never knew how to phrase it, but I've had that a couple of times in the past few years. I've had to get really picky abouth the white noise sounds I listen to. Eventually, almost all the loops become identifiable - I can tell when the loop restarts, etc. I had two different loops (both of water sounds - waterfalls, maybe? - iirc) that, at some point, started to register as human voices, and it freaked me out more than a bit.

fwiw, the only thing that works well for me is masking any other sounds with a mix of grey and brown noise on top. i use 'white noise app' to achieve this, and it helps me get to sleep, masking out many other ambient disturbances (road/car noises, mostly).