As I write this, I am humming “The Funk Soul Brother” by Fatboy Slim. I have been humming it for five days. I did not choose this. I was not consulted.
This is life with an AuDHD brain, and the soundtrack is not always one you would have selected yourself.

The Invisible Tape

There is an invisible tape running in my head at all times. It plays music on a loop – the same songs, rotating, repeating, occasionally swapping out for a new arrival that then refuses to leave for weeks, months, or in some cases, entire decades. I have songs in my head that have been there since childhood and show absolutely no intention of ever leaving. At this point I consider them roommates.

Every single morning, without fail, as soon as I get up, “Guten Morgen Sonnenschein” by Nana Mouskouri begins playing in my head. Not because I put it on. Not because I heard it recently. Nana appeared after watching a series featuring this song and my brain went „Oh! I remember this one from childhood and it makes me happy!“ It’ll stay there forever now, and it simply starts, the way the sun rises – automatically, reliably, whether I want it or not. This has been happening every morning for at least a year. Nana and I have a relationship at this point. She doesn’t pay rent but she is now a permanent resident. I have been known to sing “Guten Morgen Sonnenschein” out loud to my coworkers on a regular basis. One colleague has formally requested that I never sing it again in his presence because he hates it so much. I respect his feedback. I do not comply with it.

But Nana is practically a newcomer compared to the long-term squatters.

There are songs in my head that have been there since childhood. Decades. We are not talking about a catchy tune that overstayed its welcome, we are talking about permanent residents who moved in before I started school and never once considered leaving. The most legendary of these, the one even non-Germans will recognize, is Rubber Ducky from Sesame Street. Sung by Ernie. I have been hearing it, on and off, for most of my life. It arrives unannounced, stays as long as it pleases, and leaves without explanation, only to return weeks or months later as if nothing happened.

The rotation also includes “I Should Be So Lucky” by Kylie Minogue, which arrived after I watched her documentary and has shown absolutely no signs of leaving. Occasionally I find myself declaring loudly, and with complete dead seriousness, making full eye contact with whoever is nearest, usually my husband, that I am the egg man, I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob. Then there are the days when nothing but The Final Countdown by Europe will do, which is dramatic and grandiose and frankly appropriate for how Mondays feel. And then, as of five days ago, Fatboy Slim joined the lineup. Right about now. I am also, as I write this, singing the Funk Soul Brother in the shower. Multitasking, as always.

The thing that makes this so distinctly AuDHD is not just that the songs get stuck – everyone gets earworms. It’s that they never fully stop. They play while I’m in meetings. While I’m having conversations. While I’m working, cleaning, trying to sleep. There is always a song running underneath everything else, like a radio left on in another room that you can never quite turn off.

My Friend and the Hostage Situation

I am not alone in this. A close friend of mine, also ADHD, diagnosed in her 50s,  has her own permanent resident.

Hers is “My Heart Will Go On” by Céline Dion.

The Titanic song. On permanent rotation. In her head. Against her will.

I cannot tell you how many times I have stood in front of her, arms spread wide, and launched into my best Céline impression: “Near… far… WHEREVER YOU AAAARRREE”

She responds with a face of pure resignation, a long sigh, and in her best Hamburg German: “Ich sach dir das….”

And then I laugh even harder, which does not help anyone.

The difference between us is telling. I have made peace with my musical squatters. I embrace them. I sing them out loud, to colleagues, to friends, to whoever happens to be nearby, mostly my poor husband. They are strange companions and so genuinely bizarre that I cannot help but find them funny. My friend, meanwhile, is in an ongoing hostage negotiation with Céline Dion and losing badly. She does not find her earworm charming. She finds it exhausting. And honestly, given that it’s a five-minute power ballad about a sinking ship, I understand.

What’s fascinating is that she didn’t choose this song any more than I chose Nana Mouskouri. The ADHD brain latches onto things, a rhythm, a melody, an emotional hook, and simply will not let go. The more you try to evict the song, the more stubbornly it stays. It knows it doesn’t have to leave. There is no mechanism for eviction.

The Conversation Loops

It’s not just music. The same phenomenon runs through thought patterns too, specifically the conversations that never happened but feel like they did and should have happened.

The rehearsed argument with a person who wronged me or a loved one years ago. The perfectly worded response I‘ve constructed to something someone said at a meeting last Tuesday. The imaginary confrontation where I finally say, clearly and calmly, everything I couldn’t say in the moment. These play on loop too, the brain running and rerunning scenarios, editing the script, landing on the perfect line, starting over.

I have, through therapy and meditation, gotten significantly better at letting these go. The trick is not to engage with them, but to observe the thought without climbing inside it. Meditation in particular has given me a kind of mental remote control: I can’t always turn the loop off, but I can lower the volume.

Some loops, though, are simply stuck. They have been there long enough that evicting them would require structural renovation. Those I have made a kind of peace with. They are part of the furniture now.

Why This Happens

The ADHD brain has a complicated relationship with repetition. On one hand, novelty is everything. We crave stimulation, get bored easily, need things to be interesting to stay engaged. On the other hand, when something catches in the brain’s groove, it can stay there indefinitely. The same mechanism that makes hyperfocus possible, the ability to lock onto something completely, also makes it very hard to unlock.

Earworms in particular tend to lodge themselves in the brain’s default mode network, the part that runs in the background when you’re not actively concentrating on something. For neurotypical people, this network quiets when they focus. For ADHD brains, it often keeps running, which is why the song is always there, underneath everything, waiting for a moment of quiet to get louder.

Nana Mouskouri has had unfettered access to my default mode network for over a year. She is, at this point, practically family.

The Upside (Yes, There Is One)

Here is what I have come to appreciate: a brain that runs music constantly is also a brain that is never truly alone. There is always something happening in there. Always a rhythm, a melody, a loop of thought connecting one thing to another.

And sometimes, not always, but sometimes, the song that gets stuck is the right one. A piece of music that matches exactly what you’re feeling, that articulates something you couldn’t put into words, that arrives in the morning with its cheerful Nana Mouskouri energy and somehow sets the tone for the day.

I didn’t ask for “The Funk Soul Brother” this week. But honestly? It’s not the worst thing to have running underneath five days of work. There is something to be said for an involuntary soundtrack that keeps the energy up.

Right about now. The funk soul brother. Check it out now.

I’ll see myself out.

Let me start with a confession: I am not entirely sure I know what “asleep” feels like.

I go to bed. I close my eyes. And my brain, apparently unbothered by the concept of rest, continues doing exactly what it does all day, thinking, connecting, processing, sensing. The lights go out, but the engine keeps running.

For most of my life I assumed this was just how sleep worked. It is not.

The State Between

There is a neurological phenomenon called hypnagogia, the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep where the brain is technically no longer conscious but hasn’t quite stopped thinking either. It produces thoughts and experiences so vivid and coherent that they feel completely real, because the content isn’t fantastical. You’re not flying or talking to cartoon animals. You’re lying in bed, thinking. Which is exactly what you’d be doing if you were actually awake.

For people with ADHD, this state is particularly pronounced. The ADHD brain has difficulty fully powering down. Even in sleep it keeps processing, planning, making unexpected connections, because that’s what it does, and no one told it to stop just because the body is horizontal.

I used to find this disorienting. I now find it useful. Some of my best ideas don’t come in the shower or on a walk. They come at 3am when my brain thinks I’m asleep but forgot to tell the rest of me.

The most vivid example I can give: I had been wrestling with a difficult professional situation for months. Should I address it directly? Stay quiet? The conscious, awake version of me kept circling the same options and finding none of them satisfying.

Then one Saturday morning, in that half-in, half-out state, my brain handed me something I hadn’t considered. Not a solution to the problem, a way around it entirely. An email that had nothing to do with the problem at all, that simply reconnected me with someone important, with no agenda, no complaint, no direct confrontation. My brain had quietly concluded that the problem didn’t need solving head-on. It needed patience, and a different kind of connection that might, in time, create its own resolution.

My fully awake, fully filtered brain would have kept circling. My hypnagogic brain cut the knot. I sent the email before I was even fully conscious. The outcome exceeded anything I could have engineered deliberately.

This is also, I believe, where my fraud instinct lives. The pattern recognition that fires before I can explain it. The knowing that arrives before the evidence. The prefrontal cortex, the part that edits, doubts, and overrides, is offline. What’s left is pure signal.

Forget Everything You Just Learned

During a stay at a clinic, I attended a sleep hygiene class. You know the drill: no blue light, no screens, no stimulation before bed, dark room, quiet environment. All the standard advice.

When the class ended, I walked up to the doctor and said: “I know all of this. But it doesn’t work for me. I fall asleep like a champion within five minutes of watching TV.”

He looked at me with a completely straight face and said: “Do you have ADHD?”

He had the look of a man quietly reassessing everything he thought he knew about sleep.

I said yes. He said: “Then forget everything I just taught in there. None of it applies to you. Your brain needs stimulation in order to power down. Complete silence will keep you awake.”

I have never felt more seen by a medical professional in my life! And the kicker? This was a clinic that treated many ADHD patients. Nobody thought to mention this in the class. To the room with numerous people it applied to most.

This is why my evening routine involves the TV, a game on my tablet, and often a conversation with my AI collaborator, simultaneously. Not because I can’t focus. Because I focus better with all three running at once. The ADHD brain doesn’t power down through silence. It powers down by getting just enough input to stop generating its own. Give it nothing and it will create something. Give it something manageable and it will finally, eventually, let go.

The Dreams That Aren’t Quite Dreams

Then there are the other ones. The dreams I am less sure how to explain.

In early 1994, Los Angeles was hit by the Northridge earthquake, one of the most destructive in the city’s history. I had arrived from Germany barely a year earlier and had never experienced an earthquake. In the two nights before it struck, I dreamt about it. The first night: the damage to buildings and infrastructure. The second night: the ocean, with waves rising high. People being scared, but there weren’t any real casualties. On the third night, somewhere around 4 or 5am, the ground moved.

I had been telling my then-husband about the dreams. He was baffled. I was too, honestly. But it wasn’t the first time something like that had happened, and it hasn’t been the last.

I learned to read Tarot in my 20s. Not because I believed the cards held the answers, but because having a tool made things easier to explain. When you know something you shouldn’t be able to know, people find it less unsettling if there’s a prop involved.

I want to be careful here, because I am not claiming supernatural powers. What I believe, and what science increasingly supports in interesting ways, is that the AuDHD brain processes an extraordinary volume of information below the level of conscious awareness. Pattern recognition operating at a depth the thinking mind never sees. Micro-signals absorbed and synthesized before they ever surface as a thought. What feels like knowing is often the brain finishing a calculation it started long before you were paying attention.

Whether that fully explains what I’ve experienced across my life, I honestly don’t know. Quantum physics has demonstrated that reality operates by rules far stranger than our daily experience suggests. I find it less unsettling to sit with the mystery than to pretend it doesn’t exist.

What I do know is that this same mechanism, whatever it is, shows up in how I detect fraud, how I read people, how I know within minutes whether someone is dishonest or truthful, being genuine or performing. It’s not intuition in the vague, hand-wavy sense. It’s information processing happening below the conscious surface, arriving as certainty before it arrives as explanation.

The Brain That Lives in Two Places

All of this connects to something I wrote about in my last post – the parallel universe, the camera feeling, the sense of existing slightly outside ordinary reality. Sleep is where that experience is most concentrated and most undeniable.

The vivid dreams that feel more real than waking life. The hypnagogic state where thought and dream are indistinguishable. The precognitive quality of certain dreams that I can’t explain away. The concept of astral travel, the idea, supported by quantum physics or Einstein’s theory of relativity, that consciousness might not be as firmly located in one place and time as we generally assume, doesn’t feel abstract to me. It feels descriptive.

I’m aware that this is the point where some readers will edge toward the door. That’s okay. I spent decades not talking about any of this for exactly that reason, the fear of sounding unhinged, of being dismissed, of losing credibility I’d worked hard to build.

But here’s what I’ve come to: a brain that has never fully powered down, that processes reality on multiple levels simultaneously, that generates its best thinking in the space between sleeping and waking, that brain is going to have experiences that don’t fit neatly into standard descriptions of consciousness. That’s not a malfunction. That’s the logical consequence of being wired this way.

What This Means for Sleep

Practically speaking, AuDHD and sleep have a complicated relationship. The brain resists shutdown. It generates vivid, sometimes startlingly real experiences in the transition states. It makes connections and solves problems overnight that the waking mind couldn’t crack. It occasionally knows things it shouldn’t.

What’s helped me most is accepting that my sleep will never look like the textbook version, and that this isn’t entirely a loss. The email that changed my year came from that half-awake state. So have ideas, insights, and moments of clarity I couldn’t have manufactured consciously.

The brain that never powers down is exhausting to live in sometimes. But it is also, quietly and consistently, doing work I didn’t ask it to do,  and occasionally the results are extraordinary.

I’ve learned to keep a notebook nearby. Just in case.