EHS

Falling asleep two nights ago, I realized I was hearing a terrible noise, a roaring, screaming cacophony; but then, when I realized it, I also realized I wasn't hearing anything at all. For a while, maybe tens of seconds or a few minutes, I had been lying there listening to this noise, with a vaguely uncomfortable feeling, mind drifting - falling asleep, in other words. On attending to it, I seem to have broken myself out of a hypnogogic auditory hallucination - the experience faded after a few seconds of my concentrating on the fact that, actually, I wasn't hearing anything at all, and as far as I know it didn't come back, and I fell asleep.

The next day I told Jonathan about it, and he reminded me of "Exploding head syndrome", which is usually described as a sharper, more acute noise ("snapping of the brain" was a term coined by a doctor in 1920), but I think what I experienced fits. Maybe it's happened before - probably, I think - and either I proceeded to sleep without the lucid break, or I've forgotten the details. It doesn't happen often, at least.

The experience was basically like auditory imagery, similar quality as hearing music or voices in your head; but whereas those kinds of experiences generally seem (to me) to be endogenous and even self-willed (even when it's a tune you can't get out of your head), this sound felt out of my control. It was frightening, but as I attended to it it was clearly a completely internal experience - less real than tinnitus, but in retrospect I think more than just a typical auditory image. I say this because now, when I try to imagine the sound, I can get a rough idea of it but I can't really experience it as really as I was during the episode; and when I imagine a piece of music, or a voice, these also seem less substantial.

At any rate, once I attended to the experience, and reassured myself that in fact I was hearing nothing and that it was a hallucination, the cacophony dissolved into the regular silence of auditory imagining. Maybe it was an aftereffect of the long holiday weekend? Exhaustion?

Parahypnic Hallucinosis?

Remember this episode:
http://xuexixs.blogspot.com/2018/08/blinking-plants.html

That was my bout with what I termed 'gardener's hallucinosis', where I spent all day pulling clear weed and etc from the gardens, and wound up with vivid blinking hallucinations. I likened it to the 'eyes open' geometric hallucinations I sometimes had back in my migraine days.

Well I've noticed a few times lately something similar happening under a specific circumstance. The circumstance is: I fall asleep in my daughter's room as I read her to sleep. I wake up a couple of hours later, stumble to the bathroom to brush my teeth, and I go get in my bed.

It doesn't happen every time, but sometimes - and last night very vividly - on waking in this way I have vivid and complex geometric hallucinations. Fine-grained, colorless - much of the content is just of very, very fine beads or dots, flickering and moving - but mixed into it are larger-scale features. Last night, the features were like a high-pass Kandinsky painting: discs and long, smoothly-curving lines, all moving and twisting around randomly, but no particular surface colors except for grayness, or darkness.

I could see it all fairly clearly with eyes opened, until I turned on the bathroom light and then the experience faded.

Maybe not coincidentally, I have been having minor headaches lately, and I think there was one yesterday. My brain must be in a state?

Two Things

Got two emails last night, one right after the other:

1. I get to give my 'color across the visual field' talk at ASSC 23. Gonna put my mouth where my money is! I wonder how they'll take it.

2. I was actually awarded a NEI travel award by the VSS! When's the last time I won something? Yeah, I don't know either!