Current mood:	relaxed
Entry tags:	introspection

Curiosity necessitates an informal survey
When I go to sleep, my senses shut down before my consciousness finishes turning off, and as far as I can tell my brain panics and starts manufacturing its own entertainment. This is occasionally in the form of wild images of the most random sort (and once or twice in the form of putrid odors), but usually it's a montage of insane noises. Crashes, bangs, screams, voices of people I know urgently calling my name, tortured electronic feedback screeches that jerk me awake and make my actual ears twinge in sympathy. I know they're auditory hallucinations, but they sound real, and only the really loud or frightening ones wake me back up long enough to write to memory.

This has been going on for years, but it only occurred to me last night to actually try to remember what I hear and write about it on the internet, because apparently when my brain is in the equivalent of the "Windows is Shutting Down" screen, I am an idiot. Dur.

So I'm curious - do other people get this? Do you see strange pictures as you're drifting off? Do you hear sounds, smell or taste strange things, feel odd skin sensations? Is there a name for this when specifically related to sleep, or is it just lumped in with dreaming and/or hallucination?

(Now that I think about it, this could be related to the fact that I wake up with a different song stuck in my head every day. Maybe my ears are quick to shut off and slow to boot?)