Before a seizure, many people experience distinct warning signs that range from a strange rising feeling in the stomach to sudden flashes of intense fear or déjà vu. These pre-seizure feelings fall into two categories: a prodrome that can begin hours or days beforehand, and an aura that strikes seconds to minutes before the seizure progresses. About 70 to 76% of people with focal (partial) seizures report experiencing some kind of aura, though the specific sensations vary widely from person to person.
The Two Waves of Warning Signs
Seizure warnings don’t arrive all at once. The first wave, called the prodrome, can show up hours or even days before a seizure. It tends to be vague and easy to dismiss: irritability, mood swings, trouble sleeping, or a general sense that something is “off.” Some people notice they feel unusually anxious or depressed in the day or two leading up to a seizure without connecting it to what’s coming. Over time, many people with epilepsy learn to recognize these subtle shifts as a signal.
The second wave is the aura, which is much more immediate. An aura typically lasts seconds, sometimes up to about 30 seconds, before a seizure either resolves on its own or progresses to loss of consciousness or convulsions. Medically, an aura is actually the very beginning of a seizure itself, not a separate event. It’s the portion you remain conscious for and can remember afterward. If the seizure stops there, the aura was the whole seizure. If it continues, the aura was your last moment of full awareness before things escalated.
The “Rising Stomach” Feeling
One of the most commonly described pre-seizure sensations is a rising feeling in the abdomen, often compared to the drop in your stomach on a roller coaster. It starts low in the belly and moves upward toward the chest or throat. This sensation, sometimes called an epigastric aura, can be accompanied by nausea, sweating, or flushing. It is especially common in temporal lobe seizures, which are the most frequent type of focal seizure in adults. People who experience it for the first time often describe it as unmistakably strange, distinct from normal nausea or butterflies.
Sensory Distortions: What You See, Hear, Smell, and Taste
Seizure auras can hijack any of your senses, producing experiences that feel real but have no external source.
- Vision: Flashing or flickering lights, colorful splotches, dark spots, or simple geometric patterns. Some people see sparkling lights in their peripheral vision.
- Hearing: Buzzing, ringing, drumming, whistling, or a single repeating tone that no one else can hear.
- Smell: A sudden phantom odor, usually unpleasant. Burning rubber is one of the most frequently reported smells, though some people describe it as chemical or smoky.
- Taste: A bitter, metallic, sour, salty, or acidic taste that appears without eating or drinking anything.
- Touch: Tingling, numbness, an electric-shock sensation, or a wave of heat followed by cold in a specific part of the body. Some people feel pain or an involuntary urge to move a limb.
These sensory experiences tend to be brief and stereotyped, meaning they happen the same way each time for a given person. If your aura is a burnt rubber smell, it will likely be a burnt rubber smell before most of your seizures. That consistency is actually useful: it becomes a reliable personal warning signal.
Emotional and Psychological Shifts
Some of the most unsettling pre-seizure feelings aren’t physical at all. A sudden, intense wave of fear or dread is one of the hallmark auras of temporal lobe seizures. It comes on without any obvious trigger and feels disproportionate to anything happening around you. Some people describe it as a primal, gut-level panic that doesn’t match their thoughts.
Déjà vu is another classic aura: the overwhelming sense that you’ve lived through this exact moment before, but far more intense than the ordinary déjà vu most people occasionally experience. Its opposite, called jamais vu, can also occur. That’s the feeling that something completely familiar, like your own kitchen or a loved one’s face, suddenly seems foreign and unrecognizable. Some people report a sudden, inexplicable surge of joy or euphoria instead of fear, though that’s less common.
A feeling of detachment or unreality is also reported. The world may seem dreamlike, or you might feel disconnected from your own body, as if you’re watching yourself from the outside. These psychological auras can be deeply disorienting because they affect your perception of reality itself.
Autonomic Changes You Might Notice
Your body’s automatic systems can also react before a seizure progresses. These autonomic symptoms include a suddenly racing heart, sweating, skin flushing or turning pale, and lightheadedness or dizziness. Some people feel a spinning sensation similar to vertigo. Others notice a headache that comes on abruptly, sometimes just 1 to 35 seconds before the seizure’s electrical activity becomes visible on monitoring equipment. These physical changes can overlap with the sensory and emotional symptoms, making the overall experience feel overwhelming even though individual pieces might seem minor on their own.
Not Everyone Gets a Warning
It’s important to know that pre-seizure warnings aren’t universal. While roughly three-quarters of people with focal seizures experience auras, the numbers are lower for generalized seizures, where about 29 to 48% of people report any warning. Some seizure types begin with immediate loss of consciousness, leaving no window of awareness beforehand. And even among people who do get auras, the warning window is often extremely short. A few seconds may be all the time you have.
What to Do When You Feel It Coming
If you recognize the onset of an aura, those few seconds matter. The priority is getting yourself into a safe position before awareness or muscle control changes. That means sitting or lying down on the floor if possible, moving away from stairs, roads, sharp objects, or water. If you’re driving, pulling over immediately is critical. Let someone nearby know what’s happening if you can. Over time, people with epilepsy often develop a quick mental checklist they can run through in those brief moments: get low, get safe, alert someone.
If you’re with someone who tells you they feel a seizure coming on, help them to the ground gently, clear the area around them, and put something soft under their head. Don’t hold them down or put anything in their mouth. Time the seizure once it starts, and call for emergency help if it lasts longer than 5 minutes.
Tracking Your Personal Pattern
Because auras tend to repeat in a consistent pattern for each individual, keeping a seizure diary can help you and your care team identify your specific warning signs. Write down exactly what you felt, how long it lasted, what you were doing at the time, and how much sleep you’d gotten recently. Over weeks and months, this log can reveal your personal prodrome and aura signature, turning vague unease into actionable information. Some people discover that their prodromal mood changes reliably predict a seizure 12 to 24 hours out, which can influence decisions about driving, swimming, or being alone.