Waking up

Factual Questions
1

I’m wondering if maybe the daze you experience when you first wake up is a result of certain parts of your brain taking longer to wake up than others.

The reason I say this is because I remember that I once woke up in the middle of the night and I really needed to go the bathroom. So I’m kind of lying there half-awake and thinking a bit. Finally I manage to drag myself out of my warm bed and head to the bathroom.

When I was lying in bed I must have been barely concious. Maybe I was still dreaming, but the point is that I could remember what I was thinking. I didn’t really come to my senses until I got the bathroom. When I did I recalled my thought-process. In that half-asleep state I made a series of reasonable logical steps. What I was thinking about wasn’t particularly hard but it did require a certain amount of reason. Nothing spectacular but at lesat I know I wasn’t completely out of it because I took several assumptions, evaluated them logically and came to a conclusion.

Then I thought to myself: What the fuck was I thinking?! That’s completely absurd!

I was using some pretty complicated reasoning to figure out how the artifical intelligence worked for some computer game I was playing at the time based on the assumption that there were real, live little men in my computer that it was controlling.

It seems to me that one part of my brain was completely awake because when I thought over my logical reasoning it made perfect sense, and it wasn’t the kind of crazy stuff that makes sense in dreams but not when you wake up. If those really were little men in my computer then my conclusions on how the computer organized them were reasonable. On the other hand some other part of my brain must have been compltely asleep because how the hell did I come up with the that idea in the first place? I’m walking to the washroom thinking about how orders are relayed to the individual units and a few seconds later I realize that I’m thinking about something completely absurd.

2

Huh. When I’m half asleep I usually just think about sex.

I sold my soul to Satan for a dollar. I got it in the mail.

3

Well, this reminds me of something that happened to me and a subsequent explanation I got from someone a few years later.

One night when I was in my late teens, I woke up. I think all of us have woken up with muscle spasms, maybe in your leg or arm. But this was absolutely insane how I woke up.

It was as if every muscle on my body had spasmed at once, and stuck there. I was in indescribable pain. I thought I was screaming as loud as I could, but all that came out was a muffled grunt. I felt paralyzed and could not move.

This horrible sensation lasted for maybe 10 seconds, though it felt like an eternity. Then, it slowly faded away. My body went from a rigid state to being more relaxed. I even felt a few muscles spasm and relax, like they will do as they are getting back to normal, at different places in my body.

Finaly, I was totally relaxed again, and I was sweating profusely, as if I had taken a shower, almost. Being utterly exhausted from this ordeal, I fell back asleep.

When I awoke the next day, nobody in my house could recall hearing anything unusual from my room. But everyone in my family are notoriously heavy sleepers - as am I, which becomes pertinent soon. I still wondered for years if it really happened or was just a particularly vivid dream.

Several years later, in passing, I mentioned this to a friend of mine. He explained that the brain detatches itself from things in your body so that when you dream, the body does not react. For example, if you dreamed you were running and your body still thought it was awake, you would start churning your legs. He told me this explains sleep walking and even wet dreams - that sometimes, it doesn’t always work.

What happened to me, he said, was that I woke up, and my brain still thought I was asleep, which meant that I had no control over anything. As I tried to move, I couldn’t, and the pain I felt was from my struggle to move and th hock of not being able to.

Gradually, my brain gave control over to my body, and that’s when things came back to normal.

It is the best explanation I got for my night, and until otherwise, I will assume that is indeed what happened.

As such, yes, it does take time for your body to fully awaken, mainly because the transition from dream state to conscious is not instantaneous. I learned this in a quite painful manner.

Yer pal,
Satan

4

Well, it’s nice that Konrad didn’t wet his bed.

And, Satan, you died back then. That’s how come you became Satan.

[quote. . .sometimes, it doesn’t always work.[/quote]

Never underestimate the logic of posters to this MB.

Ray (Don’t wake me up; this too much fun.)

5

Pissing your bed to keep warm is a short term solution to a long term problem.

6

Sleep accesses the subconscious part of the brain, which is also not directly accessible, so if you wake up then all sorts of weird stuff can happen.

“I have gathered a posie of other men’s flowers, and nothing but the
thread that binds them is mine own.”

7

I don’t know if this pertains, but it reminds me of all the mornings I used to drive to work literally asleep. I knew I had fallen asleep because I remembered waking up. Anyway, sometimes I missed the exit and sometimes I didn’t, but I would have expected to be in a ditch at least once out of all those times(this was when I was in the Army and had a 45 minute commute before I had to be at formation at 4:30 am). I used to roll out of bed, put on my uniform and sleep on the way to work.

What kept me on the road or from crashing into other motorists? I could have sworn my eyes were closed half the time.

“Universe Man - He’s got a watch with a minute hand, millenium hand and an eon hand and when they meet it’s a happy land - Powerful man, Universe Man”
-TMBG

8

What Satan experienced is also the explanation given for ‘succubus’ visions, alien abduction paralysis, and other similar supernatural bedtime events. It is often accompanied by dreamlike visions of ghostly white people that seem very very real, because your brain is asleep and still dreaming, but your body is awake and you can see things.

I think it’s called ‘sleep paralysis’ or something.

-PIGEONMAN-
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