why are we never aware of the exact moment we fall asleep?
In: Biology
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Your long term memory only auto saves every few minutes, you normally fall asleep before an auto save, so you don’t remember, but you were aware (sorta).
That’s why some people under strong anesthesia or recreative drug effects won’t remember stuff, even they were sorta aware before, it mess up the auto saving temporarily.
Buzzkill here. I have narcolepsy. And I experience a very strange phenomenon in which I do not go through the normal stages of falling asleep. I drop directly into REM sleep. Usually within 2 minutes of laying my head on the pillow. It’s actually a really good situation at bedtime.
I *do* know the exact moment I fall asleep because I go so fast between awakeness and REM sleep. This has been documented. Doctors and sleep technicians think I’m pretty cool. But this is extremely rare. It’s really really nice feeling, just like a switch, but I understand if other people in the forum think I’m absolutely nuts.
I actually often do know when I have fallen asleep. I have sleep problems and for years did not get good sleep leading to me often having lucid dreams where I know I’m dreaming and can basically control my dreams.
Now when I am trying to go to sleep I am usually thinking about various things. Very often I will suddenly realize that what I am thinking about no longer makes any sense and I am now starting to dream because I have fallen asleep.
I became aware of this quite recently. My second born was a little more difficult putting to bed, I would end up rocking her and telling her bed time stories so she could fall asleep, the problem was that I would usually fall asleep before her. But since I was telling the story I could hear myself becoming incoherent and drifting away! It was the weirdest thing, I could tell exactly when “the three little pigs” became “the three little gibberish” and then they would trail off into nothing as I entered La La Land. Totally insane.
I have been trying to find this moment my whole life. I have been lucid dreaming since I have had memories.
Your brain speaks nonsense when you are falling asleep. If you do mindfulness practises you might know what I’m talking about.
Time skips weirdly and you stop being aware of external noises and eventually you are dreaming. Your thoughts stop being thought nonsense and start expressing themselves as dreams.
I always thought, imagine if falling asleep was insanely painful, but we never remembered and we were paralyzed while it happened. Like every night you had five seconds of paralyzed agony that you immediately forgot and none of us knew it.
You can be conscious without recording memories. Blackout drunks and toddlers don’t remember what they’re doing later, but they’re still thinking and taking actions.
You may well be aware of falling asleep, and then promptly forgetting to remember it.
What people haven’t mentioned so far is that you actually have two forms of memory. You have:
* Short-term memory that handles everything you do right now and keeps your train of thought going.
* Long term memory, that remembers things for more than just a few minutes.
Moving things from short term memory to long term memory is called consolidation, and when you’re falling asleep not only are your thought processes moving to a less conscious level (not really shutting down, but becoming less active and doing different things) but this process of storing memory is disrupted (or at least less effective).
So not only will you not remember the exact moment you fall asleep, but you will also have problems remembering a few seconds or even minutes before the moment when you fall asleep. For example, if you were reading you might not remember the last page you were on.
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