Waking up in the night and hearing a brain-generated sound

I hear bagpipes prior to sleep. It is in the back ground and seriously annoying racy tune. I fall into sleep with it and I suddenly wake up with a huge popping sound, like a wine cork popping then I get awake. Anxiety is there too but not so bad, don't know what this symptom is called.

 

I can confirm that whooshing sound is due to low blood sugar in my case - happened twice. Once in the gym when I exercised without enough food and second after surgery, when I was without food for more than 18 hours. In the second case, it disappeared within seconds when I had a sugar candy... but the whooshing sound that leads to like an exploding sound while sleeping (and wakes me up) isn't blood sugar related as it happens after I have had a good meal.

 

I had something exactly like this yesterday. The whooshing sound leading to a pop which woke me up. Only the whooshing sound has happened to me when sugar was low (twice - see my other comment), but this increasing pitch with pop at the end - its nothing to do with blood sugar as I had eaten well the evening before.
Not glad its happened to you, but glad I am not alone...

 

Hi @am1978,

In the context of dysautonomia eating does not preclude a low blood sugar event, in fact it may actually precipitate one.

In retrospect I realise most of my low blood sugar tinnitus symptoms were a result of gastric dysmotility, rapid emptying after carbohydrate heavy meals.

Ryan

 

@Jonathan Edwards I had this again last night, first with a sensation of being pullled towards the feet end of the bed and up by some invisible force. Since sound and perceiving the motion of self in space are both related to the ear, this would make sense. And again this happened after a light meal, and in a period where I seem to have more of the fasting intolerance than usual. Do you know what disease this is? My guess was vestibular epilepsy but according to google this would produce vertigo which does not happen during these evens. Although I do have some very low grade vertigo I think much of the time and things like being in a car that accelerates can produce a wave of nausea. I also don't understand why it appears it appears to be so sensitive to blood sugar levels.

There is also a related event that I can only describe as the sudden sensation that something is different without being able notice anything different at all. It's a bit like the part of the brain that is oriented in time and space has a hiccup and needs a moment to readjust. This is subtle mostly noticable at night but I think it happens during the day as well but is a much less noticable.

 

@strategist I have had this symptom 4-5 times since December! It's just crazy, I've been wondering if it indicates a neck issue. Here is how I describe it:

At night, I'll sleep ~4h, then wake up and go back to bed. But shortly after falling asleep again, I have this weird "pulsing tinnitus" that grows and "explodes" throughout my neck and entire back.

Here's an attempt at explaining it. Imagine you're turning the volume knob of a FM radio from 0 to 50%, then back down to 0, multiple times at a constant, moderate pace. It goes something like: "wuuuu... [3-5 secs] wuuuu... [3-5 secs] etc". Each pulse has a medium-high pitch. Then after a few pulses or minutes, there's that one pulse that gets super loud and high in pitch. And at that point it "explodes": it saturates all the way to 100%, and I feel a sort of wave propagating throughout my brain. After that, it subsides, the pulsing tinnitus goes away, though it often returns once or twice later at night.

This is pretty scary to me, so I've tried to force it to subside. How? By tilting my head backwards/raising my neck. If I do that while the "explosion" is building up, it instantly triggers it and instead of just feeling a wave across my brain, it *also sends a massive heatwave with chills throughout my neck and entire spine*. It's super intense.

The only two analogies that I have for the heatwave are:

- the contrast product injected during a CT scan
- unwrapping a tight tourniquet around the arm after a blood draw: the blood gushes back into the forearm and it feels warm.

An interesting part is that this symptom only occurs when I'm in a crash.

ETA: There is no (obvious) correlation between my blood glucose levels/diet and this symptom.

 

[Not an ME patient, myself] I've had exploding head syndrome for years. Not frequently, and most often on days that have been stressy or when I'm particularly tired. For me, it sounds like a loud gun shot inside my head, often followed by that sensation of falling through the bed or falling off a cliff that some people experience as they drop off to sleep.

I also get hypnogogic "voices" and sometimes images. I once enjoyed a trippy sequence which began with a horse morphing into smaller and smaller animals until the final creature, a bird, flew off.


You'll be thrilled to know that "exploding head syndrome" is coded for in ICD-11:


https://icd.who.int/dev11/l-m/en#/http://id.who.int/icd/entity/1393951214

7B02.0 Hypnogogic exploding head syndrome

Parent

7B02 Other parasomnias

Description
Hypnagogic exploding head syndrome is characterized by the perception of a sudden, loud noise or sense of a violent explosion in the head that typically occurs as the individual is falling asleep. On occasion, these episodes may occur with awakening during the night. They are associated with abrupt arousal following the event, often with a sense of fright.

Inclusions
Hypnogogic sensory disturbance

All Index Terms
Hypnogogic exploding head syndrome
Hypnogogic sensory disturbance

 

I experienced exploding head syndrome just the other day. A huge explosion woke me up. I googled it because it's happened a couple of times before, and it is clearly exploding head syndrome.

 

I have had the sensation of my head feeling like it was actually exploding once while falling asleep.

I have had tinnitus for about a year (different tone in each ear) i also get the extreme loud whine for a few seconds that then dissipates fairly regularly as well. I have that auditory hallucination thing where I think the door buzzer has gone off or a I "perceive" a loud buzzer type tone - it doesn't feel like I am hearing it. I assumed it was an extreme tiredness or possibly anxiety thing and happens mostly around/during sleep.

I also get the prickly back of the neck thing and feel like there is some one in the house when i absolutely know there cannot possible be. This is also when very tired late at night and possibly also anxiety (I have severe GAD. Which oddly arrived around the same time my ME got worse)

Interestingly, I was reading the thread Saturday and happened to come across a piece about Exploding Head Syndrome in BBC Science Focus Magazine. I had never heard of it before and assumed the auditory hallucinations were just randomly firing synapses...

Really illuminating thread.

 

I had it for a couple of months when my FND and anxiety were spiking; once or twice a night I would wake up due to a short burst of what sounded like radio crackle. Freaked me out the first few times, then again, everything freaked me out at the time..

 

Had another one some days ago in the middle of the night and it woke me up. I was crashed and in PEM at the time which I suspect matters. This time it could just have been an odd vivid dream but it had that same feel to it as the other episodes so I'll count it as one.

It was a strange sensation, sound and mental image, all together.

The image was a butterfly about the size of a large pomegrenade next to my right ear. The sound emanating from it was a bit like someone shaking a wooden container with some wooden marbles in it, and seemed synchronized to the wings. There were vibrations emanating from it which I could feel moving through my body. There was a sensory richness that is hard to put in words, it's as if my senses become sharper and I can feel things in greater clarity.

In the meantime, I learned more about what this could be. Low glucose in the brain can cause focal seizures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroglycopenia

Focal seizures seem to be a possible explanation for what I'm experiencing.

Simple partial seizures are seizures which affect only a small region of the brain, often the temporal lobes or structures found there, such as the hippocampi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_seizure

Some common symptoms of a Simple partial seizure, when the person is awake, are:[7]

• preserved consciousness
• sudden and inexplicable feelings of fear, anger, sadness, happiness or nausea
• sensations of falling or movement
• experiencing of unusual feelings or sensations
• altered sense of hearing, smelling, tasting, seeing, and tactile perception (sensory illusions or hallucinations), or feeling as though the environment is not real (derealization) or dissociation from the environment or self (depersonalization)
• a sense of spatial distortion—things close by may appear to be at a distance
• déjà vu (familiarity) or jamais vu (unfamiliarity)
• laboured speech or inability to speak at all
• usually the event is remembered in detail

While-asleep symptoms include:

• onset usually in REM sleep
• dream-like state
• appearance of full consciousness
• hallucinations or delusions
• behavior or visions typical in dreams
• ability to engage with the environment and other people as in full consciousness, though often behaving abnormally, erratically, or failing to be coherent
• complete amnesia or assimilating the memory as though it was a normal dream on regaining full consciousness
• dreams of daily life that appear as if they happened in reality, and can cause disorientation upon awakening

I have noted a connection to hypoglycemia before, and I think I also had an episode on the first night of trying out a ketogenic diet.

 

I'm still getting the phantom door buzzer.

Waking me up.

Happened a couple of nights ago.

Only problem is that the door buzzer was turned off, so it couldn't have gone off.

 

I think I've had this happen, only it's with certain 'common' sounds - like the tune my phone plays when I get a notification. I would wake up from a nap thinking I have a message, only to find there's nothing there. I've generally just dismissed this as well...'weird stuff' happening with me, but apparently I'm not alone with this sort of thing happening?