Exploding Head Syndrome: What We Know About This Mysterious Disorder | Hacker News Reader

Exploding Head Syndrome: What We Know About This Mysterious Disorder

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56 pointsamichail53 comments

"Drive" [1] was a really fun episode of "The X-Files" featuring exploding head(s).

And - interesting anecdote about it:

> The episode was written by Vince Gilligan, directed by Rob Bowman, and featured a guest appearance by Bryan Cranston. Gilligan cast Cranston to play the antagonist because he felt he could successfully humanize the role. Cranston's success in "Drive" later led to his casting as Walter White in Gilligan's AMC series Breaking Bad.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_(The_X-Files)

An interesting coincidence that Cranston also had a significant supporting role in the 2011 film Drive [0] (after he was already in breaking bad).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_%282011_film%29

I'm delighted that "Exploding Head Syndrome" isn't what I was afraid it was.

for a minute I was worried "The Boys" might have been _too good_ about the current challenges to humanity's future...

I had 2-3 sleep paralysis events over a short period of time; seemed mostly self inflicted due to poor sleep hygiene and lots of travel, but the first time was very disconcerting. I was "90%" awake, but unable to get my body to do anything for what felt like a long time. I didn't really feel a "presence" like other describe, but maybe I was just distracted.

The next time it happened (a few days later), I had a plan. I knew I had limited control over my lips and drooling/spitting, so I just did what I could with that until I couldn't breath; Didn't take long to wake up for real after that :)

I used to get sleep paralysis a lot. Almost daily. Easiest to trigger when you’re falling asleep but your mind is racing. At one point you’ll notice that your body has fallen asleep but your mind has not yet.

At this point you have two options:

1. Just wait. You’ll fall asleep soon and then all good

2. Focus very very hard on moving something. Eventually your body gives way and unlocks. Now you can move

These days I use option 1 when going to bed. Got so used to it that I don’t notice the paralysis part anymore. Option 2 is good when you need to get up in the morning or when you were startled awake (or just need to pee) at night and your body hasn’t caught up yet.

Ok I guess I still get sleep paralysis a lot but I got used to how it feels heh

3. Focus very hard on staying conscious and you get to remember the process of falling asleep (do not recommend).

Why do you not recommend?

Pretty much every night I attempt to fall asleep consciously and nothing bad has happened, as far as I can tell. Witnessing the transition from being awake, to light and deep sleep, and finally the emergence of dreams -- it's a fun experience, and it automatically rewards you with a lucid dream.

I’ve never dreamed. I wonder what would happen if I tried it?

Everybody dreams, except for people with life-threatening sleep disorders.

If I do dream, I have no knowledge of it. In 52+ years of life, I have never woken up and remembered anything from the time I went to sleep. I even tried keeping a dream diary to see if I could remember anything if I tried to write stuff down as soon as I woke up, but there was never anything there to remember.

I was like this from about age 16 to 39, no dreams at all. Then I developed crippling anxiety. After about 2 months in therapy, I started to dream again: full blown in color sweeping epics of dreams. It got so intense that I needed a break from therapy to find a different therapist just to help me tamp them down. Now I have a more balanced amount and intensity.

There are a few nutritional deficiencies that may need correction for some people, but dreaming is very much inherent to the sleep cycle. Keep working at it.

I grew up in a very religious and rural community. I get sleep paralysis fairly often these days but the first time I recall getting it was in my early teens. My parents thought the devil was trying to possess me. Fun.

> seemed mostly self inflicted due to poor sleep hygiene

And a lot of coffee, especially in the afternoon.

Scanners immediately came to mind. That's not what the article is about.

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

This happens to me. Started in my twenties and I was convinced I had a brain tumor. I'll be almost entirely asleep, then I get jerked by a weird electric buzz sound, like the buzz of a transformer, and it feels like my body from the shoulders up is zapped with electricity, then I get terribly anxious. And then I don't get to sleep that night more often than not because of the anxiety.

I get this too occasionally.

I find it correlates with being extra stressed or exhausted. If I workout too hard, or stay up to long or too much is happening at work and I'm tanked, I get the ZZZAAPPPP noise in my head when falling asleep.

A lot of folks say its related to withdrawing from Antidepressants. But I'm not on anything and havent been, so who knows what actually causes it

Exploding head is very much a sleeping thing.

Brain zaps can be while fully awake.

I have had something like this and a bunch of other parasomnias for a while, one of which I haven't really come across in any literature and doctors seem to have no idea what I'm talking about, so I'll try to explain.

I can't do it 100% of the time, but I can enter a dream/unconscious state whilst being fully awake. Here's how it goes:

- first stage you start seeing light swirling shapes that can take various colors, believe this is called hypnogogic hallucinations, but at this point you won't make any sense or shape of them

- second stage these swirling shapes start to take form into the shapes of images, sometimes flashing between different ones

- third stage directly after this is the "exploding head" part that doesn't happen 100% of the time but right in between that hypnogogic boundary I get an incredibly loud buzzing sound in my head, accompanied by a deep sense of terror - almost like you get from sleep paralysis.

- fourth stage, once you get past that, you enter a light "dream" state where you start to feel like you can move your arms and legs and walk around, even if you don't see anything - it's a very weird sensation because you can still "feel" your physical body lying in the bed at this time. I believe this is when sleep paralysis is happening.

- fifth stage I am in a dream state and fully lucid. I can maintain that state for a while before either losing the dream and waking up or falling deeper into unconsciousness. What's odd is in this state I am almost always in a dream-representation of my house. 99.999% of the time. Initially my doctors thought this was when I was sleep walking, but cameras ruled this out.

I have a bunch of other parasomnias like sleep walking/talking and bed wetting stuff when I was younger. It's all related somehow, but no one really knows what's going on that I've talked to so far. It's kind of cool but can occasionally lead to crappy stuff like insomnia or poor quality sleep, or when I injure myself sleep walking. The only thing that's ever come up in a sleep study (which I struggle to take because in those settings I can't fall asleep normally) is that I enter REM sleep very quickly, almost like a narcoleptic, but that was never the formal diagnosis. Another thing that's happened in more recent years, ever since I experienced DMT, that I will occasionally have dreams where my sense of time literally feels like decades have passed. It'll always be super mundane stuff too, and when I wake up it's a really disturbing feeling.

That mirrors almost exactly the process of astral travelling. You might be interested in the book "How to Know Higher Worlds" by Rudolf Steiner.

This is essentially what the advanced tantric sadhana of dream yoga is all about... Lucid dreaming is a super power. Cultivate a practice of recognizing when you are in a dream state (during sleep) and building the ability to visualize intently with the minds eye is essentially what all the esoteric traditions are trying to teach.

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

I don't really believe there is anything mystical about it, but yea, that stuff is interesting - and I am well practiced at becoming lucid during a dream state, due to chronic severe nightmares I've had since a very young age. But, what I am describing here looks and feels way different to me.

However, this is funny:

> According to Kragh, "The yogi is here instructed to think of whatever dream arises as being merely a dream and to relate to it without any fear. If he dreams of water, he should plunge into it or walk across it. He should jump into an abyss or sit down to be bitten by dream-dogs or beaten by dream enemies. He should fly in air, visit the god realms, or go sight-seeing in India."

> Blessing as illusory and getting rid of fear – Here, the yogi checks their mind during the dream to see if there is even the slightest fear, and if so, they should let go of it by recognizing that they are only in a dream. Once they've mastered the feeling of complete unobstructedness, they have "blessed their dreams as illusory" (sgyu ma byin gyis brlabs pa).

I basically do this but didn't know it was a thing. When I experience that sleep-paralysis like terror in a dream state, I try to conjure up the most horrible thing I can imagine until it goes away, stuff like that. Nothing ever comes.

If you want to learn more about Dream Yoga, Alan Wallace's Dreaming Yourself Awake is a great resource that includes guidance and exercises you can practice.

When you experience fear in a dream, remind yourself that what you experience is not what you are, in the same way that the movie is not the same as the screen on which it is projected. The monsters in our dreams are a reification of our fear, and the best way to address them is by allowing conpassion to arise and kindly comfort your fear as you would do with a child who is scared. Nothing in your dreamscape can harm you.

Anyway, I hope this helps. Alan Wallace recommends letting the monster hurt you in your dream, but personally I think it is not the optimum approach.

I am shocked that I was not aware this was a thing, thanks, I will check that out. I’m shocked because I’ve been practicing some form of a lot of this stuff my entire life without realizing it but never really came across this before.

I am intrigued by the tibetan stuff as well, I just started reading the relevant sections of “tibetan yoga and secret doctribes” by W.Y Evan-Wentz. It’s dense, and like I said I very much don’t believe in mystical things, but some of the techniques described here I see as potentially useful for addressing trauma, which I have struggled with for a long time. Accessing memories and exploring your own consciousness in this state can be terrifying but I’ve definitely dipped more than a toe in there before.

Thanks for this, my mind is blown. I’ve tried Supervised Ketamine/MDMA/psilocybin therapies to achieve similar goals but this seems much healthier if you are able to do it, as those experiences didn’t do much for me.

I get where you are coming from, because I've followed a similar path.

I'm not a spiritual person either; having frequent nightmares as a child led me to learning how to recognize the dreaming state and exert control over the dreamscape. I had learned how to do most of the exercises that Alan Wallace talks about in his book all on my own before I ever heard of dream yoga or Buddhism, so following through didn't require any faith or belief.

I can't speak of how to deal with fearing this state of mind itself because for me it's always been a tool to escape the scary situations I had unwittingly conjured during my non-lucid dreaming. Once you recognize that everything in your dreamscape is a manifestation of your emotional estate and your expectations, you unlock the ability to manipulate it at will. When you recognize that the evil person in your dream is nothing but a representation of your fear you are able to turn it into a non-threatening experience through self-compassion. You can literally go talk to them and say you feel sorry that they are scared and reassure them that they are safe with you, and they will turn into your friend. Because you are literally talking to yourself.

I do recommend practicing kindness and understanding in your every day life, as it carries over to your dream experiences once it has become a habit. Buddhists may describe this in more spiritual terms, but I see it in a mundane way. Maybe they are right, I don't really care. It works.

Why is lucid dreaming a super power? What can you practically do with it?

For me, I can do a lot of things - when I'm very proficient (it feels like a skill that can atrophy like any other skill can) I can conjure entire worlds and scenarios I'd never be able to simulate in real life - I can have sex with who I want, I can go to the top of a mountain, I can fly. This stuff is occasionally useful for my creative writing. more practically though, I've been using it lately to access memories that are usually very difficult to access in my waking life due to severe trauma. it's been very useful for that.

Hmm, ok. I lucid dream, but I can also daydream with nearly the same clarity. I use the daydreaming for most visualization and memory recall use cases. I could see how vivid dreaming could be used instead of that.

Cognitive productivity during sleeping hours; it may not be working on a problem but oftentimes is, or emotional labor. Oneironautics for it's own sake.

In stage three I have never felt any fear.

I believe what you are feeling in stage four is not your real body on your bed. You probably lost the sensations of your physical body around phases two or three. Rather, by stage four you are already experiencing a dream and you haven't "projected" a particular visual image yet.

I suspect that "astral projections" are nothing but non-lucid dreams in which people dream that they are on their bed without realizing that it's not real.

How much do you normally sleep? To me it sounds like the sort of experiences I have when severely sleep deprived, especially the part about entering REM really fast.

I don’t know, I am pretty sure I am feeling my body and I am pretty sure it is when sleep paralysis taking effect - It feels like I have two bodies, first I can start to move my arms, but I can physically feel my toes, and if I try to wiggle them before paralysis has taken effect, it can wake me up entirely. It’s an extremely strange sensation but it does not last very long.

I’ve had this since at least far back as I can remember, around age 3-4. I don’t always sleep well but I’d say no less than the average person. 6-8 hours a night, but with whatever I have going on, sometimes it’s easier to do split sleep cycles like 4 hours sleeping (2 full rem cycles), 8 hours awake, 4 hours asleep. I feel much more rested when I sleep this way but it doesn’t coincide well with normal life.

This very accurately describes what I've been having for some time. Got laughed out of the room by a few doctors. Tests didn't find anything wrong other than an arachnoid cyst in the brain (occurs in about 1% of population, effects vary).

Ultimately, fixed it by:

1) Having a glass of water before going to bed. Having another glass at night when I wake up to pee the first one out.

2) Spending 1-2 hours before sleep time gradually relaxing. No work/exercise for 2 hours before sleeping. Minimal activity for the last 1 hour. Mostly, browsing or watching something on YouTube.

Works like a charm altogether.

>I experienced DMT, that I will occasionally have dreams where my sense of time literally feels like decades have passed. It'll always be super mundane stuff too,

Do this often and double your life span.

Hypnagogic hallucinations, sleep pralysis, sleep walking and night terrors I've had but the most fucked up one I've had is compulsive night eating. The sleep walking was also night eating but a bit diffeent: unconcious rather than compulsive. I wonder if there really is a big difference. If you've never had a true compulsion, I have to tell you it's a lot stranger than you think. I could stand there and tell myself to stop repeatedly and reason with myself, even put obstacles and reminders in my way ahead of time but it was like I was just a passanger in my own body. It took me two years of fighting it full time. Literally harder to stop than actual drug addiction. I think it came from a sleep medication that I had discontinued by then but the damage somehow stayed with me.

What worked was eating a lot much later before bed and then still doing battle with all my other tricks like obstacles, etc.

Recurring nightmare hallucinations suck too though. I used to wake up absolutely certain there were snakes in my bed, get up, turn on the light and look through my bed. It took me minutes to fully wake up and realize it was a dream. I think I was able to fix that by imagining the dream but with a pleaeant ending before I went to sleep. I'm not sure if that works but it did stop after that. I didn't even know recurring nightmares were a thing. I thought that was just from movies.

I've had both hypnagogic hallucinations and night terrors a lot when I was younger, up until my early 30s. They almost disappeared now, which I can't really explain. For me the worst were the hallucinations, the most recurring one was seeing a dark figure abseiling from the ceiling or from the window, which after waking reveals to be a ceiling lamp or a curtain. It's terrifying stuff while you experience it and I even broken stuff in a desperate reaction of throwing objects to defend against the "intruder"

Oh yeah the waking up thinking there’s “stuff in my bed” happens to me at least once a week.

This happens to me sometimes. I think it would happen randomly when I was a kid, but as I've gotten older it seems to only happen when I'm really stressed out and not getting much sleep.

I have this. When it first started I thought there were like secret gang wars going on in my apartment complex. I would wake up hearing a BANG. I called 911 a couple of time even thinking it was gunshots, but they police said no one else heard anything. I started asking my neighbors if they had heard it too. That's when I started to realize that I was hearing things. I talked to my doctor and that's when I learned about exploding head syndrome.

Yes, I had this during an extremely stressful life crisis.

Basically woke up believing a bomb went off in my neighborhood. Absolutely real and startling and disorienting.

I've noticed my brain tries to instantly construct a story to account for the noise, like someone is kicking in the front door, gunshots outside etc. I think the order of thoughts / senses while in that half-asleep state is fluid enough that my brain manages to make it all feel like it happened in the order it would if real. I've got up to answer the door more times than I care to remember.

It used to happen like every night in my teens. Now it's only like once a month. No real idea why. Maybe less stress

I used to get this a lot - I'd be dozing peacefully, then would hear a loud bang with a hypnic jerk and auditory startle response (a white flash).

I just put the whole thing down to nervous system noise, like closed-eye hallucination and tinnitus, though it went away when I got a bit older and stopped drinking caffeine after 3PM.

similar but for me and this only happens after I've taken large amount of edibles before falling asleep

instead of a large bomb I hear a loud scream in my head usually when i have to be awakened due to urge to urinate

i now avoid taking large amount of edibles before I fall asleep waking up during the night and feeling paranoid

Tangential but what were ‘large amounts’? I guess there’s always some interpersonal variance in metabolism etc., but are you talking high tens or in the hundreds? Did this ever occur after smoking/vaping cannabis? If so, I wonder if the more drawn out pharmacokinetics (incl. those of the active metabolites, primarily the more potent and potentially more sedating 11-HO-THC) of edibles played a factor.

yes 20mg to 1000mg sometimes (high tolerance and i dont ant to repeat that)

If you have a chance to see Memoria by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, you definitely should. Tilda Swinton plays a woman with this condition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoria_(2021_film)

I have this. About once a month, in the early morning hours, I hear a hard to describe, "internal" sound, as if a hard object hit my cranium. Extremely loud, but painless. 20 years ago it was distressing but now it barely wakes me up.

Stress does seem to increase occurrences for me.

I get the related hypnic jerks they mentioned, just suddenly my whole body jerks a little every so often, I think it goes away when I am not getting enough sleep funnily enough

I've experienced this only once or twice in my life, thankfully. Probably under huge stress at the time, normally have pretty constant tinnitus.

Is this the same thing as night frights that some people are prone to?

I'm not sure what you mean by "night frights". Are you talking about "night terrors"? As someone who experienced EHS a lot when I was younger and who's seen someone with night terrors, they are very, very different things.

I used the wrong term and you used the right one - yes, I mean night terrors. And got it - different things. Thank you.

On a slightly different topic, we now know that a surprisingly large number of people suffer daytime "hallucinations without delusion" meaning they see things but they know the things are not real. And I've often wondered if that is some kind of dysfunction of the sleep cycle. If we think of dreams as a kind of hallucination, then is daytime "hallucination without delusion" a kind of dreaming while awake? I'd like to see more research on that question.

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