I was watching Lord Of The Rings the other day (no, im not a nerd) and there is a scene where Gandalf (the wizard dude) is sleeping with his eyes open. I was wondering is this possible and if so then how do you do it?
Yes. I had a friend years ago who did this. It was pretty creepy until you got used to it.
Hell, I do it all the time. So does my young son. My daughter does on rare occasion.
How? I don’t know. It just seems that the eyes don’t always close when asleep. Once or twice I’ve seen my son asleep with his eyes pretty much wide open. Freaky.
Now, if your asking whether people can do it intentionally, then I have no idea.
Yes, but I have no idea how. My cousin did it once when she fell asleep on the sofa as a kid. It’s quite creepy!
I had a coworker once who slept with her eyes open. She said it creeped the hell out of her husband.
Do they blink? Don’t their eyeballs dry out? What is it, some sort of disconnect of the brain so it doesn’t process what the eye sees?
When my eyes are open, I see. I can’t not see if my eyes are open.
Yes, they blink. Whatever the root cause of it, the blink reflex is fully functional.
You also see when your eyes are closed. If I’m sleeping during the day, wearing an eyemask, I can tell when light hits my face. Not because any light gets through the mask, but because light shines through my skin above the mask, and enough gets through to my eyes! This doesn’t let me actually make out any pattern at all, but I can consistently track a light beam of sufficient intensity.
If you think about it, we may have our eyes closed but we still hear, feel, smell, and taste. If we can not register all of those inputs, seeing shouldn’t be too much trouble.
That makes me wonder, though; we wake up if we hear a really loud noise, and smelly stuff is used to wake people. Is there some amount of large visual input that would cause an asleep-with-eyes-open person to wake up?
I would certainly think so. I sleep with my closed, like most people, but often turning on the light is enough to wake me up, depending upon where in the sleep cycle I am.
There was a guy in basic training that slept with his eyes open. His bunk was nearest the latrine, and the latrine light was on all night. It was pretty creepy to walk past him and see him ‘looking’ at you when you went into and came out of the can.
He was an odd duck besides that, and he didn’t make it through basic, but that’s another story.
It’s like when your mind wanders while you’re driving, and you suddenly realize that you’ve been unaware of driving for a period of time. On some level you were able to “see,” in order to avoid an accident, but you have no conscious memory of “seeing.”
If you’re in a pitch-dark room, you don’t see anything whether your eyes are open or not.
And yet I can’t sleep with my eyes open even under these conditions. It’s as if I have to close my eyes in order to send the signal to my brain that it’s OK to shut down for the night. The absence of light isn’t enough in itself.
But that’s just me. Other people’s brains clearly work differently if the earlier posts in this thread are anything to go by.
I dated a woman who sometimes slept with her eyes open; it usually happened when she was extremely tired. Creepiest thing in the world to see.
I’ve never seen it, but I think it would be creepy. I’m surprised nobody has mentioned that.
By the way, Dr.nuggets, I think you’ll find that most folks here are familiar with Lord of the Rings, the book and movie, and know quite well who Gandalf (the wizard dude) is. Decide for yourself whether that makes us nerds.
It does. But, I can live with that. I have long ago accepted my nerdness.
Thanks for that.
I know someone who doesn’t normally do it but did once while high on various drugs. It freaked me out because I’d never seen it before and she was sitting up with her eyes wide open (more so than normal) but motionless. I’m guessing it was depressants which caused it.
My sister and I shared a room as kids, and she’s told me that I’ve slept with my eyes open multiple times. This usually coincided with me talking in my sleep, so it always took her a while to realize that I was asleep.
She eventually started asking me, “Are you asleep?” whenever I was staring at her and talking nonsense. I always said yes, reportedly. I never remembered it in the morning.
I had quite a few sleep problems from around age ten through young adulthood, so that might be related.