Hi all,

This is my first post here, I'm a layman and know very little about the brain and how it works and this seemed like a good place to ask my question so any thoughts on this would be really helpful.

I sleep with a server running in my bedroom 24/7 and have done for at least 6 years. I've noticed many times in the past that as I drift from my waking state to my sleep state my hearing fades out and becomes muffled, as if someone pushed earplugs into my ears. Sometimes I'd become aware of this effect when it happened and in doing so would wake myself up slightly, at which point the background noise would return to normal suddenly, at which point it would jolt me awake enough to snap back to normal

This all (sort of) makes sense so far but a couple of months ago I reached that point but decided not to react in the usual way, which was to "register" that sound had changed, i decided to just go with it (not waking the rest of myself up) and was astonished to find that within maybe half a second it had built to a level I've never experienced before in my life (and I'm a heavy metal drummer)

At this point I'm definitely not dreaming - I'm fully aware of where i am, who i am, and how terrified i am. I know a little bit about sound engineering and it's like feedback but unimaginable. I can hear the harmonics beating off each other like when you stand next to a jet engine on full throttle, all those intersecting waves bouncing off eachother and creating a series of ever-rising notes around the base-sound. If the earth was being destroyed to make way for an hyperspacial bypass, this is what it would sound like. By now i am fully awake and it stops, leaving me full of adrenaline and utterly awake. I've mentioned this to a couple of friends and no one seems to have had this happen to them, but i guess most don't have a constant background noise to "lock on" to

The standard response has been to tell me it was probably a dream, but this happened again last night (but this time i caught it before it had hit infinity the loudness scale) and i'm 100% sure that i am awake enough to not be dreaming. I don't have a history of lucid dreaming, night-terrors, sleep paralysis, sleepwalking or out of body experiences. I've also never seen anything odd in the night and although i have mild tinitus in one ear i can rule that out as this is both ears and sounds completely different

Has anyone heard of this before?
Does anyone know what's going on here and if it's possible to blow a fuse?

I was honestly scared that something was going to give... my first instinct was to check my ears for blood but there was none (as i immediately realised there shouldn't be, since if that sound had been real in the room everyone in my neighborhood would have called the police and birds would probably have fallen dead from the trees)

So, any thoughts?

So you're saying that before when you start to fall asleep, the sound of your server would fade away, and now that one experience you've had is that the sound became super amplified?

Sound often becomes super lucid for me when I'm sleepy, often especially noticeable with drug induced sleepiness such as with pot or DXM.
My guess is that a few of your cognitive functions are dormant at this stage, which allows for the raw sensory data to carry more weight in the brain.

Thanks for the reply dude,

That pretty much sums it up, although it's hard to tell if the "gain" suddenly turned up or if some kind of loop got started. The way the sound built up toward max level is what put me in mind of feedback but I suppose if the part of the brain that controls volume (if there is such a thing) went from "off" to "11" over the course of about half a second the effect would be similar.

The idea of certain bits shutting down makes sense because this was probably what happened when I went with it instead of letting it wake me up a bit, as it often did previously - I'll have to do a little digging on how that works, I'd always imagined a direct connection between my ears and my conscious mind but it's probably more complicated than that...

Cheers for your thoughts

Well the way I think of it is through attention, sensitization and habituation.

We constantly have all these stimuli coming into us, not to mention our mind is constantly running with thoughts that takes up parts of our attention. We are only able to attend to so much.

Additionally, we habituate to repeated stimuli that aren't important and are constantly there. For example, you don't notice the feeling of your clothes on your body. You often don't notice the city noises outside. But if suddenly a gunshot goes off outside, your hearing will become super sensitive.

So for your situation, I'd think of it in terms of when you sleep, you're shutting off most of your stimuli except your hearing. Your mind is becoming less active as you near sleep, so that leaves your hearing.
It seems akin to when Joe Rogan explaining how his thoughts turn super lucid when he's in a sensory isolation tank.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEjTXX2rHgA

I don't know if there is some kind of a loop in our head that can cause some kind of resonation... it could be true, but I'm just going off stuff I learned in my classes and Joe Rogan.

Sorry for the necro but I have an update to this.
The forum "forgot my password" button doesn't work so I had to create a new account, I'm the OP btw...

I now get this almost every night and it's starting to bother me. For a while I found earplugs worked but now my brain seems to just make a special effort to amplify this reduced input level and I get the same ear-splitting whistle as before

I found that sometimes, if I keep my internal voice talking the sound grows in the gaps between words but then drops again as the next word is "spoken". It's as if this can only happen when my brain is otherwise silent but it's amazing how quickly after a word finishes it starts up again. I estimate it takes about half a second to go from a quiet murmer to a deafening squeel so it only gets about a quarter of the way up between words as it doesn't have time to max out. Weird.

I also now find more and more that this experience is accompanied by sleep paralysis. I don't like this much but compared to the noise it's ok.
The other added bonus is that now this happens as I wake as well as during the transition from wake to sleep - Double the fun!

I know the simple answer is to put the server somewhere else but I really want to understand what's happening here and control it. Bare in mind that for several years I had the same background noise but no strange audio events so I don't think this is something that is inevitable

I also read somewhere that aspertine can contribute to this kind of thing, I must admit I drink about 7 diet cokes a day but again, I did for many years before this all started so it's hard for me to lay the blame on this

I'd love to hear any more thoughts about this,
Thanks for reading =)

Hi SIAL,

I would suggest your consideration of tinnitus to explain your condition.
I have had it for 40 years and have experienced very similar sound effects to those you describe, but only occasionally.
My main component is a sinewave whistle which started as an intermittent condition but became permanent about 10 years ago.
Don't let it drive you mad - shave any hairs in your ears which may touch your pillow and be prepared to move your head around as you try to fall asleep in case you are aggravating any near-surface blood vessels in your neck area.

Thanks for the suggestion Rhymer

I already have tinitus myself though so can definately rule this out. I suffer from "ping tinitus" but just in my left ear. This is a similar kind of sound but experienced in both ears and at massively higher volume, also it's triggered by the constant drone of a server running in my room, whereas I hear the pings at work, in the studio and generally at random. This phenomenom only happens as I pass between awake and sleep states and only when I'm in my own room

Also, tinitus sounds like a straight sine wave but this sounds like a server feeding back through a PA so there's a rapid ramping of volume and a whole bunch of other harmonics in there which appear as the volume crosses various thresholds.

I sort-of wish it was tinitus because although I find it really annoying, I can name the venue where the damage was done and even which song we were playing and there's nothing mysterious about it to me, this other thing's really got me baffled!

Thanks again for your reply anyway dude, I hope your own ear troubles aren't too distressing, 40 years is a long time to have put up with all that whistling and I can only imagine what that must be like

Welcome to the consciousness singularity my friend. Your consciousness has reached a higher frequency. http://www.biblicaluniversalist.com/Raphaim.html

The view from the shoulders of Giants can be wonderful, but we just have to remember to tell the Zamuzummim to keep quiet every now and then so we can get some rest!

What a weird answer for a ridged logical ass such as myself

Cheers Flex,

I must admit, I didn't read every word of that link you provided but it didn't seem to have much to do with reality to me, thanks for your reply though

Precisely the point! Nor does religion! We follow it blindly, with faith, just like science. But wait, no, stop! The world in not flat, no it is round! Euclid's 5th postulate cannot be proven based on the other 4 postulates. It is a lie we have been taught all of our lives. An assumption that has blinded us to the reality of the world, it is irrational! Or seeminly so. Don't we call pi, phi and e irrational numbers after all? And do not these numbers represent the direction of instantaneous change, relating the world of lines and curves, and in doing do, producing "irrational" ratios.

Carry on to page 6: http://archives.math.utk.edu/ICTCM/VOL10/C027/paper.pdf

Enter the matrix

An actual scientific paper describing the same thing:
http://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/2/3/417

One need only read between the lines to realize the Rephaim are nuclei... How do they communicate with each other? By interactions of electrons. Their speech sounds like rolling thunder. This is how atoms communicate! It is the foundation of life. In fact, it is about time for Enki to show his face again on this forum again--for those of you who do not know, just search Enki in the forum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anak

How bizarre is that?

Let me put it a little less crazy...

When Time Turns Over:

Holy shit… I am 23. Well not quite—my birthday is in 6 days. I remember when 6 days felt like a lifetime, hell, at some point it was a lifetime. In fact at some point, if I keep going back far enough, to May 21, 1989, 6 days would BE my lifetime exactly. Time keeps ticking by, continuous, constant. But our perception does not. Time begins to fly by. It seems to accelerate, as we grow older. Now do you get it? Holy shit…

I mean think about it. Remember how you felt waiting to get your first driver’s license? It was an eternity! Things have not changed much since then. We still have to wait an eternity at the DMV, but even so something is different. Time feels more—precious. We certainly do not want to waste it, but we do not realize how precious it really is until it is too late. Live each moment like it is your last, because at some point, it will be. Our entire existence will collapse into one single moment. But wait. What happened before I was born? Time certainly didn’t stand still, nor will it when my time comes, as it were. Time just keeps on moving, but where does it go?

May 9, 1966, 6 day before my birth, 23 years before my birth—where was I then? And where will I be 23 years after my death? It is almost as if on that day, the day of my birth, time turned over and I was brought into this world a conscious being. Say this is true, will time turn over again when it is my time to go?

Now I am no Einstein, but it seems a certain somebody figured out that space and time are intimately connected. In a vacuum, the speed of light is a constant to all observers, or so I am told. No matter how I move, towards or away, up or down, the speed of light that I observe will always be the same in a vacuum—in a sense, time and light reference one another, like yin and yang, like north and south. Time has directionality, it flows like hot to cold, so too then must light. Did I lose you there?

Let’s imagine the Big Bang as a beacon of light emerging out of nothingness at a single point in space, continuously emitting light in all directions. Ok, who cares? There is a lantern floating in space, big deal. Well… If light and time are truly connected, then light like time must be traveling, and it is! Light travels at 299,792,458 meters per second, the same speed at which all-massless particles ought to travel in a vacuum. We usually think of light traveling as instantaneous, but it is not. It just keeps on going, constantly, continuously. From this cosmic eternal beacon radiates a field of concentric energy waves. As each wave propagates in time away from the origin of light, a new wave front is born, and continues to travels on just as the first forming the geometry of life. http://www.world-mysteries.com/FOL_large.gif

Let us say this is true. Lets up say that the origin of the Universe is pure energy being continuously emitted from a central point. Where does that get us? Nowhere! Sure the planets, galaxies and other extraterrestrial terrestrial bodies seem spherical, as do their orbits. This is also true of the atomic level, but what about us? Why do the heavens above and the heavens within seem to poses the majesty of curvature--bending and looping and breathing--while we are stuck here, ridged and flat, moving in absolutes? Forwards and back, up and down, we never seem to let our hair down and join the heavens both beyond and within us.

Is the problem that we are blind to the truth right in front of our eyes? When Eve took a bite out of the Apple of Eden, Man was imbued with the power of knowledge, at the cost of losing touch of that which is eternal, holy and sacred. Perhaps knowledge is the veil that prevents us from finding Truth. We spend so much time seeking that which is, that we fail to look at that which isn’t. Of all of Mans great inventions, none exemplifies our progress towards truth like the wheel. We focus on the spokes of the wheel, but it is not the spokes which make the world turn, no—It is space itself! The wheel obtains its usefulness from its emptiness. It is the hole in the center of the wheel, which allows it to move.

The answer is so obvious that it cannot be seen. We were blinded by our own arrogance. The most intelligent beings on the planet, ha! My ass… It was our perspective that was wrong all along. We thought the Earth was flat. Any rational being would have come to this conclusion. All one need to do is draw two parallel lines on the ground with a third line normal to each, since the connecting line only intersects the parallel lines at one point, one can come to the conclusion that the Earth is flat. We are taught to be blind. That geometry is flat, that reality is flat, and that life is flat. Life is not made of lines and edges; it is made of curves and bends. Balance, ratios. But wait? Do we not define circles by that most curious of numbers, pi? Ahh yes, pi, the ratio of a circles circumference in relation to diameter, the joining of the Heavens and Earth. That number which we call irrational.

Maybe time is like pi. Irrational. 3.14159 on and on never repeating, never knowing what will come next, but always approaching greater and greater perfection. Maybe it is time we join the Heavens, and start living like circles! Maybe it is time to take a step back and say, “God damn it! Enough is enough!” Maybe it is time to change direction, to evolve towards the absolute, to join the world of circles and cry out, “I am different!” To dance, to move, to laugh and cry. To break free of the illusion that we all must fit in a box! To realize that there were never walls to contain us in the first place, for we are created in Gods likeness.

Three days have past since I first sat down to reflect on this most recent trip around the sun. Three day left till my birthday. And right smack dab at the junction between past and future lie life—the present. What is time? Who knows... After all, I am no Einstein. But I do know this, that when time turns over, I will be a better man.

http://brainmeta.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=14724

Notice my crazy ass never made a post in this thread--I just notices a guest on the board was reading it.

Thanks Flex,

That was way more than I was expecting =)

I'm possibly the least spiritual person you'll ever meet though and as such, I failed to get any point from all that...

I simply have no idea what I'm meant to think, I did enjoy reading it though so please don't think I'm ungrateful, just that I literally have no idea what any of it meant - I've probably embarrased myself now so if anyone else understood this could you please translate it into the kind of language a drummer would understand?

Are you saying that I'm hearing my soul travelling through time? Or that it's all a dream and I'm just dreaming now as well. Is it God messing with me? Did I just reach enlightenment? Was it the sound of the Big Bang?

I'm so confused right now dude, I'm gonna smoke a phatty and read your post again...

I'm 35 btw, so the stuff about the perception of time I can understand, just not sure how to apply it to my current situation

Cheers

I think I just might be able to do so. I am glad you are a drummer Now I feel like we can speak the same language... Music. When you are playing your best, do you think about it? Do you think about every fill? Hell no. If you are thinking about it, I can guarantee you are not playing worth a damn.

I am not trying to say anything religious, only spiritual. We do not know where we are going, but when we feel what is right, and don't stop to rationalize and question ourselves, we succeed. Next time you hear the thunder, go to your kit and play. Let me know when you feel it. When you let your mind go blank, and you feel the heart of creation. "God" is the stillness of mind that allows creation to flow. The heart of creation you might say, the pulse, the beat. It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to feel good!

You do not need to be stuck in a loop. Sound can only travel because we create opposites. We create oscillating high and low pressure, and right in the middle there is a balance, a node.

What happens when you barely push on the 12th fret on a guitar and pluck the string? You get a harmonic. You halves the length of the string, so you doubled the frequency. But wait! That note was there all along, you were just not aware of it. Every single note is composed of harmonics, we just have to be in tune with them.

I believe Arnold Schoenberg may be able to communicate to you what you and I have experienced in the past few days.

http://www.amazon.com/Theory-Harmony-Calif...t/dp/0520049446

It is good to feel the fool every now and then. I know I feel crazy as hell right now, but it is alright. Take a lesson from Shakespeare, is not it the fool who reveals the greatest truths?

Am I actin' a fool right now? Eh, thats ok.