Also, what do you mean by "sound"? Like music or actual sound from your memories?
In my case it wasn’t like dreaming exactly, more like that in between state where you’re falling into a nap but still awake. Sound was kinda like being underwater, in fact recovering consciousness very much felt like surfacing into reality for lack of a better term.
It was kinda cozy, definitely not an experience to be scared of.
As an example, I think I was around 16 years old and I was very much into sport cycling and Tour de France. When I lost consciousness a slide show of Tour de France competition accompanied by the TV commentators rush into my thoughts. All of it at very high speed and extremely overwhelming.
I think of it as an analogy of a memory dump of a process that is no longer running (consciousness), and everything gets just read and dump at high speed and without any sense nor capacity to make sense of it, only leaving a small impression in my short memory area which afterwards I was able to remember for longer time.
When David Eagleman was eight years old, he fell off a roof and kept on falling. Or so it seemed at the time. His family was living outside Albuquerque, in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. There were only a few other houses around, scattered among the bunchgrass and the cholla cactus, and a new construction site was the Eagleman boys’ idea of a perfect playground. David and his older brother, Joel, had ridden their dirt bikes to a half-finished adobe house about a quarter of a mile away. When they’d explored the rooms below, David scrambled up a wooden ladder to the roof. He stood there for a few minutes taking in the view—west across desert and subdivision to the city rising in the distance—then walked over the newly laid tar paper to a ledge above the living room. “It looked stiff,” he told me recently. “So I stepped onto the edge of it.”
In the years since, Eagleman has collected hundreds of stories like his, and they almost all share the same quality: in life-threatening situations, time seems to slow down. He remembers the feeling clearly, he says. His body stumbles forward as the tar paper tears free at his feet. His hands stretch toward the ledge, but it’s out of reach. The brick floor floats upward—some shiny nails are scattered across it—as his body rotates weightlessly above the ground. It’s a moment of absolute calm and eerie mental acuity. But the thing he remembers best is the thought that struck him in midair: this must be how Alice felt when she was tumbling down the rabbit hole.
I was conscious again about 10-15 seconds later. It's the kind of thing that sticks with you your whole life. It probably wasn't close to life threatening, but the combination of adrenaline, sharp pain, and brief unconsciousness definitely leaves an imprint in your memory.
I was at scouts and we’d set up a monkey swing on a branch next to a river.
While I was on it, I somehow realised the knot on the branch was coming undone and was able to witness its unravelling in slow motion.
The fall was also slow, as I hit the ground I cried out, but more from shock than any pain.
Very luckily I had landed on the soft sandy riverbank rather than the rocks in the river I had been above just moments before.
In the eternity of the arrow’s flight, you wonder: What is this present moment? Confronting its end, your mind becomes razor sharp, cleav- ing time into uncountable, quickly passing moments.
At one such perfect instant you see the arrow as it floats, suspended between the finest ticks of the most precise clock. In this instant of no time, the arrow has no motion, and nothing pushes or pulls it toward your heart. How, then, does it move?
While your beginner’s mind embraces the mystery, the arrow flies."
A car I was driving to a parking area for someone had incredibly loose steering, and I lost some traction on a tight turn on a highway that had been covered with gravel. As I straighten out of the turn I was heading straight at an oncoming car.
I calmly jiggle the steering wheel to avoid the head-on collision, with as little adjustment as possible to avoid losing control, but the car fishtailed anyway, hit a rock cliff wall on the right, bounced 45 degrees and off a short cliff on the left side of the road.
As I went off the cliff I just thought calmly "So that was it.". At the same moment, not having had the sense to be wearing my seatbelt I threw myself flat across the unified front seat.
The car went over the cliff, hit it, flipping end over end and then rolled before coming to a stop, upright, facing the opposite direction I had been driving, completely destroyed.
Technically, I never lost conscious, but from the moment the car launched I lost all awareness except for sound. My mind absorbed endless crashing, metal rending, glass shattering, 10 or 20 seconds of silence, and then I suddenly had vision again, and a sense that I was still in my body. Calm, with normal physical sensation, and no pain.
I was incredibly banged up, but couldn't feel any of it. I moved my limbs and body carefully, guessed I was ok to travel, crawled out a missing window and sat on the bottom slope of the drop until help arrived - the oncoming driver happened to be a medic. I was so calm and lucid people expected me to stand up and find my way up a navigable part of the slope with them, and so did I. But while I had been sitting and talking without effort, I couldn't get a single muscle to actually move. When my legs wouldn't move, I tried raising an arm and it just didn't respond. I had to tell people I couldn't move, because there wasn't any evidence I was trying.
Bruises of the steering wheel around my body, and other lacerations formed a visible record of my body being thrown around in complete mayhem. But all I retained is a clear disembodied memory of endless crashing, eventual silence. Without any fear or emotion, beyond a feeling of acceptance that morphed into interest in what had happened.
Nothing broken - no stress or post-stress, despite a couple weeks of miserable pain and soft tissue recovery. I could be wrong, but I don't think my heart rate or breathing adjusted the whole time.
Apparently, I survived in part by being completely relaxed the whole time.
I don't remember anything about the fall itself. After hitting the floor I immediately got to my feet, realized the breath had been knocked out of me, tried to call my partner's name, then sat back down. I think the pain came shortly after that.
People training technique will grey out pretty much routinely as they talk through things with their partners and work strategies for techniques.
People go out now and then, usually on purpose with folks who understand when it happens.
The BJJ community is mature at this point. There are folks on comp teams basically having fights every day. I suspect when those people go out, you are right. Damage is done and it accumulates.
I suspect when folks like me and my training partners go out, there is no trauma to speak of.
What is the net of this lifestyle? I don't know; I've had no major injuries (requiring surgery or major downtime-- popping the cartilage in your rib working top control drills will take fucking forever to heal tho), I've learned a lot, made good friends, and have only this life to spend as I see fit, so I can only anecdata.
But the understanding in our world is this: trauma is traumatic (and sometimes causes loss of consciousness, sometimes not), but not all loss of consciousness is traumatic.
I don't have any crazy memories when I'm out. But coming back to, I always feel like there's something I just can't remember, it's just out of reach, at the tip of my tongue... and then my sight comes back and I can place where I am, but it feels like I've been gone for a very long time and am returning to the past, and then everything snaps in place and I'm back to normal.
Being put under with anesthetic feels very different. With that, I simply pop out and then pop back in.
I thought I would gently fall asleep, but it was actually extremely fast. It went from "tell me about your life" which the anesthetist uses to check your state to "oh so came here for uni..." to "huh the surgery is over" in a single cut.
Nothing in between, nothing like that thing you feel when before you fall asleep at night or wake up in the morning. I felt tired when I woke up, but I didn't think I had dreamed or felt anything at all in between.
And some people have a very different experience while under them - they are fully aware.
The gist was that modern implementations suppress memory formation rather than induce unconsciousness. That you remain in some sense aware of what's happening but don't remember the experience. This is safer than traditional methods, but could potentially subject the patient to complex mental or emotional trauma.
Is that accurate?
Before surgery, you're given an amnestic to help reduce immediate anxiety and avoid remembering going into the OR and getting prepped - which people don't generally enjoy.
Then you get the anesthesia, which puts you to sleep. They put you on a respirator, which - alongside helping your barely/non-working lungs - delivers a gaseous anesthesic to keep you asleep.
Because some reactions to pain are reflex, they may still work. And when you wake up, they don't want you to be in pain; especially if that's on the surgery table. So next, you get the analgesic opioids. Here you may also (if you didn't already) get paralytics to stop all muscle movement.
Rest assured that they are not YOLO-ing your pain and suffering. You are given a cocktail of drugs to make sure you are comfortable before, during, and after surgery.
Luckily, opioids can be swapped for other medications that are less effective, like high dose NSAIDs. There's also local anesthetics for some stuff.
In that case, they don’t seem to work that well for me. Or maybe they do it differently here.
I always remember going into the OR and being prepped.
My anxiety for my last surgery was huge up until the moment I passed up. The best I got was the anaesthesist telling me it was normal for someone in my circumstances (I’d not had anxiety the last few times, so was very confused as to why I had so much this time, I was freaking for some reason)
You may also require either a higher baseline dose than expected, and an onset of acute anxiety can actually affect dosing too. Both totally normal!
Either way, it's best to speak with your doctor leading up to surgery if that experience was upsetting. There's lots that can be done for dosage, supplemental medication, etc. Your comfort is important!
And that is how I saw the inside of my own beating heart at 10 while I was tied down and essentially naked in front of like 10+ adults.
Oh, and the contrast dye momentarily made me feel like I was being burnt alive from the inside out.
She now insists on full sedation.
The modern implementation is to use general anesthesia as little as necessary as it has numerous side-effects. Local anesthesia with improved selectivity is used if possible.
That's called twilight anesthesia and it's used for some procedures, not others. Usually used for stuff like wisdom teeth extraction and colonoscopies. Anything "major" and you're getting general anesthesia. You can ask what type of anesthesia you will be receiving (twilight or general).
That was about 20 years ago. To this day, the last thing she remembers is lying on the table and saying "OK, let's git-er-done" and the next 5-10 minutes are missing.
In larger doses, propofol will completely eliminate consciousness. This is "general anesthesia" and what you get when you go in for a major surgical procedure. You are completely unresponsive to any stimuli.
There are levels in between these too. Consciousness is a spectrum.
As far as I know, propofol doesn't make you feel particularly good or block pain. It just kind of makes you go away. So in addition, at all levels of anesthesia, they also typically give you a narcotic like fentanyl so that you aren't suffering. They aren't just letting you scream in pain and then erasing the tape afterwards.
As someone who has had a couple of procedures where they pushed the fentanyl into the IV before the propofol, I can 100% assure that pain was the absolute last thing I was feeling. Hell, I was still high as a kite after the propofol wore off when I got home. I was sitting at the kitchen table with a bunch of metal recently unscrewed from my leg bones thinking about literally nothing in the world beyond, "holy fuck this eggnog is the best beverage I've ever had in my life I wish I could drink it forever".
The only thing I got for my endoscopy a couple of years ago was some numbing spray for my nose and a decongestant.
All in all, I really appreciate the loss of memory formation, since the most annoying part of these procedures for me is the boredom. Just splice all that out, thanks.
With whatever he did additionally, as he did it he goes:
“Let’s try this again, start counting back from 10”
I might have made it to 9 the second time around.
Does this mean they messed up the dosage or something? I’ve had the same guy since and it’s never happened again.
The fact that he gave you something else that time, and that you've never had that experience again would make me believe he thought it was a fault in the product he initially gave you.
That's not what they usually use... but people have different reactions to novacaine, and different innervation; for dental work, there's a couple typical options for where nerves are and which nerves cover which teeth, some of which need more shots in more places.
For the GP, most likely the anesthetist put a note in the chart that they need more or different drugs to go under.
My lips and gums go numb but my teeth generally do not. I am sure it takes the edge off, but I can still feel it and it is still incredibly uncomfortable.
On the other hand, while having a tooth pulled and opting to be put under, the nurse and I were having a great laugh after because I was so awake. Apparently there are multiple drugs and whatever the first one was hit me so hard they only have me a half dose of another. It was enough though. They said count, I hit nine, and I woke up somewhere else. Exactly what I wanted considering local doesn't work.
Not just in surgery for example but in extreme other situations (nukes, titan sub, piano to the head, etc)... You're just there then you aren't and you don't even know. Shook me (lightly) for a while
I'm guessing being properly flattened by a truck is similar, though of course that's adjacent to being severely injured and dying later.
One may think, any existence is better than nothing.
Interestingly some medications like tadalafil restore my dreams... My smart watch also tells me the phases like remand deep have normal lengths. So I'm not sure why it is so rare for me to dream, but I suspect low glucose or oxygen may have something to do with it.
You might be having those but “not having dreams” is not an indication of that. And i put the “not having dreams” in quotes because for most people they have dreams but then go on to forget them.
If you are having other symptomps by all means get it checked out. But if your only symptom is not remembering dreams i wouldn’t worry about that.
Same. I was put under twice and both times it was like someone flipping a switch from conscious to unconscious. When I woke up it was like nothing happened save for a slight groggy feeling. It was not like sleep where you feel rested, as if you lost time.
edit: to add when going under the first time I was laying down on the operating table as the anesthesiologist made small talk with a nurse I suddenly felt super high while the room started to spin - POOF out.
I talked to the nurse about this as I was prepping for the procedure, and he said that a recent patient talked throughout the procedure, but when he got back to his room afterwards, he asked "so when will the procedure start?"
So, I think the drugs you get might let experience everything. But the "nothing in between" might actually be memory loss, not loss of consciousness.
all this stuff is spooky and philosophically tricky.
Nothing stops us from using both, where strategically appropriate.
In the latter case I actually remember more of the procedure - although I was completely detached and thought it lasted about a minute (it was a 10-15 min procedure). In that case I can recall having the tube removed and passing out what seems like instantly.
Sometimes people fall asleep that way too, especially when very tired. The expression ‘out like a light’ seems apt.
Ouch. Excessively appropriate choice of words there.
They really got under your skin.
I don't remember a thing between seeing the car pull out infront of me and waking up on the floor looking at the ambulance.
From my perspective that was worth about 1h of dreaming normally.
I remember having a very vivid and pleasant dream (riding in a car with some friends and laughing) while I was "out". I came-to when a bystander started beckoning to me ("Sir! Sir!"). Their calls bled into my dream first, then I awoke and realized I was laying face-down in the grass by the bench.
The pain was gone in the dream, but, of course, came back when I awoke. I sort of wished I could just pass out again.
Interestingly that dream has stuck with me in a way that typical sleeping dreams don't.
However I have had always recollection of those seconds or minutes when I was unconscious: there was always an intense and quick succession of memories and images accompanied by sound. At some point the external sound from people trying to reanimate me took over and I was able to gain consciousness again.
I always felt that was how the brain acted before passing away, and also how some literature and cinema were right when depicting flashbacks.