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6:00pm February 20, 2012

nobody-nowhere:

Well, this is not at all what I set out to write, but I guess it needed to get out. It’s been going on for years now, so maybe now’s as good a time as any to start writing/talking about it.

I’m putting it behind a “read more” (or, at least, I’m attempting to), because I feel really self-conscious about it. But I still feel the need to get it out of me, because I’ve been holding onto these thoughts for so fucking long. All by myself.

[Content warning: paranoid thoughts]

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That sounds highly similar to something that happens to me when I’m tired but not asleep. I was told it’s called hypnagogic hallucination (even when it’s in my head). It’s apparently rather normal although enhanced sometimes in people with sleep disorders. From the Wikipedia page on hypnagogia:

“Snatches of imagined speech are common. While typically nonsensical and fragmented, these speech events can occasionally strike the individual as apt comments on—or summations of—their thoughts at the time. They often contain word play, neologisms and made-up names. Hypnagogic speech may manifest as the subject’s own "inner voice”, or as the voices of others: familiar people or strangers. More rarely, poetry or music is heard"

I sometimes write mine down. What strikes me as the strangest is they often come with a lot of situational knowledge, even when they’re just a snatch of words. Like I’ll know that words were said by a pregnant teenager to her mother who is threatening to throw her out on the street. The level of detail can be shocking.

Whether they’re about something real or not I have no idea. They could be equivalent to dreams, but they could be patterns in the world I’m somehow picking up on, or a little of both. Mostly at the moment I see them as a sort of waking dream, sometimes entertaining but not real. They can go on for quite a long time before I finally sleep, if I sleep at all. (Or else I could be sleeping in that phase where you don’t feel as if you’ve slept.)

There’s one other thing they might be, but in the absence of other details I doubt it. I don’t know if you’re autistic. But I’ve had some experiences that are autism related that have similarities. One is that when I lie down after a lot of language overload, words go through my head for ages. And if I’ve taken in too much sensory information in a day for my buffer zone to handle, then I lie down and reexperience every sensory detail of the day in a huge jumble. Then suddenly there’s quiet and I’ve drooled all over the place. It feels almost seizure-like but I don’t think it is.

But my most likely guess is hypnagogic hallucinations. It sounds exactly like mine at any rate. While technically they happen right before sleep, it’s possible for that not quite asleep state to persist for a really long time for some people. Me included. Not all shrinks seem to know about it, even though they’re supposed to check for it being that before they diagnose psychosis or something.