: why is it that sometimes when we wake up it feels like only a few minutes passed but then you check the time and it’s been HOURS, why does it feel like you closed your eyes momentarily?
In: Biology
If you stay in light sleep you may not reach REM or detailed dreams. Your brain uses the memories of these dreams to guesstimate how long you were asleep.
No dreams means no memories from sleeping means no way to make an accurate timeline of the night.
So your brain does what it can with what it does have and connects the memory of going to sleep directly to the next one of waking up in its mental timeline – making it feel like the hours only lasted minutes.
It sticks out as weird because it doesn’t always happen this way, when we do make it into deep dreams there can sometimes be a long time line formed – it could feel longer than the whole night!
Generally I recall either more or less time than I was actually asleep, less if I don’t dream as much.
We still don’t know a huge amount about dreams and sleep, but we’re still learning!
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