can hear it. Even when it's only heard by one person, however, it can be unclear whether this was a physical or metaphysical phenomenon, for though most people say that the bell sounded real, they knew that there was something otherworldly about it.

Spirits can manipulate electrical appliances to get our attention, and objects that ring are popular with them, again no doubt because ringing is used to call us or get our attention. In fact, one of the most amazing experiences I've ever had involved a spirit ringing me up via telephone.

Very early on the morning of my fortieth birthday, my husband and I were sound asleep when we were awakened by a ringing sound that neither one of us had ever heard before or since. It was like a mixture of a telephone and an old-fashioned ambulance, as it had a tone that went up and down. Though there was a phone right beside me, it wasn't ringing: only the phone in the other room was.

My husband stumbled into the other room to answer the phone, and when he picked it up, he heard a series of beeps that he said sounded like a phone for the deaf. He said Hello? a couple of times and then he hung up. When he climbed back into bed and told me what had happened, all of a sudden it hit me: my father, who had died two years before, was trying to wish me a happy birthday!

All the details fit. First, spirits tend to do this sort of thing on special days, such as significant birthdays and anniversaries. The phone didn't sound like a normal phone: in fact, it didn't sound like any phone on Earth. Further, not every phone rang: only one receiver did. Finally, when spirits are trying to get the hang of communicating with us through electrical devices, there are often strange sounds on the other end instead of normal or discernible voices.

That it sounded like a phone for the deaf made sense to me, for if I were in another dimension and trying to figure out how to manipulate a phone to make the sounds I wanted to make, I imagine it would be easy for that sort of thing to happen. Also, my dad was the kind of guy who would barge in banging pots and pans to wake you up on your birthday, singing at the top of his lungs. After I moved out of the house, he would call me every birthday and sing me the Happy Birthday song. I had been particularly sad when he died to think that he would never call and sing to me again, but he managed to pull it off!

I got more amazing signs of confirmation that this was indeed him that day, which sadly I don't have room to go into here. The important thing is for you to recognize that hearing bells ring is a common way that beings in other dimensions try to get our attention, so if this should happen to you again, stop whatever you're doing and tune in, and then trust the impressions that come to you.

- Julia