Elizabeth's Journal

Entry Eight

Apr. 4, 2019

There is a neurological condition called synesthesia, which occurs when someone has extra sensory connections in their brain. This can cause the activation of one sensory pathway to trigger another. For example, my mother knows a man who hears music when he sees pictures, and I have a friend who had a form of grapheme synesthesia when she was a kid.

I have chromesthesia.

Chromesthesia is where you can literally see sounds. I don't know how it is for other people with chromesthesia but for me, I see bright flashes of light or even patterns when I close my eyes after being scared by a sudden loud noise. It only happens if my eyes are closed though, so it happens fairly rarely.

Sometimes it happens at work when someone tosses a fork into the sink and it makes a loud noise. Sometimes it happens when I am trying to sleep but the cars on my street are too loud. Once it happened when my brother tripped over a box. It looked like swirly clouds.

One night I was walking up the stairs to my room. My mom and brother were downstairs with both of our cats. My dad was at band practice. The hallway was completely dark.

As soon as I rounded the banister on the stairs my dad walked in the door. He wasn't particularly loud or anything though, so it shouldn't have been an issue. It was.

I thought I saw something jump off of my brother's bed and walk out of his doorway into the hallway. My first thought was that it was one of my cats, but then I remembered that they were both downstairs. So was everyone else.

I tried to stay calm and walked to my room. As soon as I got there I hid under the covers until I had calmed down.

I had never seen a sound while my eyes were open before, and it had certainly never moved before either. At the time it was rather terrifying because there were boxes that obscured my view from where I had been standing, and the shape I saw was round like the top of someone's head. It looked almost like a little kid had jumped off of my brother's bed and then come walking into the hallway before disappearing.

Honestly, it wasn't that scary, I just felt the need to share.