I can be like that. I can't sleep if I hear other people talking, and if I'm already asleep and someone in the next room starts talking and I sense it at all, I'll wake up. It took me a long time to get used to having a roommate - I don't sleep well with another person in the room.
Noises can drive me nuts too. I need background noise while I eat because I find the sound of chewing to be disgusting, as well as much of the rest of the process. (Yes, I do chew with my mouth closed, but that doesn't help much, since my skull itself acts as an excellent conductor of sound.)
If someone in the next room is playing loud music, I get tense. Heartrate goes up and I lose concentration. If I don't need to have my ears available for anything, I put in earplugs and try my best to ignore the vibration that their speaker system puts into the floor and then my chair.
Other sensory stuff bothers me too. My mom said that as a baby, if she was giving me a bath and so much as a drop of water hit anywhere on my face, I'd start screaming like I'd just been doused with acid.
To this day, I still find washing my face in the shower to be very unpleasant, and taking a breath afterwards is kind of restricted, like I'm still trying to breathe underwater.
Think Warren from Something About Mary, only I don't get violent when touched. I'll just jump pretty damn high. My "personal space cushion" is quite sizable.
Originally posted by: Chaotic42
My cousin's girlfriend is like that. She failed an exam once because someone had the sniffles.
That drove me nuts through one calc test. About every 15 seconds, one person sniffed 3x in a row. The timing had the consistency of an atomic clock, too.
Originally posted by: Rubycon
I absolutely abhor the sound of gum popping and people that smack their lips at the dining room table. :|
Or sometimes after eating something like chicken wings, every. Single. Finger gets a lick and a lip-smack. Eating soup, every single spoonful gets a lip-smack.
I have yet to have a roommate who doesn't do that - or else slurp loudly when eating soup or cold cereal.
But I guess they learn from TV. I caught a glimpse of a show, think it was King of Queens. The main character in that was chewing something, and I'm surprised it wasn't just spewing out all over the place the way he had his mouth open so wide with each chew. Yuck.
