Is it possible to sleep for 5-10 minutes without realizing it (insomnia related)?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve had trouble falling asleep for years, well decades now and it’s getting worse. As a matter of fact, I didn’t sleep at all last night. A fortnight ago, I slept something like 5 hours in three days.

Typically, I’ll go to bed at my regular time and basically lie there waiting to fall asleep and, the best way to describe it is: nothing happens. It’s not like I necessarily have problems on my mind. Sometimes, it really seems to me that my brain has “forgotten” how to fall asleep. Hours pass by and I’m 99% certain that I don’t sleep at all. I look at the alarm clock at depressingly regular 20-30 minutes intervals or go to the bathroom. Mildly TMI:

I always tend to pee a lot when I have a sleepless night :confused:. So I know that I’m wide awake at, say, 10:33 and 10:57 and 11:26 and 11:45 and 0:13 and so on.

Yet, there are two points which really make me wonder, hence the “99% certain”.

(1) It doesnt matter how little I sleep (or rather don’t sleep), I always feel… not bad the next day until late afternoon at least. That means I can go to work, do an adequate job and can even deal with change of plans, unexpected problems. I don’t feel good of course but my system works OK.

(2) Time seems to fly when I don’t sleep. During the day, there’s no way you’d get me to stay in bed for more than 1 hour doing nothing. I’d get bored and restless very quickly. Even listening to the radio or reading a book is OK for 1 hour, 1 hour 1/2 max. But at night I can lie wide awake in bed for 5, 6, 7 hours straight or even the whole night and somehow, not get bored. No books, no radio, nothing and yet I can lie like this, wait and watch hours pass by, something I’d be utterly unable to do during the day.

So could I be getting some quick sleep episodes without realizing it? Is there such a thing?

2

Yes, and for longer. I don’t have the reference here, but apparently one of the things doctors often find when doing sleep studies in the hospital is that people sleep more than they think; many people dream of being awake and, if what they’re dreaming isn’t weird enough to be identified as a dream, are later convinced to have been awake*. The shortest sleep times are called microsleep (depending on who you ask, less than 30 sec or less than 10) and refer to dozing off when you do not want to.

These people at Harvard Medical School spend a lot of time thinking about sleeping.

  • Having known several people who were absolutely convinced that they hadn’t even dozed off even though they’d been snoring and drooling on their clothes for upwards of half an hour, that information was a real big “ooooh!” moment. My mother used to be convinced that she didn’t fall asleep in her armchair after lunch until all three of her children told her that yes she did; she still didn’t believe it, until we proposed recording the snores. Snoring can happen awake, but she didn’t remember snoring.
3

Yes, I do it all the time. My husband tells me all about it. He does it too.

I’ve actually used that fact to become a (slightly) better sleeper, because once I knew I was sleeping more than I thought, I could become more relaxed about my frequent insomnia. Thus leading to less of it, of course.

4

As someone with major sleep problems, I can attest that if I’m sleeping light enough, my dream is that I’m in bed trying to sleep. That’s when I get the incredibly wonderful confusion of checking my phone and seeing that it’s 10pm, then checking it 15 minutes later and it’s 8pm.

5

But I don’t get that kind of surprise. Almost always, when I check, the clock shows the time I more or less expected it to show, give or take a few minutes.

Also, I’m not looking for medical advice. If I did, I’d go to the doctor. I’m interested in knowing whether the phenomenon exists which is why I posted in “General Questions”. So far, your answers seem to indicate that there is indeed such a thing as very short sleep.

6

The answer to that question is simple: yes, you can fall asleep for a short time and not realize you’ve fallen asleep.

7

Thanks! I was puzzled by the discrepancy between my perception (very little to no sleep) and how I felt during the night and the next day.

And like Aspidistra says, as bonus, it makes me feel a bit better about it

8

You sound like me, sometimes I could swear I go days without sleep but I know I must be getting at least a few minutes here and there. I will seldom go more than 30 min without noticing the clock unless I am forcing myself to just lay still and try to fall asleep/

9

Without any external timeline, you won’t necessarily be aware of when you doze off. If you’re drifting between being asleep and awake, you may not perceive the times you were sleeping and incorrectly think you’ve been awake the whole time.

One way I realized this is when I would listen to old TV shows to help me fall asleep. The shows would seem to skip ahead and I’d realize I missed 10-15 minutes of the plot even though I thought I was awake the whole time. I was drifting in and out of sleep without having any perception of being asleep.

It’s best if you don’t look at the clock since that will wake you up more.

One thing that may help is to listen to self-hypnosis sleep audio. I’ve used Speed Sleep and have had good results. For those times when my brain can’t seem to settle down, listening to those will help get my thinking more linear towards going to sleep.

10

Sometimes I will be awake for a few hours late in the night. I feel like I am awake non-stop, but Mrs. FtG sometimes notes that I was sound asleep at one or more points.

Similarly, I will be watching a program and think I only verged on falling asleep, but instead find on rechecking the program (on a DVR), that I was asleep for up to 15 minutes without really noticing.

11

Have you been to a doctor about your sleep issues?

12

Absolutely possible. I can’t count the number of times I’ve fallen asleep and been unaware of it, only to have my wife wake me up to tell me to quit snoring, or bat at me because I farted or something.

To me, it seems like I’m lying there awake, and then getting hit and wondering why in the hell she just hit me or started talking to me, when in fact I’ve been asleep for a short while.

13

Hey, this may be why people are always honking at me…

14

There was that one morning I woke up driving into Cleveland …

15

I can fall asleep and dream for what seems like hours, and find that only 15 minutes have passed. Of course there are probably different chemicals sloshing around my brainbucket than yours.

16

A couple of times, I’ve fallen asleep sitting up on the sofa in the middle of the day WITH MY EYES OPEN. :eek:

17

OP, I had a sleep study done to determine why I can’t sleep or if I have sleep apnea (your story sounds almost exactly like mine), where I was wired with electrodes and monitored the entire night. I tossed and turned the entire time because the bed was institutional and uncomfortable, plus the electrodes and cables kept tangling up.

In the morning the doctors claimed I had a full restful night of sleep, which was absolute B.S. I wonder too then if there is some way to technically ‘sleep’ while being aware, so that we get a semblance of rest but not the dream state or feeling of actually falling asleep…from my experience the state of science on the subject is terrible.

18

That’s interesting. Did you question them about it? I wonder if they adjust for the uncomfortable setting. If they compare you to someone who is known to have no sleep problems and to sleep deeply, and find that you slept as well or better than they did (in the lab) they might report that as a restful night of sleep, even if it was terrible compared to how either of you would sleep at home.

Or maybe they meant that you met some standard for how much sleep the average person is supposed to need in a night.

Or maybe they compared your sleep to a diagnostic checklist for patients with significant sleep disorders and found that you didn’t meet the criteria for those.

I’d be curious which of those it was.

19

There have been times while laying in my recliner watching TV, that my eyelids will get heavy and I will allow them to close. At the time, I am aware that my eyes are closed. Internally, I tell myself: “OK, I’m gonna let my eyelids rest a couple of minutes (literally two minutes), and then open them again and finish watching this movie.”

Only except, when I open my eyes after what seemed to me to be about two minutes, I’m able to surmise, a couple of hours have past. (Usually indicated by the ending credits rolling on my TV screen on a movie I just started.)

It’s very disorientating. I often tell myself, this must be what it feels like to time travel.

20

Being sleepless when you want to sleep can be severely anxiety-making. Watching the clock is both a symptom and a cause of this, and tends to keep it bad. It will probably be helpful for the OP to turn the clock around so he can’t see it at night.

I sleep passably well most nights, with occasional exceptions, but I’ve had longer periods of time with serious difficulty sleeping. (And the gut-wrenching anxiety! Picture yourself intensely wringing out a wash-cloth. Now picture what it feels like to be that wash-cloth.) During times that I’ve had trouble sleeping (especially multiple nights in a row, and at one period in my life, for 16 months non-stop! :eek:), I’ve experienced pretty much everything just like everybody in this thread has been saying.

I learned that if I could just get some sleep in a night, and know that I got it, I could feel at least a bit better about it. If I wake up at night and remember having had a dream (even though I often don’t remember what the dream was, I can sometimes at least remember that I had a dream), then I know that I slept a little. Then I’ll know that I’ll feel at least a little bit rested and functional the following day.

Note: BE CAREFUL if you want to try any kind of sleeping pills. I find Benedryl somewhat helpful, but I refuse to use it more than, say, 2 days a week, and only rarely even that. And benzos are the sleeping pills from Hell.