Melatonin changes my sense of time

I work shifts, and that isn't good for my already unusual sleep rhythm. To battle the sleeplessness and following zombie state every time my schedule changes, I got some melatonin pills. Melatonin is a hormone that is produced naturally in the body when it is dark. It is a part of the system that signals the body when it is time to fall asleep.

It does, usually, make me fall asleep faster. It also makes me wake up earlier, which is a good thing when the alarm rings at 6 AM. After taking a melatonin pill before midnight, it feels like I have had a fuller night of sleep early in the morning. It is easier to drag myself out of bed.

What I didn't expect was the effect the drug had on my experience of time. I don't just wake up as easily after 6 hours with melatonin as after 9 hours without, it also feels like it has literally been 9 hours since I fell asleep. I have often woken up at 3 or 4 and thought I have overslept, because my sense of time has been wrong. I have woken up half an hour before my alarm in a panic, because I have been certain that I overslept!

We all wake up several times every night. Many people can't remember this. I usually do. When I take melatonin, I notice the awakenings even more, because there is usually some anxiety involved. It is harder to fall back asleep when my stomach is a tight knot and my mouth is dried out. Sometimes, I am sure that I have been lying still in bed, trying to sleep, for more than an hour. Then I look at the time. It has only been 20 minutes.

The altered sense of time lasts into the morning sometimes. It can feel like I have spent half an hour in the bathroom, and that I have certainly missed my bus, when it has only been 10 minutes. This is really fun when work is slow.

I have asked other people on IRC and on LD4all for their experiences, and nobody else has experienced this side effect. It isn't stopping me from using the pills now and then. I'd rather have a moment of panic in the morning than a full shift as a zombie.

The body knows

Today, it is time for my annual review meeting at work. It is something we all have to go through, and I don't expect anything shocking or bad to come up. All my coworkers have come out of the manager's office with relieved expressions. I don't fear it. I keep reminding myself that there is nothing to fear here.

When I woke up today, my left hand had broken out in a rash. This thing, atopic eczema,bothered me in my early childhood. I had to see a dermatologist for it when I was 3 years old. It has mostly disappeared since then, but for the last couple of years, it has occasionally popped out in stressful situations.

No matter how much I try to convince myself that the meeting is no danger, my body seems to have a different opinion. The rash says what I sometimes don't want to say out loud.

This reminds me of a story my grandmother told me. She had just started a new job, and she was about to move into her new room in the town where she got the job. The night before her first day, she had a dream about rash covering her entire body. It was disturbing to her. When she woke up, she found her body covered with hives. My theory was that the itch must have leaked into her dream. She thought the stressful dream was the cause of the rash. With what I know now, I wonder if the stress was the cause of both,

She would also frequently experience sleep paralysis and hypnagogic hallucinations in that room. That is a story for a different post.

A late night walk

I was just out for a late night walk. This September has been unusually warm, and I need the exercise. Walking, for me, is almost a form of meditation. While my body moves with its own automatic rhythm, my thoughts flow freely.  I lose track of time.

Something made me look up at the sky for a split second. I saw stars, and looked at the road again, but something felt wrong. Fundamentally wrong. My subconscious was feeding me a sense of dread, as if I had seen something impossible happen. This confused me; I had just seen stars?

I stopped and peeked at the starry sky again. Then I saw it. One of the "stars" was in fact a high flying plane, slowly moving across the sky, too slow to be noticeable but too fast to be anything else than a plane. Somehow, my subconscious had registered this subtle movement and interpreted it as wrong, because stars don't move.

It is amazing how the subconscious can filter the enormous amounts of sensory information we take in every day, and only pass on the relevant part to the conscious mind. It makes me wonder how much we miss because it isn't weird or dangerous enough to be noticed.

Synesthesia and the Beer Spectrum

I have a condition called synesthesia. That means that my senses are more or less linked to each other in my mind. Different people get it differently. For me, it is mostly sounds, smells and tastes that get "translated" to shapes and colours in my mind. I can say that a scented soap "looks purple, but smells yellow", and that makes perfect sense to me. The smell gives me a mental image of "yellow".

I like beer, and trying out different kinds of beer. Beer tastes multicoloured. Almost all beer has a dark red to orange flavour from the kinds of malt used, yellow-green tones from hops (Cascade is intensely lemon yellow!) Some dark beers taste more brown than others. The best pilsners have a very pleasant, golden orange taste of fresh bread. Wheat beers and sour beers can even have blue tones, but bright blue usually means strong carbonation.

The idea of a beer spectrum came into my mind when my SO and I had a conversation over a beer in a local pub. "This stout has a more even spectrum than the Guinness. Guinness has a peak in the red part and the top green part, while this one has more orange" My SO gave me a strange look. He obviously didn't have this kind of mental image of beer. Now, he usually asks me for a spectrum when we try a new beer.

Guinness

Clausthaler Wheat

Staropramen

Mack Bayer

After a beer or two, the mental image becomes more pronounced. It tends to fade from my mind and get harder to recall afterwards, so in order to build up a collection of images, I should draw them while actually drinking the beer. The images above are easy to remember, because they represent favourite beers which I often drink.

How do I explain synesthesia?

"Sundays are white" 
"December is at the bottom of the year" 
"This song looks like a white brain"

As a child, I used to puzzle my parents with expressions like these. I couldn't understand what they thought was so strange about this. They couldn't understand what I meant. As I grew older, it became clear that almost nobody else shared these experiences. I wrote it off, stopped speaking of it and hid it inside my mind.

Not until I was an adult, almost 30 years later, did I first hear of synesthesia. My mother had heard it mentioned on TV, and reminded me: "Do you remember that Sundays were white? You should look at this..."

I experience most of the forms of synesthesia that are discussed in the Wikipedia article, but the strongest association is the one that shows sounds and smells as visual images. When a word has a colour, I don't see the colour strongly when I look at the letters of the word, but I see it when it is spoken out loud. The shapes are usually in 3D.

The song that looked like a white brain was an upbeat, big band version of a famous jazz song. A well known radio show in my country uses it as its intro. I can't find this specific version of it online, but I have found several others. Interestingly enough, they look different. Where the big band recording looks like a white brain, a slower version with the main melody played on a clarinet looks more like a dark green fractal tree. The general "winding" shape is the same, but the faster version has a lighter and more compact visual.

Smells have even stronger associations than sounds. I have learned that the sense of smell has a strong connection with the primitive, subconscious part of the brain, especially with old memories. I can often visualise a smell before my conscious mind can come up with the name for it. The smell of blood, for example, is a semi transparent iron grey blob.

I experience synesthesia stronger when my mind isn't fully alert. When I am very sleepy, intoxicated, or sick, the associations become stronger. This is especially an issue with (lucid) dreaming. The connection between a word, its sound, and its shape and colour is sometimes so strong that it makes the dream hard to type up.

One peculiar thing I have noticed is the fact that the lower quality the sound recording is, the less colourful and detailed is the image, unless the recording is of a sound I know very well. It is as if the brain fills in the blanks, and gives me the image I expect.

The article also links synesthesia with misophonia. I don't know if that is universal, but I definitely have misophonia too. Some sounds translate to fear and/or aggression. I wonder if that works in the same way as the connection between smells, memories and emotions.

Wikipedia article about synesthesia

A good article on Google+

My favourite thing to do in a lucid dream

I am a natural lucid dreamer. Staying on LD4all for many years has greatly improved how often I lucid dream. A lucid dream is a dream where you are aware of the fact that you are dreaming. This mental state, although limited in time, is complete freedom and privacy. If you can imagine it, you can do it in a lucid dream. With some experience, training, and mental focus, it is possible to make a lucid dream last for several minutes, and you can do literally what you want.

In their first lucid dreams, many people will typically want to do the same things. It is common to want to lucid dream about flying, other superpowers, and fulfilling one's desires. I have done those things. It works just like daydreaming, just in full virtual reality 3D.

When we are asleep, our senses are turned down. We don't pay much attention to the world around us, because we are sleeping. This means that everything that happens in a dream happens inside our own heads. This also means that our experiences aren't limited to what our senses can process. I have read lucid dreams where people have had 360 degree vision, where they could follow scent trails, and where they could see and hear from the point of view of two people at the same time.

Flying and singing in my own private world

I love music. I love making music, singing and drumming random rhythms when I am alone. Unfortunately, I'm not very talented. This is where the lucid dreaming comes in. In a lucid dream, my voice sounds good. It becomes deep, expressive, and powerful. It is as if I listen to a skilled singer, and can perfectly control what they sing, because I am that singer. The dream environment can also provide background music. Since my mind isn't limited by my ears anymore, I can clearly hear and follow multiple voices and instruments playing together. In a lucid dream, the harmony is always perfect. Sometimes, the music comes from my surroundings, from people around me, or even from the planet itself. The euphoria from this is impossible to describe with words.

Apart from all the other good sides of lucid dreaming, it is this that makes me keep trying. There is simply nothing like standing on a private world, singing a song you make yourself as you sing it, loudly and freely.

The randomness has a name: Hypnagogic hallucinations

You lie in bed, waiting for sleep to come. Your thoughts spin around everything that has happened in the day, and everything you will have to do the next day. As your body gets more and more relax, it gets harder and harder to follow the train of thoughts. The mind jumps randomly around, and strange ideas insert themselves into your mind. You find yourself looking at something, and it takes a moment to realise that it isn't real. Random lines flash past you in your thoughts. You are walking, and suddenly, you slip through the ground. Your body jerks, and you are startled awake.

This is called hypnagogic hallucinations, hypnagogic images or sleep images.

Hypnagogic hallucinations are normal

Phosphenes, as they usually look to me

Most of us experience this phenomenon regularly. It is extremely common to hallucinate while falling asleep. These hallucinations are a normal part of the process of falling asleep, and not in any way connected to mental illness.

The first and simplest kind of hallucinations is called phosphenes. When there is no visual input from the eyes, background noise from the nervous system will become visible as shapeless blobs of light. For me, they are usually blue or green. Staring at the darkness for a few moments is usually enough to induce the hallucination, and the longer I focus on it, the stronger it becomes.

This isn't necessarily a sign of falling asleep. Phosphenes can have other causes, such as pressure (for example from rubbing your eyes) sleep deprivation, or fever.

Visual hallucinations are common while falling asleep. After intense activity, especially after learning a new skill such as a computer game, visual hallucinations can be very detailed copies of the activity. This is called the Tetris effect. Other common themes are text or headlines, shifting patterns, landscapes and work scenes. Maybe my most common visual scene is the workbench in the flower shop where I work. It is welcome, because it simply means that I'm falling asleep. For a person with periodic insomnia, this is a relief.

All senses can be affected

The hallucinations aren't necessarily visual. It is just as normal to experience sounds and physical sensations. I have been lucky enough to hear music several times. The music can be a well known song, or it can be completely new. Some people hear their own thoughts spoken by their own voice. Footsteps, the doorbell, or a phone ringing are commonly reported sounds. Some people may experience an extremely loud noise. This is known as exploding head syndrome. It is rare, and harmless.

It can feel like the body is being stretched, compressed, lifted up or vibrating. I sometimes feel like my hands are floating in thin air. Some people have even reported smells or tastes. I know that I have hallucinated the smell of smoke at least once.

The hypnic jerk

A specific kind of hallucination can actually be so disturbing that we wake up. It's a startle reaction called the hypnic jerk. It feels like a "jump", and is usually accompanied by hallucinations of falling or slipping. For me, it usually feels like I fall "through the ground". This is apparently more common in stressful periods. Sometimes, after sleep deprivation, this is how we can notice that we are actually falling asleep in the day.

Hypnagogic hallucinations and lucid dreaming

Many of my lucid dreams start with this

For people who practice the WILD form of lucid dreaming, the hallucinations are valuable. They are a good sign that the body is actually falling asleep. The hallucinations can transform seamlessly into a dream. The trick is to stay focused on the images, while still allowing sleep to happen. This will usually take some practice.

For me, the best hallucination to get a WILD from is an image of a road or path. It feels easy to concentrate on. I imagine moving along the path, and at a certain point, the illusion shifts from 2D to 3D. When I stand on the road, the lucid dream has started.


For learning more about lucid dreaming, I strongly recommend paying a visit to LD4all. I have learned so much from the people there.