I have tinnitus. I’m pretty sure it has something to do with the exploding head syndrome episodes I get regularly as well.
When I’m falling asleep there’s a decent chance of my tinnitus getting louder and louder until it’s a full on roar like standing under Niagara Falls, then it goes “snap” and I wake up with a bunch of adrenaline and my heart racing.
It used to really freak me out. But now that I get it so often, and know what it is, I don’t worry about it so much, spend half an hour chilling out, and go back to bed.
Could be. Could also be the auditory system “turning up the gain” until it gets “feedback”, which apparently is how some forms of tinnitus work (I suspect that’s how mine works). No muscles moving or actual mechanical sound, it’s just the auditory nerves getting too sensitive and firing when they’re not supposed to.
I was serious about the tinnitus, but I’ve never experienced EHS. I have this weird thing by moving my neck funny and feeling like an electrical fire starts at the base of my neck and shoots to the top of my head. Fun times.
Yeah. Fun times. My dad always said not wearing earplugs at raves would make me go deaf. Looks like I showed him. I’m only half-deaf. He also said I’d regret not taking care of my ears. He was right about that.
When I was at university I did some holiday work at the foundry that my dad worked at. I started on the day that they were doing the hearing tests and the day after I’d seen Cheap Trick do a show. My ears were still ringing when I did the test.
Almost thirty years later he still claims his hearing is better than mine. I respond the only way I know how. “WHAT?!”
The same part of the brain, the brainstem’s reticular formation, appears to be involved in isolated sleep paralysis as well
Tell me about it.
I figure the Greys are responsible for both phenomena, and the roaring in the ears / strobing in the eyes is just part of the abduction experience.
To me it sounds a lot like a very short (fraction of a second) sample of electronic music, like Aphex Twin or Autechre. Sometimes it’s a sweep through the frequencies, like white noise through a wah-wah pedal. Sometimes it’s more like an electrical short.
Always when falling asleep, most often after smoking some green.
Very occasionally I get something similar, except it doesn’t sound like an explosion, but rather like a brief alarm somewhere between a very low-pitch fire alarm and the vibration you feel when you’re operating a push-lawnmower, lasting about a second or two which usually wakes me up.
Also occasionally, I get this… swirling sensation, like I’m spinning around in space, although contrary to expectations I rather enjoy it… it doesn’t make me dizzy, it’s sort of like my consciousness is being sucked down the drain to the dreamlands. Unfortunately being aware of it sometimes makes it stop just as I’m enjoying it.
Agreed - your description is bang on what I experience very occasionally (albeit without the smoking). I think it’s accompanied by a perceived flash of light too but I could be wrong. I’ve occasionally wondered what it is and now I know!
Note to self: try listening to Aphex Twin when going to sleep.
Note to self: try listening to Aphex Twin when going to sleep.
I used to do that at uni - selected ambient works 1 & 2 are awesome sleep music, but not so glitchy as a lot of later stuff - and if you’re in the least bit interested, he recently dropped ~11 hours (and more to come) of unreleased material to soundcloud:
A lot of that stuff would be conducive to dreaming/sleeping too.
Cool, I’ll check that out. I find a lot of dance music, particularly house, good for listening to whilst going to sleep. Something about the repetitiveness is hypnotic.
For me the experience sounds much like a phone modem - sort of a “SHROOIING” mixed with a “KSSHH” - and so I sort of assumed it was the same type of phenomenon as interrupting a phone modem; my brain accidentally patching my sound processing into a stream of information meant for some other part of my unconscious mind.
