Some people with insomnia think they're awake when they're asleep

https://archive.ph/9yqQY

Used to be a big problem when my dad would wake me up at 4am to hunt as a kid. Sometimes people tell me we had conversations and i was making eye contact. I have no option but to believe it bc ive heard it so many times now

I've begun taking a small amount of CBD in the form of an edible a few hours before going to bed (a quarter of a 5 mg gummy), and I have minimal sleep issues now.

A disc herniation caused me pain all night until it eventually destroyed my circadian rhythm. Even after it healed and the pain went away I had terrible sleep disruption. Up every 90 minutes, couldn't fall asleep until 4 am, waking up at 4 am. The works. Going on a few months.

Then I found sleep restriction.

First two weeks were brutal, but then biology takes over. And just like that, in a couple weeks, you rebuild you ability to fall asleep naturally and you're back to normal.

And in retrospect, this is exactly the approach we took to sleep training our young children. I swear by it.

That realization has helped me stress out a lot less about "not getting enough sleep" when there's an important even the next day (which makes it easier to find sleep in turn).

It's like there's something building up in my brain that's blocking real REM sleep, and cleaning it out results in the subjective experience of a migraine.

This happens to me when I go to bed while thinking hard on a specific problem, usually related to my startup.

It starts off awake with regular thinking, but then at some point it becomes surreal and events that have no cause and effect or basis in reality start occuring.

When I feel an "aha" moment where I become of the surreal nature of my recent thoughts, my memories cease and I assume I transition to real sleep.

In some cases, I wake up and when I check the time my 30 minutes of "thinking" actually occured over ~3 hours.

I find it fun, and as part of my self sleep experiments I try to even recreate it.

Of course, this is me, I am a thoroughly weird person. I understand that some other people may find it unsettling.

Guess I got some sleep after all.

Specifically, my understanding was that a complete lack of sleeping is rather fatal.

It didn't change until I developed a serious yearning for quality time in the morning. 'Quality' is any span where you do not have to be conscious of the passage of time (yet). First 5am and now 4:30am, the span from awakening 4:30 until 7:00 when work begins for example, was enough to impose a clean 24 hour cycle of habit.

The next hurdle was that I sleep with a loud fan which helps mask environmental noise and helps me to sleep. But at 4:30am it means that the cell phone alarm would have to be very loud and I'd typically awaken apartment neighbors through thin walls who sleep in silence. I'd hear them moving around and know that I had probably awakened them.

My solution was a programmable digital clock relay. At 4:30am it turns off the fan, and my mind is conditioned to awaken instantly while the fan is spinning down. Sometimes I even hear the 'click' of the relay. Then I get up quickly, because the cell phone is just out of reach and set 4:32am and I know it will be penetrating and shrill in the silence. Getting up to turn it off breaks my first level of snooze-abuse syndrome. I now (correctly) associate snooze abuse with stress and unpleasant outcomes, call it 'maturity' if you like.

So now I can awaken with time to spare in 'silence' and my neighbors can stay asleep.

> For example, If a person objectively sleeps for 5.5 hours, the experts allow the person to be in bed only for six hours. A preliminary lab study in which participants delayed their regular bedtime by two hours showed that such sleep restriction can reduce the number of arousals during REM.

I Like how science and medicine are more frequently taking account individual differences into account in a measured and sensible way. That is as opposed to ignoring it or making everything statistics.

PSA: Remember kids, just say no to drugs.

"Significant sleep spells" - sometimes the data, sampled in 1-minute binning intervals, is a flat line - no difference, minute-to-minute, in motion (however significantly above baseline of an unoccupied mattress - I guess that's what the angel care sensors monitor - just the motion energy of breathing. Other times the data is really, really noisy. Is that different sleep or just different body position? Never figured it out. But "awake" is clearly visible - that's noise that never goes down to the "just breathing" baseline at all.

It's not quite lucid dreaming, though I think it isn't completely different (I've experimented with that a bit, and I work in neurotech/sleeptech).

This kind of sleep never felt restful by any means, though.

But this rarely happens because sleep is very important to me and I worked hard on my habits to get good sleep. Good sleep for me equals no memory of dreams.

It seems that memory splits when environment splits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis

But yeah, I've experienced the same thing, you think you haven't slept a second during the night but you probably have