So this one came to me after a miserable weekend after surgery, I had a foley catheter in (its a catheter that is anchored in the bladder with a water balloon and is connected to a pee drainage bag), and in order to sleep I had to connect a big overnight pee bag and put it next to my bed. Now, I’m an active sleeper, I roll around and change positions a ton, so I was terrified of rolling over in my sleep and potentially yanking the catheter out, which would have been extremely painful at \*best\* and probably damaged my insides at worst.
Weirdly though, I slept still as stone, I barely moved for the 3 nights I had it in and I had no issues whatsoever. I’ve also noticed I do this if I fall asleep with my glasses or phone right next to me, I subconsciously avoid rolling over them in my sleep somehow and don’t move around as much.
How does that work? How does an unconscious body “understand” a danger/risk and avoid it?
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Well, you also can’t shut off your ears but only wake up to certain sounds. Like, I can sleep through the construction racket from next door but wake up if the cat scratches gently at the bedroom door, or if my phone rings. Some part of the brain is clearly still sorting and filtering the sounds and other sensory input, and reacts if something is important enough to wake you up. Which makes sense, if our ancestors didn’t wake up for potential threats they’d be dead quickly.
So it also makes sense to me that we can have a level of awareness of what not to do in our sleep, like knowing where the edge of the bed is, or where our glasses are when we have trained ourself to keep track of them every day of our lives.
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