Although the name is terrifying, “exploding head syndrome” is actually quite common and not exactly what it sounds like. The syndrome refers to the experience where someone is drifting off to sleep and is suddenly jolted awake by a loud sound that seems to come from inside their own head and not anywhere in their immediate environment.

A large study published in the Journal of Sleep Research has now been done on this phenomenon and the researchers at Washington State University suggest that as many as one in five college students have actually experienced it at least once in their life.

What happens in that situation, is that there can be a type of neural misstep as the brain prepares for sleep that basically fires some auditory neurons by mistake. The result is what seems to be a shocking and confusing noise that comes from inside the head.

The study took into account the experiences of 211 college students, which was an effort to study it more extensively as previous research suspected it only happened to middle aged people. Brain Sharpless who authored the study thought there was more to it than was previous discovered.

“I didn’t believe the clinical lore that it would only occur in people in their 50s. That didn’t make a lot of biological sense to me,” he said.

He also thought it was possible to expose how common the syndrome actually is, since a lot of people struggle with the experience.

“Some people have worked these scary experiences into conspiracy theories and mistakenly believe the episodes are caused by some sort of directed-energy weapon. They may think they’re going crazy and they don’t know that a good chunk of the population has had the exact same thing.”

The condition does not have a treatment at this time, but the researchers hope that shedding a little more light on it will help people accept it as it occurs.