There is a weird phenomenon I sometimes experience and that has been happening to me since I was a kid.
It always starts the same way–late at night, with me in bed watching T.V. I’m watching a show I want to see, and I am getting more and more tired.
Then it happens. I lose all sense of time! And almost instantaneously, it seems, I wake up (I agree it has something to do with sleep) and it is a couple of hours later. The T.V is turned off, because someone in the house was woken up by it and found me alseep in my room with it on. And then I start doing something kind of weird. Confused by the fact that the program has seemingly “suddenly” ended, and dazed by the fact that I was in a sound sleep, I go the television. And I start fooling randomly with the controls. When I wake up more and realize what I am doing, I usually stop. But that part–and the fact that I almost always seem to do it–seems weird too.
So my question then is, What is this phenomenon? How is it caused and does it have a name? Does anyone else ever experience it? Hmmm.
Yeah, it’s called “falling asleep with Johnny”, which dates back to the days when Johnny Carson did the Tonight Show, and yeah, it’s normal to wake up, disoriented, at 2 a.m. and not realize what time it is, but only to remember vaguely that you “need to turn the TV off”, hence the groggy fumbling with the controls. And part of your mind is still asleep, so it doesn’t register that the TV’s already off.
Sounds like something similar that happens to me. When I get migraines really bad, I usually had to sleep them off, so I’d go to bed at 3 when I got home from school and usually wake up around 7 feeling very groggy from the nap and puking. Anyways, if the conditions were right (ie sun setting etc) I’d never know if it was 7 that night or 7 the next morning, I always hated that. Didn’t know If I was late for dinner, or late for school. But that I got used to. Something that is still strange for me to think about and it only happened once is this. I must have been really tired. I was lying down on my couch and must have been dozing off. I remember seeing the VCR clock and it said 3:14 and to this day I’d swear all I did was blink and the clock said 6:14. I fell asleep for 3 hours and I swore all I did was blink, but I check and everyone in the house said I was out for quite a while.
I generally doze off so I’m not away of the time as lost but I once experienced a whole night as a blink. One moment it was late evening and dark, I blinked my eyes, then it was morning. I apparently hadn’t moved at all during the night. Pretty freaky.
That has happened to me many times… I seem to close my eyes and when I open them it’s someone waking me up. “Damnit I just closed my eyes how can it be morning… What the hell?!” May I add, that is quite annoying. I enjoy sleeping.
Yeah, the FATWA hits me sometimes too. Like one time on the metro I was studying for my exam that morning. next thing I know I am in the next town. Oops, had to wake up real quick to catch the opposite train.
The question about perception of time while sleeping is interesting to me. There is definitely a sense of time passing… when I’ve overslept on a week day, I know when I wake up that I’ve been asleep for too long.
I think that time seems to be:
faster when you’re in non-REM sleep (subjective:actual ratios vary widely, in my experience anywhere from about 1:5 to 1:20). I don’t know if this is because time does indeed seem to be faster when in stages II, III, and IV, or if it’s because I don’t remember time passing.
just different in REM sleep. This is because the dream has its own clock. A part of the dream “narrative” is the amount of time passing. In a dream, you can tell yourself that a year has passed. You have a perception that you’ve been in the experience for a year. I’ve even had dreams when “a year has passed,” and I remember about as much as I’d usually remember about a year (usually wake up very confused).
I don’t know how time perception in sleep has been studied aside from the introspection method. Usually, introspection = bad science in psychology… anybody have any better data?
What occasionally happens to me is the reverse. I’ll doze off, sleep well and feel like several hours have passed, get waken up for some reason, and it’s only an hour later. Freaks me out every time.
It’s pretty simple, really…you don’t remember being asleep, so it seems like no time has passed. An even more acute form of this is undergoing general anesthesia in an operating room; it truly seems like you blink your eyes and its over.
The time was being felt when you were dreaming; it’s just that, if you don’t remember your dreams from that particular night, you have little to base time upon. During non-REM periods, its unlikely that your mind is conscious enough to process concepts like time, and this further adds to the dichotomy – the majority of sleep is non-REM.
I nearly always perceive time when I sleep. I have often expressed discontent at sleeping, because I don’t want to switch myself off for however long. When I wake up, I know that it’s not an instant after I closed my eyes. I felt that time pass. Contrary to what occ said, I am also aware of the time in which I was knocked out by an anesthesia.
However, on a few rare occasions, I have experienced ‘sleep in a blink’. It has always happened when I’m trying to sleep on aeroplanes. One time, I heard the throbbing of the aircraft change into a high pitched whine for a few seconds, before I woke. I would rather sleep happened like that the whole time - it’s more convinient.
I would be interested in finding out if there is a way to try and induce this affect. I also agree that it would be interesting to discover why some people perceive sleep more often than others, and why ‘sleep in a blink’ happens at seemingly random times.
That’s happened to me once or twice. The first time was when I had a fever when I was about 8 or so. I was sitting on the coach with my mom, watching some movie on TV, at night. I blinked (Or I THOUGHT I had blinked. No “drifting” off to sleep for me THAT night), and suddenly it was daylight, the TV was off, etc. But my head apparently hadn’t changed position as I slept, so it was like someone had turned the world “on” by flipping a switch. It seems cool now, but it was disorienting as Hell back then.
Ranchoth
In regards to the OP, in sounds less like natural sleep and more like a form of hypnosis - you fall into a trance-like state, induced by fatigue, a state of relaxation, and (in some of the cases mentioned above) some steady, “lulling” background (think of highway hypnosis without the highway). Do you feel rested after this happens, like you have just taken a nap? Or do you feel just as if you’ve zipped forward in time?
If those last questions were directed at me, I would say I never feel really rested. But that is probably simply because the phenomenon never lasts for more that a couple of hours for me. People who it lasts longer for might have a different experience to tell.
Back to my OP, as I said, the loss of time makes it seem like only an instant has past. In fact that is why I fiddle with the knobs on the TV set. I am confused why the picture has suddenly gone away, in my half-awake/half-asleep haze. And I am literally trying to get back the last scene of the program that I thought I had just “lost”!
I remember reading years ago that when this happens, it’s because you woke up during a certain stage of sleep. IIRC correctly, it was stage 2, out of four stages.
THis happened to me just once, when I went camping for the first time when I was 11. I have always assumed that it was because I didn’t dream at all during the night, which usually gives some sense that you’ve passed some time. With me it seemed like I woke up just before I fell asleep, if you can understand that.
It’s happened to me, too. About 12 years I was very tired after work one day, so I lay down and took a nap. When I woke up it was 7:45 PM, but upon looking at the clock I thought it was 7:45 AM. I knew I had to be to work at 8:00 the next morning. I thought I was running late and I was about to call to let them know I’d be there as soon as possible. It wasn’t until two minutes later that I realized that it was 7:45 PM the night before. What contributed to this confusion was that it was at a time of year when the amount of daylight at 7:45 AM and PM was about the same, and I wasn’t paying any attention to the orientation of the sun when I woke up.
