Now imagine not having the internet, and getting a few times a year. Everyone I spoke to thought I was insane (including doctors!), and I was beginning to think so myself. It tapered off and I hadn't had it for years when I accidentally read about it somewhere.
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.
Even with the internet I was unable to explain to my GP back in 2006 what this was. All I could present was 'I dunno, maybe it's epilepsy, it's like an electrical zap sound deep in my head at times', I was told it was nonsense and sent away without any further knowledge.
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 just found out now that I get some of this. Occasionally I get a very bright flash as I’m driving off. As if an old camera flash has gone off in the room. No sounds, but the myclonic jerk and fright is there for sure.
Felt a bit giddy reading this annd recognising it! I also get a lot of headaches.
I read "Out of body experiences" by Robert A. Monroe a long time ago, a time of gullibility and innocence. If I remember correctly he used a technique to induce that effect and I made it mine. Sometimes it worked, here is the recipe: lay on your bed with eyes closed, try to avoid any disturbances. Concentrate you attention to your inner ears and you'll hear a high frequency hiss (similar to tinnitus). Don't sleep and keep focused! After some time (I think as you are falling asleep) the volume hits a dramatic crescendo and, in my case, culminates in a devastating powerful dry explosion without a discernible source. It lasts a moment but can be really scary.
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!
I‘m a lucid dreamer. You are describing the WILD (Wake-Induced Lucid Dreaming) technique. It’s basically entering sleep without losing consciousness by staying focused on some thing (usually your breath but anything works). It’s not an out of body experience. You were dreaming.
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.
I have, for many years, experienced sudden loud buzzing/sine tone sounds accompanied by vivid monochromatic zig-zagging phosphenes (as I have more just learned they are called) when I’m in the process of falling sleep and suddenly jolted awake by some external stimulus (a sound, usually).
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!
Basically, stay away from all the totally clickbait LD YouTubers and Reddit kids who are too hyped to care enough to learn what they are talking about. There are two guys I know who aren’t a scam, and I recommend this one[1]. He is clickbaiting with thumbnails and titles too (tbh to survive in YouTube you need that) but at least he doesn’t lie in the video. Tho at this point he exhausted every possible video that can be done about LDing so he is mostly reuploading old content.
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.
You choose when to lucid dream, at least with WILD class of techniques. I don’t have any sources for this but from my own experience, I believe while LDing you don’t the full amount of rest you’d otherwise get. I believe this is why we by default don’t LD.
I’ve not seen any consistent LDer (like once every night) complaining about it.
Set periodic alarms on your watch or phone, 3-5 per day, same times every day. Every time it goes off, take a few minutes to look around you and try prove to yourself you're not dreaming. Note the stability and regularity of the world around you, and that where you are and what you're doing makes sense (hopefully).
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.
This is a DILD (Dream Induced Lucid Dreaming) technique, reality checking. These techniques are generally not as reliable as WILD, you can’t control the timing of your LDs and they tend to create pseudo-lucid dreams[1]. If you have a consistent sleep cycle (REM and non-REM), I recommend WILD techniques. If you are young it’s even easier, as sleep phases tend to get messed up as you get older.
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
Interesting! I'll try to keep this as short as I can since I am writing on the phone, but I came up with another technique which I used with success a few times, and it's similar to yours in a way.
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).
There is a lot of amateur literature on this topic, written by Monroe and others, even though Monroe in particular made an honest attempt to tell what he knew. To my knowledge, some dzogchen and especially bon authors talk about this, although very reluctantly. Among the western authors, the most direct work on this matter is Leadbeater's "astral plane", but if you're looking for instructions on how to obtain such clarity of perception, you won't find anything, except the usual "learn to control your mind and everything will follow". I think the reason is partly to fend off lazy curiosity, but mainly because many who already have all that's necessary don't need any secret instructions, and those who are not there yet can't use a safe method. It's quite possible that in the near future this will provoke a social strife between those who can and those who can't.
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 think you have pointed out something very important here concerning social strife. Even outside of this topic there is already a huge gap in understanding between those who perceive and those who judge.
It happened to me once. I was falling asleep and suddenly I heard a huge explosion. I was certain that something like a lithium battery somewhere in the house just exploded. It was very loud.
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.
I think this article, and your comment have helped me understand something that happened to me a year ago.
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.
I've had something that seems to be the same a handful of times. Disconcerting.
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.
I had never heard of it but it also happened to me once but waking up.
I was dreaming when I heard an increasingly loud sound that culminated in me being awake all at once
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.
I am sure that hypnic jerk is related. Distortions of sleep/awake transitions have quite a universal pathology mechanics caused by brain stem / nerve damages. Either physical or metabolic. POTS is also a related condition. All those pathologies belong to a more broad pathological condition called dysautonomia.
For me, it's a loud knocking on the door. It's as if impatient cops were knocking. It's not a pounding sound, it's knuckles to wood. I immediately awaken to check if someone is there, but no one ever is.
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.
Happens to me as well. Now I just ignore a knock on the door (or rather, most any sound) if it happens just once as I'm waking up. It has been a hallucination every time.
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.
This happens to me about once every few months. As the article states, just learning about it and feeling reassured that nothing is wrong turned the experience from terrifying to just slightly annoying.
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.
> In my case, getting my sleep apnea treated with a CPAP machine coincidentally greatly reduced the frequency of these episodes.
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.
As a kid, something similar happened to me sort of regularly (maybe a few times a year?). As I was falling asleep, some noises that initially might have been normal ambient noises started looping, acquiring some rhythmic pattern and becoming progressively louder, until suddenly there was a loud bang followed by a sense of complete void and silence.
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.
This also happens for me when I use psychedelics (like LSD). It's very fascinating when it happens. I'm autistic, maybe that has something to do with it.
I've always been aware of many neurological curiosities, and I've never been able to determine whether most people truly don't have them or are simply not aware of them (or whether there's a difference, but my pet theory is that with appropriate training, others can become aware of, and experience them, because they're a result of us being analogue beings and not perfect computers).
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.
Off-topic, but the title made me think of that scene from Cronenberg's Scanners [1], which has a pretty interesting backstory:
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.
How apt. This happened a few months ago. I thought there was a lightning strike outside that woke me up, I remember a flash and a crack, and woke up. But there wasn't a storm. I checked radar, satellite, nothing. No strikes. Went back to sleep. At last, the mental thread has been closed. Thank you Hooke.
> 10% of people also experience visual disturbances like perceiving visual static, lightning, or flashes of light. Some people may also experience heat, strange feelings in their torso, or a feeling of electrical tinglings that ascends to the head before the auditory hallucinations occur
Such phenomena are well known amongst advanced yogis. Sleep scientists would do well to investigate there.
When I was young, and experiencing the occasional ringing in the ears that's known as "transient ear noise" or "transient tinnitus" -- as far as I know, the causes are not well-understood. But, as a 7-year-old, or whatever age I was, I asked my parents why this was happening.
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!
This happens to me fairly regularly. Best way to describe it is a mashup between those step-off-the-curb dreams in light sleep where you jolt awake and a gunshot being stuck in your head like a song.
What a coincidence, I experienced this for the first time when falling asleep a week ago. It was clearly inside my head, so first I suspected it was somatic and was quite worried. Some quick googling and I found the hilariously named "exploding head 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.
Growing up near Washington DC during the Reagan years, I might have described it as Nuking World Syndrome. Waking up suddenly from an explosion and immediately perceiving the light outside the window as a flash and being afraid that it was the flash from a nuclear explosion. Still happens occasionally. More visual but occasional auditory.
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.
I've had this my whole life, though this popping up on here has made me realise that it hasn't happened in about 6 months. I also get ice pick headaches [0], would be interested to hear if anyone else here gets both.
Yeah, I get an explosion maybe once a year or so. And I get the sudden / short headache (which seems to match the description) very rarely, but almost always on winter mornings while driving up to the snow for skiing.
I don't think I've ever experienced these loud noises, sounds frightening specially if you are not aware of the syndrome.
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).
This has happened to me a few times. Reminds me of sleep paralysis, in that people across time and cultures have identified this kind of strange experience as a paranormal event of some sort:
"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 :-).
I know it can't be this but can't help wondering if it's the same problem digital audio systems have when you stopped playing something without returning the speakers to amplitude 0 :) The next time you play sth there's a loud bang because you return to 0 instantly :)
Or perhaps your brain listens and doesn't quite catch the header, so audio is played mid-stream and you get the digital noise playing like you're trying to listen to a tape loaded game.
I don’t have explosions, but in this pre-dream mind wandering, some events/phrases may become very loud. They don’t mean anything (unless you’re into deep meaning, then everything does), just parts of speech and sounds. It happens often, so I’m used to it. But a few times, especially when it only started, it amplified something you don’t want to hear… 8)
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)?
One time I heard a huge boom that woke me up but it was actually a gallon glass container blowing the cabinet doors off the hinges in the kitchen. My college roommate was trying to make "pumpkin wine".
Awww, I was looking forward to the replies from people who didn't read the fine article, and were deeply confused by comments like "I get this!" or "This happens to me every few months" or "God, It happens to me at least once or twice a month."
Wow, I just had this for the first time yesterday morning. I woke up too early for some reason and heard a loud "screech" for a second or so just as I was falling asleep again.
I have quite vicious migraines, and have regular painless aura migraines that feels like I have a huge number of paparazzi behind me with random flashes, wonder if you're experiencing something similar?
I experienced this twice in my life but it was not an explosion type sound. Just a very loud sound with a sawtooth waveform, fast attack, ~1 second release.
I've had the same sawtooth sound, in addition to a door slamming. It was while I was quitting caffeine, and made it difficult to sleep when I needed it most.
Hmm, interesting. I've had the exact same sensation/"sound". Though not always that sound, I experience something like this moderately frequently when just about to fall asleep, so maybe it's likely that it would at least sometimes line up well with what others experience.
This is a good a place as any to ask about weird sensory experiences at night.
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.
Moderately confident, but not 100% certain. I believe my dreams are normally longer than these experiences, and that my dreams have not involved my actual environment since I was in pre-school.
The only thing I have in terms of waking up in middle of the night is that I seem to see hexagon honeycomb patterns of RGB lights..... not kidding. They're like phasing in and out. Really makes me think of a visual screen, lol. If I push on my eyes they move.
I heard something a bit like that, once when I was 11, and I was waking up after being knocked out by a trampoline. Only time it happened though, and it was spinning triangles filling my vision.
Is this phenomenon similar to brain zaps? I've experienced something similar but without the pain described on the wiki page about antidepressant discontinuation syndrome. Also I've never taken antidepressants, but those zaps occured always after taking too much chemicals at parties.
Stimulants, or rather the come down from them, are known to cause brain zaps. That's because CNS stims tend to mess with serotonin levels, which is what most antidepressants and anxiety meds are acting on as well, if they are SSRI or the newer SNRI types anyway. Brain zaps are hard to explain, but you know them when you feel them. A lightning storm in your brain that lasts a fraction of a second and by the time you feel it, it's already gone. Weirdest feeling ever.
This happens to me sometimes, usually if I'm not getting enough sleep because of stress. It sounds kind of like a garbage truck when it sets down a dumpster. Always accompanied by a flash of white light. When I was a kid I thought it was aliens because I would fall asleep listening to Coast to Coast AM.
This happened to me once as a kid right as I was falling asleep. It sounded like a car had just crashed into my bedroom. I spent the next half hour trying to figure out what had just happened.
It's only happened once or twice since then but was a lot less scary because I knew what EHS was by that point.
Used to get this when I was younger. It's been a while since I've experienced it. To me, it was more like I was hearing the percussionist in an orchestra build to a loud crescendo with felt mallets on a gong.
This can be induced. This is 90-95% the rule for those who practice what’s known as “astral projection,” as compared to the articles figure of ten percent of the population, for those who have this “syndrome”.
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.
I had this frequently in my early 20's. It is no longer frequent; the last time I got it was about 8 months ago. Prior to that I can't recall. It's weird.
I occasionally hear a sound like a thin metallic tank rupturing due to air pressure, while trying to fall asleep. Not very loud, and I can kind of tell it's not real.
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.