Hacker News Reader

Comment by munchler | Hacker News Reader

> I'm in bed and drifting off towards sleep. A few minutes before I'm fully out, while I can still hear and see everything going on around me, I'll start to dream. The dream can be either vivid or fuzzy, but it plays out in just the same manner as when I'm asleep, just kind of superimposed upon my normal waking senses.

This happens to me often, but I've never thought of it as a symptom of anything. In fact, when I'm just on the edge of sleeping, I can sometimes switch back and forth between "normal thinking" and "dream thinking". I often try to remember my dream thoughts when I switch back to normal mode, but it is nearly impossible - they evaporate or are somehow incompatible with normal thinking.

> whenever I'm asleep I always dream, and I start dreaming the instant I fall asleep

This happens to me frequently as well (but not "always") and is basically another aspect of the phenomenon described above.

View on HN

+1 here, no narcolepsy diagnosis (do have sleep apnea though), but I also have that exact same awake-dreaming experience semi-frequently, or at least enough that it's not distressing to me for the most part. I also assumed this was a universal sleep experience.

I do vividly remember one experience though, I was riding the bus to high school. It was a very long ride very early in the morning and I started to fall asleep. My head was doing the thing where it would droop suddenly from tiredness. Usually the feeling of suddenly falling like that would wake me up a little and I'd snap my chin back up, but this time I guess I was extra tired so my head stayed drooped down and I continued drifting asleep while mostly upright on the bus. The dreams started, but in one part of the dream I heard someone call my name. I immediately became fully awake again, because I was aware I was on the bus the whole time and had thought someone had called to me and I might need to respond. But there was nobody behind me. Freaked me out a little because I wondered if that was a hallucination, but everything about it just felt like falling asleep. I get hypnic jerks a lot too, so I am used to suddenly coming back out sleep halfway through, and about half the time that happens I can remember bits of dreaming.

(author here) Maybe you should get a sleep study done, especially if you have ever had trouble sleeping at night, or are excessively sleepy during the day! I went over twenty years without a diagnosis.

Thanks for responding! That's interesting. I'm a night owl and nap pretty much every day, but it's kind of my superpower, not something I consider a problem. I feel a million times better after a good nap.

Reminds me of a Japanese girl I met who told me that when she smoked weed for the first time, she lay in bed, and saw an entire episode of The Simpsons play on her ceiling.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com