Do you ever hear a silence so thick it has texture?

Since I started studying pause patterns in witness statements, silence has become almost tactile to me. I'll be mid-conversation and a gap opens up and I'm not hearing the words missing so much as feeling the shape of them. Now I catch myself wondering if all the ways we read between pauses bleed into dreams and make us terrible at small talk. Anyone else get that — where the absence is somehow the loudest part of the room?