What I’m experiencing — sometimes weeks will go by without it, and sometimes it happens multiple times in a few days — is technically called an episodic cranial sensory shock, but it’s more popularly known as exploding head syndrome. It’s alarming but not actually dangerous in itself; it is a parasomniac condition, rooted in a dysfunction in one of the many complex mechanisms by which the brain transitions to and from sleep. It’s part of a disease I have, one that has shaped my life so completely that it is impossible to imagine who I would be without it.
That disease is insomnia. Something, somewhere in my brain, in the system that triggers sleep, is broken. My condition used to be called primary insomnia: lifelong, chronic rather than acute, not linked as other insomnia experiences often are to anxiety, depression, or a wide range of other factors and causes. I’ve had it all my life.
The longest I’ve ever gone without sleep was 11 days, which is roughly the same as the official world record. That was particularly brutal, but going three, four, five, or six days without sleep is a pretty common occurrence for me. Without reliable pharmaceutical assistance — and I didn’t find anything even mildly effective until I was well into my twenties — I will sleep, on average, three or four nights in any given week. The rest of the time, I will just be lying there, locked in my head, in the dark, for hours.
It’s unpredictable. Some weeks I might sleep okay, the next barely at all. Some nights I struggle from midnight until dawn, and then finally sleep, staying under for 18 hours or more. Other nights I drift off in a relatively brisk two or three hours, only to be woken minutes later, irreversibly and in exasperation, by a noise from outside.