Weird Sensation

A few days ago I experienced a weird effect in my brain regarding tinnitus.

I was watching TV and started to doze of. I remember distinctly after waking up again that during this dozing of my tinnitus completely disappeared, but I was still hearing sound from the tv (subconsciously). As if the tinnitus was in a twilight zone between consciousness and sleeping. (I was not dreaming!)

I often notice when I go to sleep at night that my tinnitus stops just moments before I fall asleep. Actually it is more noticeable the other way around. When I fall asleep for an instance and wake up again I hear my tinnitus starting. Like an audio fade-in.

I understand that when you go to sleep parts of the brain "disconnect".
This was the first time I noticed complete disconnecting of a part of my brain. At least that is what I think it is.
If it wasn't such a horrible affliction I could have been utterly fascinated by this process.
I just thought I share this with the TT communety

 

It could have been a dream.

 

Transition from awake to sleep and vice versa can affect how we perceive the tinnitus signal. If one is in bad luck one may experience tinnitus signal is the last part of the brain that is shut down before falling asleep. In that case tinnitus signal is perceived as very loud right before one is about to fall asleep making it hard to actually fall asleep. I had a bad experience with this strange phenomenon for half a year. It is called the banging head syndrome. After much silence around me for half a year, I managed to get rid of it.

The most common tinnitus, and which I have now, seems to be that tinnitus signal is shut off when one goes to sleep. Then it is silent right before one is clearly awake in morning. In that case people may describe tinnitus as contact lenses. Something that one has to take on every morning.

 

When I go to bed the noise is there. But i've gotten pretty darn used to sleeping in silence with T. When I sleep or am in a near sleep state, I feel as though my T doesn't exist. I wake up many mornings and don't hear anything. Then it fades back in, or I notice it. I might listen for a while, but then I stop thinking about it and I feel like sometimes it disappears again partially.

 

I have considered that.
I can not remember ever having a dream where I wondered whether I was dreaming. I never needed to "pinch my arm" to know if I was dreaming. I have not been able to enter a stage of lucid dreaming. Also this time. I am convinced I was not dreaming. That made the experience so interesting.

I noticed that part of my brain was "disconnected" from my consciousness. In this part that was disconnected, I gather, tinnitus "resides".
If researchers understand these processes better and how to manipulate parts of the brain, would be nice.

Naturally I hope, that eventually, the cause of tinnitus is able to be cured (in my case NIHL for sure). But for now, doing something about the effect that damaged hearing causes in the brain would make me happy too.

 

I experience the same thing. For me it only takes (I estimate) 5-10 seconds at the most. But I often do experience it.

 

I just signed up for this to reply that I had EXACTLY the same experience tonight and a few times in the past - but tonight I caught myself enough to say "what was THAT?" out loud, loud enough to startle myself fully awake again and at least write it down for once instead of surrendering to sleep. I immediately googled it and found this thread, It's not a dream, it's not something imagined, it is exactly the tinnitus coming to an actual, real stop, a real silence, a moment before losing consciousness, and sometimes multiple times in a single night if you're coming in and out. I feel like this means something.

While I have the opportunity, I've also noticed an insane amount of gaze-evoked-tinnitus, an especially strained loud ringing when losing focus with a quick turn of the eyes, after stopping a year's worth of Prozac. The return of this happening was extremely pronounced right after the meds wore off.