alias_sqbr

This is a presumably totally benign brain thing, but I'm curious if it's a known phenomenon, and googling just got me stuff about half-awake people hallucinating music, which is the opposite thing.

So. The other day I had a nap while the computer beside me was playing music fairly loudly. The cycle was I would sleep for a bit, lay half asleep vaguely pondering things, lay awake with my eyes closed vaguely pondering things, and then fall back asleep.

The half-asleep and awake parts were mostly pretty similar except for how repeatedly, as I 'woke up', I would suddenly go from not hearing any music and having forgotten the music playing was even a thing, to a sudden jarring awareness of the loud music beside me, as if it had just been turned on. And then I would go "oh wait that was always on, that's so weird I couldn't hear it and forgot it was even there" and then I would fall back asleep and the cycle would happen again. I may have had a "half asleep and not hearing music" phase as I fell back asleep, too, but have no way to know.

I have had a great many intermittent naps while music was playing in my life and can't remember ever having experienced this before, it was very odd. It wasn't the music itself changing or waking me since the awareness would kick in mid-song. And it was otherwise a totally unremarkable nap.

I'm guessing it's the audial equivalent of sleep paralysis, where the part of my brain responsible for making sure I don't respond to sound while asleep hadn't quite turned off yet. I've never actually experienced sleep paralysis but have experienced other odd half-asleep phenomena.

Anyway! That was my odd brain experience. I will probably be appalling at replying to comments but at least I have documented it now!