I don’t know if this qualifies, but I go on call for my job and get woken up sometimes. I use a really annoying alert tone to make sure I wake up. Unfortunately, some times when I’m not on call I hallucinate hearing that tone as I’m dozing off or in a dead sleep and it makes me shoot straight up in bed.
I have ADHD and am a night owl, so that kind of time management was always super stressful for me, to the point that I would set up a dozen or so alarms so I would wake up in the morning. After some time it was so ingrained that I sometimes heard the alarm sound randomly when sleeping, always causing me to be wide awake in the middle of the night with racing pulse.
I used to have that when I was a teenager. About one out every ten times I was falling asleep just at the moment I drifted off I’d feel this crazy big pop that went from deep behind my right eye to the top right part of my skull. Sometimes it was more like a noise, sometimes it was more like a physical impact, like somebody bounced a golf ball off of my skull. It was really annoying. It started to happen less and less as I got older though. It pretty much went away completely by the time I was in my late 20s.
I get that as well! When it’s not a horrifyingly loud boom, it’s like an increasingly loud wind sound. When I get that one, it’s accompanied by my body feeling like I’m in a wind vortex being whipped around every direction. Makes me scared to go back to sleep.
Wait, is this my “nightmare sound”? When I have nightmares (fairly rarely, but I’ve gone through times when they were more common) there’s a sound that goes with them, and builds in intensity as the fear comes to a crescendo. It’s like a high-pitched whine that starts as a hum (like tinnitus) and slowly grows to ear-splitting intensity, except it’s more like head-splitting because it feels like the origin is in the center of my head. And I say “feels” intentionally because it’s not just a sound, it feels like my consciousness is vibrating apart.
Often the actual content of my nightmares is mostly abstract (like worrying about why the room is dark, or feeling followed but not knowing by what) and the terror is completely disproportionate to the events, but directly proportional to the intensity of the sound.
Uh, for me it’s firmly inside the dream though, I wouldn’t classify it as a hallucination. When I was taking antidepressants I used to have hallucinations wake me up—like waking up because I heard my mom talking, when she was in a different state—but that felt different. That was like hearing someone in the room with you and having it pull you out of whatever dream you were having. The “nightmare sound” is inside the nightmare, it isn’t what wakes me up.
Interesting Q lesbian_seagull. I never got the sense that anyone else was involved, but the sound is definitely slamming shut with a loud thwack. And I suppose the first couple times I thought it was real, but I don’t have screen doors.
There’s possibly some relation there, but I have hypnic jerks almost every night and EHS every now and then and as far as I’m aware I do not have synesthesia.
When I was deployed in Afghanistan, everyone I knew had the same reoccurring dream- some other dream is happening, and then out of nowhere, you hear a gunshot/explosion, and wake in a cold sweat, absolutely certain that you just got shot or blown up. And the certainty persists for about five seconds after you wake, as you shakily pat yourself down for blood. Good times.
And the certainty persists for about five seconds after you wake, as you shakily pat yourself down for blood.
Unless you also happen to get sleep paralysis at the same time! Happened to a friend who fortunately was in a tent full of very understanding people when he woke us up screaming.
Mine goes ShhhhshhiINNKK!!! Starts kind of static like and within the same second makes a sound like if you flicked a really thin glass really hard, but with a metallic finish. I also see a flash of purple/green/silver color on my eyelids when it happens.
Wow! Now I have a cool name to this phenomenon. Doesn’t happen every night and there are also times I can ignore it because it’s typically not scary, just disruptive. I also see the flashes of light and that can be scary sometimes. I’ll think somebody tried to come in while I’m sleeping or that a nuclear bomb just went off. Or that a cosmic ray hit my eyeball.
Now, is there a phenomenon about seeing random faces in my head while falling asleep as well?
I used to have all this as a chronic weed user, if you’re the same maybe try stopping and see if they go away. The only one I still have is the flashing lights, but it’s rarer.
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