Gingerfear

I suffer from the frighteningly named exploding head syndrome and last night my head exploded again.

About every two months as I’m dropping off to sleep I hear a ferocious electrical BANG! inside my head, and then it’s very hard to sleep for a while.

Occasionally it’s accompanied by a nano-second flash of white light, but one particularly nasty episode recently came with the terrifying opposite: a flash of blackness.

Even though it was dark and my eyes were closed, for an instant my I saw total dark - an absence of anything . Except, bizarrely, there was a clear, thin white border around the edge of my vision.

Absolutely petrifying.

You can replicate the sensation by asking two people to creep silently into your bedroom as you’re falling asleep, hold a metal tray next to each ear, and then simultaneously crack the shit out of the trays with a crowbar while pushing a strobe light under your eyelids.

Then you’ll have to spend six months being bounced around doctors and specialists while they diagnose something which you’re not even sure happened by the time you wake up in the morning.

Finally you can relax when you’re told it’s probably totally benign, although no-one really knows what is causing it.

And then stop relaxing when the sensation of 5,000 volts smacking through your skull hits you as you settle down for sleepy bye-byes.