The Strangeness of Subjective Experience

[contrarianarchon]

What subjective experience of falling asleep do people have? I ask because I fucking don't. If I didn't have dreams to wake up from, or, like, stiff limbs and bleary eyes, I would not actually notice sleep happening. (I know this because this happens sometimes, that I lie in bed for a while and then I notice the lighting changed a bunch and I check the clock and I guess I was asleep for 8 hours, huh.) It's really weird! I am honestly surprised that this repeated lack of memory integrity doesn't get to me more than it does, but I guess you can get used to anything!

So yeah - what're other people's experiences of falling asleep like?

Comments

[nathanielbuildsatesseract]

I don't notice falling asleep, either, unless I'm interrupted in the process. I definitely notice waking up, though given the intensity of my dreams, I don't really feel like time is vanishing. The line between dream and consciousness is often thin for me.

[contrarianarchon]

Oh yeah it's very clear that dreams/sleep happened when I *do* wake up from dreams, which is the case nearly all the time - this makes the days when it's just a total blank in my memory that much more concerning, because it's not typical!

[wingedcatgirl]

We have no subjective experience of falling asleep. We go straight from "trying to fall asleep" to "waking up".

Waking up does subjectively feel like a change of state, usually.

We'll try to figure out how to describe it more the next time it happens... unless we forget. Which we might.

[wingedcatgirl]

Update: It is... very hard to remember to pay attention when waking up.

[contrarianarchon]

Not surprised, TBH. Sleep is attention-manipulating in a way that makes paying more attention to it hard.

[oligopsony]

Hardly ever had it until I read Jennifer Dumpert’s “Liminal Dreaming,” which basically an instruction manual for, well, exactly this. Falling asleep feels like darkness and white noise getting filled with little flickers of images and ideas in your mind’s eye, which gradually grow longer, more distinct, and more immersive. Allowing yourself to more passively submit to them allows you to enter into unconscious dream, while drawing attention to you conscious thoughts and awareness of what’s happening draws you back towards wakefulness, so you can build up skill at “surfing” the space between. Try it the next time you nap!

[brin_bellway]

I have pretty bad hypnagogic recall, and generally remember only the earliest stages of falling asleep (a quietness, not wanting to move or think) when going to bed for the night. Sometimes not even that.

Going *back* to sleep after waking up in the middle of the night works somewhat better. Occasionally when going back to sleep I'll go directly into a dream, an imaginary scenario getting gradually more vivid and less consciously controlled: this never happens when initially going to bed, to my knowledge.

(I get more information from times that I've been awakened after not quite (or only barely) falling asleep, kicking the long-term memory compilers back online when the memories are still fresh. Primarily it's a feeling of comfortable heaviness, like my body and even my mind are weighed down with sleep.

One of the first things you learn reading trip reports is that it's extremely difficult to convey in words why any high is worth experiencing: they never *sound* like a big deal when someone describes them. Indeed, there's a distinct possibility that in some sense this *isn't* a big deal, that there are other people out there experiencing exactly the same quale *except* that their brains don't tag this feeling as Important and Profound and mine does. But it's profound to *me*, and I endorse that no matter how similar the non-profound analogues in other minds are.)

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>>I am honestly surprised that this repeated lack of memory integrity doesn't get to me more than it does, but I guess you can get used to anything!<<

It gets to me, but it's not like I have a choice in the matter: not sleeping is strictly worse, seeing as how sleep-deprived memories don't function very well either.

(It's less bad now that I can simulate the feeling of falling asleep without actually losing consciousness. Those memories are as stable as normal waking ones, and it means this isn't something rare and precious anymore. (Well, precious, yes, but not rare.) Perhaps at this point, wanting hypnagogic recall would be like wanting individual memories of every shower you've taken: if you've seen one you've seen them all, for the most part.)

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>>(I know this because this happens sometimes, that I lie in bed for a while and then I notice the lighting changed a bunch and I check the clock and I guess I was asleep for 8 hours, huh.)<<

For me, there is almost always a sense of time having passed when I wake up. I may not always predict how *much* time, especially if a storm is making the light through my window dimmer than expected, but under normal circumstances I never feel *surprised* to look at my watch in bed and see that there's been a significant chunk of time since last I checked. This lack-of-surprise often stops working when I'm sick.

[wolffyluna]

Sometimes I notice that I am about to fall asleep, but I don't often remember the actual falling asleep part. Being about to fall asleep mostly feels like getting more and more relaxed, and my train of thought slowly getting derailed. (I can't remember what I was thinking about from the beginning to the end of a sentence, and I get randomly selected nouns and verbs, some of which are just stolen from what ever background podcast/radio noise there is.)

Also, I usually remember the 'about to fall asleep' stuff better when it happens in the mornings after I've woken up and decided to go back to sleep, then when it happens in the evenings when I first go to bed.