Exploding head syndrome
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Until then it was on my ever growing list of "shit that only happens to me, apparently". Makes me wonder how many people got misdiagnosed with mental disorders, because the world was just smaller back then.
Felt a bit giddy reading this annd recognising it! I also get a lot of headaches.
I silently assumed that this is true for everybody, I'm amazed to find out it's rare, at least in your experience !
Sometimes I wonder if it's remotely related to the other obscure 'unable to name until post-2010 internet knowledge' syndrome that I suffer - Alice in Wonderland syndrome. Although I do know that the cause for that was operations on/or my amblyopic strabismus 40+ years ago. Certainly it appeared first while I was convalescing.
edit: to add a little bit of clarification here, sometime around 2010 I learnt what they were both called due to one of those clickbaity buzzfeed-style '50 bizarre medical issues you won't believe' style pieces.
I had one episode once when very relaxed but awake, though.
If you can keep calm without awakening, you'll be on the "other side". There is no transition. In my case, the "other side" is just me, in my bed as if I'm awake. I tried some experiments, but I felt too weak to do anything really interesting. I moved a couple of pillows, for instance, and when I woke up they were in the original position, untouched.
A really bizarre experience, I stopped trying when I finally got close to full-replication-mode on three consecutive nights. I felt very weird as if I was starting to mess with the boundary between dream and reality.
If you know more about this phenomenon let's keep in touch!
How can we stay in touch?
Hearing sounds (exploding head syndrome or other sounds), the feeling of spinning, seeing shapes etc. are symptoms of the hypnagogia (transition from wakefulness to sleep) stage. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia
LD is a learnable skill. I can recommend resources if anyone wants.
The point is to establish a habit such that you end up repeating this habit even when you're dreaming. Often you won't realize you're dreaming when you do this while sleeping, but sometimes you will. This lucidity sometimes doesn't last long, but duration will get longer and frequency increases with practice.
1: These are just regular dreams in which you dream about that you are lucid dreaming. Your awake consciousness is not actually present, your memory is as suspended as it is in regular dreams, you don’t notice flaws in the dream reality and it feels distinctly like regular dreams (like a “bystander”) as opposed to the self awareness feeling in lucid dreams. See https://youtu.be/fqWikLRVby8?si=J0E2BpxO4ff4mam4
On his website there’s a FAQ, Basics and a list of techniques[2].
The real gem was the lucid dream forum[3] which was closed this year. You’d find people who are veterans at things you’ve never imagined was even possible. People doing Tibetan sleep yoga (remaining conscious throughout the entire night sleep) and dream yoga (meditating in dreams), LSD-style experiences without LSD (seeing in 4 dimensions), people who have advanced their degree of control to basically playing Minecraft in creative mode, floating in void or going to space or mars in dreams, dream achievement contests (do X in your dream), theories about sleep and dreaming derived from anecdata which seemed to be one step ahead of today’s science, even a guy claiming he is doing ADA (All-Day Awareness, an impossibly hard technique). One notable thing I learned was that the LD veterans were of the opinion (from their own experiences) that so-called “dream logic” is a myth. They believed that simply the part of the brain responsible of memory remains asleep during REM sleep, and this lack/unreliability of long/short term memory leads to a broken reality, not any inability of your brain to reason. This rings true to me from my own experience as well.
I know all I recommended was a single guy’s website, forum and channel, but to be honest this topic is so niche that he’s the only guy I know who is earning his living through LD without clickbaiting people and thus have an incentive to take it seriously.
Technique-wise I can explain one which works well for many people: 1. Have a consistent sleep. Go to sleep early.
2. Wake up 4.5 or 6 hours after you sleep. You need to wake up at the start of the REM. Maybe use an Apple Watch or something.
3. Wake up yourself enough (walk around, drink water) to commit to the thing you’re gonna do next.
4. Go back to bed. You are going to sleep now, so tell yourself you are going to now sleep. Do everything normally, get into your normal sleep position etc. Then, once you are completely ready to sleep, continue with the process of entering sleep, except a single thing. I say except a single thing, this is crucial, because your body and brain needs to believe that it’s gonna sleep now like it does every single night before you sleep. Everything is the same. Your body is in the same process of relaxing, your mind is in the same process of maybe wandering in pre-sleep thoughts, if that’s how you sleep. The thing is: focus on your breath. Focus on its sound or the sensation of it in your nostrils. Pretty soon you’ll start experiencing hypnagogia. I usually get a feeling like I’m spinning in a washing machine, but different people get different things. Maybe a sound or visions. Focus on whatever is the symptom. The more you focus, the more it will intensify. After a short while the dream starts. You may have vision or not in the beginning. For many it starts in your bed and you may think you woke up. Use some reality checks like counting your fingers (5 or 6?) or opening the light (does it work?). If you believe they’ll show whether you are in a dream they’ll work.
1: https://youtu.be/fqWikLRVby8?si=J0E2BpxO4ff4mam4
I’ve not seen any consistent LDer (like once every night) complaining about it.
These appear to last just a fraction of a second and are rather jolting. I wonder if my mind was “playing” these sounds and sights as part of the normal sleep process, and the sudden waking just raised my consciousness enough to catch a glimpse of them.
Anyhow, thank you for sharing, I have long wondered if this was a known phenomenon, and now I have a name for it!
I'll make a guess that the loud sound is just switching audio source. Sometimes the new source is some internal process, like breathing, but unfiltered. I personally heard my own breathing in this transient state that was amplified to the loudness of the Niagara falls, and "colored" with the same waterfall sound texture. Even though at the mental level I recognized the pattern of my breathing, it was hard not to yield to fear, so overwhelming the sound was.
I should point out I think out of body experiences are controlled dreams and what I achieved was a regular lucid dream, didn't even had the illusion of me lying on the bed, I just were somewhere else.
The technique is this, also great for relaxing, since it does not focus on trying to relax
Instead of focusing on your ears, focus on your eyes. Close your eyes but keep staring through your closed eye lids. When you do, you usually see some optical illusion moving , I guess that happens to everyone. Keep staring and try to make those things into some image (a glass, a table, a mountain, etc). If you may briefly have a real vision of that. Depending on how much you have gotten good with it, it may last a fraction of second or you may start a mostly controlled dream.
Works best when you're tired or just woken up (depends on how you wake up though).
But my wife was reading a book and heard absolutely nothing. Of course, I checked the house and nothing.
I heard about this syndrome after that and apparently it’s pretty common. Rare in a lifetime but happens to a lot a people at least once.
A lithium battery exploded and I didn't wake. After my partner woke me, I found the kitchen in smoke and an exploded battery & charger.
Though I once had something like this while I was lying awake in the early hours of the morning, which was weird. It turned out that it was the Buncefield oil storage depot exploding about 40 miles away.
Just as i was falling asleep i heard the loudest bang i've ever heard. And was sure someone just bombed the neighbor or someone else down the street. But after having stayed awake for an hour checking the news, and no police or fire department arriving. I went back to sleep.
In the morning i tried to talk about this with my family, but no one had any idea what i was talking about.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnic_jerk
Similar outcome: you awake quickly in a panic, just the difference is hypnic jerk feels like something interior and you know it wasn’t a noise or something. I get these occasionally, and they’re easy to ignore because I just “know” it was dream-like falling feelings. Annoying in the moment but I drift back off to sleep quite quickly afterwards.
Happens once every few months. I've learned to check the response of my cat's. If they aren't looking at the door, it's in my head.
Great idea about the cats, I'll try that!
I'm still quite often woken up suddenly by Starving Cat Syndrome.
Bonus: If someone is at my door at some ungodly hour, they might leave me alone.
It's pretty remarkable how real it sounds though, complete with being in the distance - just enough to make you think it came from somewhere else in the house (usually the front door) - it definitely takes a deliberate act of will to totally ignore it.
Since another commenter has mentioned a knock on a window (distinctly different sound), I wonder whether our brains just contextualize this to whatever is plausible.
In my case, getting my sleep apnea treated with a CPAP machine coincidentally greatly reduced the frequency of these episodes. Your mileage may vary.
It last happened about a week ago: I could swear I was woken up by a cluster of firework explosions going off in the distance, some 100m away. A sudden burst of sounds along with a lot of gentle but noticable shockwaves.
Orthogonal to the post here, but I just want to encourage anybody reading this who snores, or has a partner who says you snore or stop breathing occasionally, to go get a sleep study. I didn't have any of the hallmark symptoms, just descriptions from my wife, and my doctor seemed doubtful that I had sleep apnea based on my descriptions of my symptoms. But, he said, "I know better than to argue with your wife."
Turns out, I have severe obstructive sleep apnea (AHI >50), it's just that most of my apneas are what are known as hypopneas -- my blood oxygen drops, but I don't entirely stop breathing, I just have a partially obstructed airway. My sleep architecture is fine, which is probably why I never noticed extreme daytime sleepiness. But the dropping blood oxygen is still a serious health risk, and associated with a huge number of other conditions, from the obvious like heart conditions to the unexpected like fatty liver disease.
tl;dr, get a sleep study if you have any reason to think you have sleep apnea.
Then I suddenly rise up and wait a bit in order to calm down.
After a while I learned to notice the "looping sound" pattern and just raise my head from the pillow to interrupt it. Then, at some point, it never returned again.
I'm aware of the visual noise, and the multiple layers of auditory effects (from the mild tinnitus I have, to the sound of my blood pumping through my veins, and the "general brain noise" that leaks into my auditory processing).
I've found the auditory events when falling asleep somewhat disturbing, they often come after especially stressed days and are accompanied by a particular "feeling in my brain" which feels analogues to a mild muscle twitch. To me, it's not as much a boom as, the creaking sound like that made by an old-fashioned magnesium flashlight right after being fired.
Often I experience flashes of light on those same nights as the explosions, I think both are related to some kind of seizure-like event, but very mild. I don't have epilepsy.
The head itself was made using a number of different materials. First, a plaster head was used, but it looked more like an exploding statue. Then, they tried making a head out of wax, but it wasn't pliable enough and did not provide the desired effect. Eventually, the team settled on an internal skull structure formed with plaster, with outside skin and facial features rendered using gelatin. From there, the team packed the skull with just about whatever they could find. They used wax and latex scraps, along with various stringy bits and anything they had lying around the studio that they thought would fly through the air a little better. They even used bits of leftover burgers from lunch that day.
From there, the plan was to blow the head up with explosives. The problem, the team found, was that any kind of explosive they used revealed sparks to the camera, which they didn't want. To portray a real sense of internal mental pressure resulting in the head exploding outward, they needed a different method. As the shoot wore on and nothing seemed to be working, special effects supervisor Gary Zeller told everyone to keep their cameras rolling, to get into their cars, and roll the windows up. He then lay down underneath the head with a shotgun, pointed it up beneath the back of it, and fired. The result is the exploding head scene in Scanners.
https://screenrant.com/david-cronenberg-scanners-movie-explo...
1. Probably don't watch this at work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI3NoBeNwfk
Such phenomena are well known amongst advanced yogis. Sleep scientists would do well to investigate there.
I vividly remember telling me that it might be exploding head syndrome, which would eventually cause my head to explode. Obviously, I was terrified. They quickly allayed my concerns, and it's never bothered me since (though, of course, I still get these transient episodes).
Anyway, I've always wondered: Did they actually know about exploding head syndrome, or did they just make it up? Obviously, the real thing doesn't cause your head to explode, but it would be a heck of a coincidence to just make up a real syndrome!
Possibly related, I occasionally get "brain zaps", spontaneous sensations of an electric shock inside my head, also when on the verge of falling asleep. These are almost exclusively described as a symptom of SSRI withdrawal, but that is interestingly not the case for me.
Criminals blow up ATMs in the Netherlands occasionally, but I usually sleep right through that. But they're a few blocks away and I'm not unlucky enough to live in an apartment right above them.
[0] https://denveruppercervical.com/ophthalmodynia-periodica/
Sometimes I do experience whilst falling asleep like if I'm in a wind tunnel, it's both a physical sensation of the wind going against me (like freefalling) and also the noise, it's not unpleasant. I've tried several times to stay still and focus on the sensation to induce a lucid dream, however either I end up being slightly frightened, moving and waking up or just falling to normal sleep.
Everything dream-related is pretty mind blowing to think about, both how many of us experience such different experiences and sensations, but also how many of us sometimes have almost the same experiences, like the exploding head syndrome, sleep paralysis and it's hallucinations (which in many occasions seem to be around the same for everyone).
"Culture may be a major factor in shaping sleep paralysis. When sleep paralysis is interpreted through a particular cultural filter, it may take on greater salience. For example, if sleep paralysis is feared in a certain culture, this fear could lead to conditioned fear, and thus worsen the experience, in turn leading to higher rates." [1].
Finding a wikipedia article about the thing should have, I hope, the reverse effect :-).
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1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis#Cultural_signi...
Also after waking up and trying to sleep more there is a periodic (but unpredictable) slap sound as if a thin wooden plank hit against a table. It only happens when I sleep more than needed. Something cares about my schedule I guess.
A therapist said it is a disorder, but not in the same class as schizo-… things, so relax.
- hearing a sudden banging sound like my head is hitting something - feelign like I stopped breathing
In my case it seems obvious it is related to PTSD, developmental trauma - or simplified "stress".
Sometimes I wondered if there was actually a sound, because I have earplugs - but it's happened enough times that I can tell when it's "imaginary".
It's really simply, can we find someone who experiences these symptons that has NO developmental trauma, pretty good family and childhood, no PTSD, no shock trauma in adulthood ( car crashes, violence, and whatnot)?
I'm 99% sure it is due to the nervous system.
Spoilsport :-)
I always wondered if you could damage your senses with an imaginary light / sound
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, and while my eyes are open there is an instantaneous change in my vision equivalent to wearing coloured fillers or monochrome LED lighting. Usually red. No other symptoms. Transition was instant so that rules out retinal bleeding etc.
I asked my doctor about this, she didn't know either.
One trick a psychologist mentioned is having a notepad near the bed and writing in it when it happens.
It's only happened once or twice since then but was a lot less scary because I knew what EHS was by that point.
No idea what's caused it at all - sounds like someone has suddenly opened a pressurised pipe near my head/ear.
Granted, the name sounds gimmicky, but it’s a very real phenomenon in which the mind remains awake, while the body goes to sleep. It carries with it very distinct, consistent sensations.
While different from a lucid dream, lucid dreams are often used as a segue to this state of consciousness.
Typically, meditation and trance induction techniques are used to reach this state, while many also have no control over it, and they go much, if not all of their lives, assuming it’s like that for everyone. Interestingly, I’d venture an experienced guess and say this occurs in roughly five to ten percent of the population, which is also the number of people who reportedly have this issue in its “syndrome” form. I wonder if there’s a connection? Obviously, the same area of the brain is being activated (or deactivated).
I also wonder if this group of individuals (most of the commenters here) are naturally predisposed to experiencing astral projection on command. It typically takes significant dedication and practice to overcome your mind falling asleep along with your body.
After 25 years of practice, the sounds remain the same for me; a coin, wobbling on the counter getting ready to come to a stop— although much louder. Low frequency noises such as that of an idling ship, and the sound that air makes, swooshing and sucking about, as it escapes from a vacuum. All of these are very typically accompanied by various crackling, popping, and banging.
Additionally, the flashing of lights, sparks, or “energy”, sometimes colorful, sometimes not, is extremely common, if not a requirement, to reaching this state, and this is usually accompanied by a vibrating sensation, which can be intense, but also is harmless.
It seems that whatever this syndrome is, it affects the region/s of the brain responsible for regulating the transition between various states of consciousness.
At this point, classic astral projection would have (or be very close) progressed to feelings of separation or detachment from your body, levitation, and ethereal, hyper-realistic, yet dreamlike, imagery.
It would be interesting to know if researchers have looked at the studies performed on astral projection over the years to see if any of it can be borrowed to assist with determining the cause, if any, of this.
For anyone who experiences noises while falling asleep-do any of the other sensations I mentioned sound familiar to you? Personally, if I didn’t already know better, I would be keen on studying AP to determine if I was naturally inclined for it.