Do your dreams have sounds?

It's a question that is often asked to deaf people. For late-deafened people like me, people often ask if our dreams stopped featuring sound after we lost our hearing. And, if so, did the sound return to our dreams after we got cochlear implants.

When I became totally deaf, my own dreams stopped featuring sound. Did sound return to my dreams after I got cochlear implants? No. At least I don’t think so. Thing is, with 100% silence at night, you do tend to sleep pretty deeply. I only occasionally remember my dreams, and sure enough, they are all silent.

Except for the last nine weeks …

The difference? I’ve been wearing an alternating processor each night, thus giving my brain access to sound.

My dreams feature sound once more. I seem to constantly be having conversations with people in my dreams, or listening to environmental sounds. It could just be the broken sleep at the moment that’s making them more vivid, but I believe the presence of sound makes my dreams easier to recall at the moment also. 

Something for the neuroscientists amongst us to ponder perhaps ...

The sounds of our baby boy

I always knew that getting cochlear implants would help me hear, and therefore respond faster, to my baby crying. Little did I know they would also help me monitor his well-being in other ways. While I was pregnant, and getting regular foetal monitoring, there were often times when I was chasing him around my stomach with the receiver, using only the faint sound of his heartbeat alone to ‘find’ him again.

During the birth and in the weeks thereafter, my cochlear implants were crucial for communicating with our son's doctors and nurses in noisy environments.

And now, at home, yes – I can respond to his crying. I’m learning to recognise the different types of crying. But I can also use sound to gauge when he’s had enough to eat. When he needs to be burped. By wearing a processor at night, I can tell when he’s vomited and needs quick attention. I can tell by his breathing whether his head needs to be repositioned in the bed. Best of all, I can tell that he’s breathing.

And in amidst the sounds that help me care for him, there are a bunch of others that always bring a smile to my face.

Impending labour symptom # 2

Second note to self: if, in a future pregnancy, your hearing suddenly starts to return for no reason at all, be very wary.

Again, about two weeks before I gave birth to our son, I noticed the residual hearing in my right ear start to improve slightly. The first sign of this was in the shower – I could hear the water running over my hair. (Very faint and crackly, mind you, but the sound was there nonetheless.) Then I noticed I could hear cupboards closing, without having to slam them. I could hear Jase talking in my ear, though I couldn’t understand his words. And, finally, I could hear the dial tone of the telephone (with volume full blast, and the receiver held in a very precise location over my ear).

I pointed out this weirdness to my audiologist, who, at my 12-month CI review, actually conducted a proper hearing test to assess what was happening. Sure enough, the slight residual hearing that I have in my right ear had improved a little in certain frequencies. In one of the lower frequencies, for example, I was now registering tones at 65 decibels – before the surgery, they needed to be 90-100 for me to hear them. How very bizarre.

This jump in hearing disappeared immediately after the birth. Now I doubt there’s any medical reason to support that, and I can’t say it would happen to anybody else who wears CIs, but I’m firmly connecting it to the approach of labour in my particular case. Something else I’ll keep in mind for next time!

Impending labour symptom # 1

Our son was born one month premature, as I think I might have mentioned on here. It is tricky, in a first pregnancy, to recognise genuine labour symptoms. For me, there were a couple of major hearing-related ones that I’ll be sure not to ignore the next time around.

The first one?

When tinnitus starts roaring for seemingly no reason at all, recognise that there are serious hormonal issues at play and be prepared!

My tinnitus is always present but it is reasonably quiet when both processors are on. However, about two weeks before I gave birth to our son, those ringing and roaring sounds became so loud and distracting that I barely had the energy to try and listen over them.

I’ll never forget the silence that greeted me the morning after my c-section. At first I thought I wasn’t wearing my processors … but I was. Then I realised what was so different – the tinnitus had quietened down again. Thank goodness!

Tuning time

I’m very excited about my piano being tuned next week. It started going out of tune last December and got progressively worse with all the humidity over summer. Having finished my concert and lessons in time, I never bothered getting it tuned. Figured it could wait until its regular annual tune in May.

I’ve been deliberately avoiding it while it sounds so bad, for fear I will accidentally retrain my brain the incorrect tones and pitches for everything. Is that even possible? Not sure. But I dare not risk it after all my hard work.

People ask me if I can perceive that it’s out of tune. Yes! Notes that don’t belong in certain scales. An annoying twang that not only resonates after pressing a key, but changes the tone. Bars of music that sound like they’re being played in entirely different keys. Reminds me what it was like playing the piano with my distorted natural hearing in the months leading toward total deafness.

Can’t wait to get back into playing – I really miss it!

Spicks and Specks ... with CIs

It’s Wednesday! Spicks and Specks night! I still love this musical quiz show, even though playing along is so much harder than when I had natural hearing. But rather than feel frustrated about that, I try to make this show my ‘musical training’ instead. This is especially useful because the piano has been out of tune for months, and I barely have time to get on Sound and Way Beyond these days. So this show is about all I can muster in terms of training at the moment.

Why do I consider it training? Because parts of this show involve manipulating well-known music in order to make it recognisable.