Inner activities

I was struck this morning by a funny noise. That is to say, by the oddly loud noise I experienced when idly scratching the jaw bone just in front of my right ear. I believe that what I heard was not the product of sound waves travelling through the air at all, rather of vibrations travelling through the jaw bone to the inner ear.

Not something that could be heard by somebody standing near me at all. Or by a microphone, be it ever so clever.

So in what sense exactly does it count as sound? Sound faked up by the brain? Not exactly a hallucination, but not sound in the ordinary sense of the word either.

A little later, having taken the first tea of the day, a ceremony vaguely analogous to the first fag of the day of old, I dozed off again. To wake to a rather elaborate dream. A few seconds later, as the dream faded, I thought that it would have been a pity to try to capture it in words, something that I had been doing a few months ago. A dream was a delicate thing and while it might be a fleeting experience, caricaturing it in written word was not the way forward.

Clearly time for breakfast and to get out and about before it gets hot again, as BH's telephone tells us that it will.

PS: snap of the ear courtesy of the Britannica organisation via Bing, with this particular snap lurking in small at the left hand side of the reference given, reference 1 below. An image to which the Bing search crawler must have crawled to.

References

Reference 1: https://www.britannica.com/science/auricle-ear.