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

I have the opposite where my entire life my parents or partners would say they came to wake me up, i sit up, looked at them and clearly say "ok im getting up" and then the return 10 minutes later and im still asleep. When i actually wake up i have no memory of anything.

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 definitely experienced this. It used to happen weekly. My wife would often "wake me up" and say I was snoring, but to me, I was still lying awake trying to fall asleep. It was incredibly confusing, but I just trusted that she wasn't making things up.

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.

If they are able to think, that means they are conscious no? My favorite type of sleep is the sort that precludes conscious mental activity, since I tend to think of work or other mentally fatiguing subject matter and physical sensations like pain and tension. I'd like my sleep to exclude that sort of suffering. Maybe there should be more than one word for sleep. We could distinguish certain aspects, maybe name them or something? Course I'm probably asleep right now and dreaming I typed this.

I was in the ICU for an extended period of time, and as you can imagine, with the pain, discomfort, noise, and constant monitoring, I really "wasn't sleeping at all". I remember getting frantic and trying to discharge AMA, and the attending came to talk to me and listened to my principal complaint of not sleeping. He looked me dead in the eyes and said, "I'm a sleep doctor who's been watching sleep studies for 30+ years now, and I can assure you, outside of a very small number of patients with serious, often hereditary sleep issues, everyone sleeps. You may not feel like you slept, and can be convinced you were awake, but the body forces you to sleep throughout. And sometimes, when you think you fell asleep immediately, you actually didn't sleep for a while but you stopped forming memories as you were drifting off to sleep". It absolutely did nothing for me in that moment, but it's given me a lot of peace of mind since around sleep. You might still feel like crap, but you won't have anxiety on top of it!

I've experienced this a couple of times: Feeling like I've been lying awake for at least half of the night, twisting and turning, when my sleep tracker really only shows movement for maybe 2-3 stretches of 5 minutes each.

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).

Mind awake and body asleep is nothing new.

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

Sample size of 1.

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.

The article is blocked unless I pay so I can't read it.

Have you ever entered a room and forgot why you entered the room? I think a similar thing happens in sleep. What happened in dream doesn't carry over into waking memory. And maybe vice-versa.

It seems that memory splits when environment splits.

Interesting to see this article and the comments here on how everyone's experience varies.

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.

Don't know if this is related, but I really enjoy the dreams when I go back to sleep after my wife wakes up. They are really vivid and imaginative, but at the same I am mostly aware I am dreaming, as if I was partially awake.

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

Great, just great. I went relatively low-tech and outfitted the mattress I sleep on with an Angel Care sensor pad, connected to some custom homemade datalogging stuff. This is to convince me that what felt like a restless night actually did have significant sleep spells. So I'm just imagining feeling tired and having been awake most of the night, right? Have some coffee and get on with things. And now they're saying that sleep was, in fact, no good?

"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.

Every now and then I will have a night where my brain feels "wired" and I can't sleep and just have thoughts racing through my head. It feels like a don't sleep or barely sleep and yet hours go by pretty fast so I assume I must be sleeping more than I think, but it is a different kind of sleep for sure.

yeah i have this. didnt officially verify but i noticed that theres a direct correlation between hours i am in bed and how rested i feel, even if i feel like i spent the time awake. So i stopped specifically worrying about whether i’m asleep or awake and instead focus on enjoying the break

If you read tales of the taking MSLT on /r/narcolepsy, you'll see it's a very common phenomenon. Obviously, a sample bias of people with heavily disordered sleep, but man it was so confusing. They turn off the lights, then turn them on and ask if you think you slept and I just had no idea. I took 5 naps in 5 tries but didn't know until I saw the results.

I actually thought this was well established? Largely, it isn't just a complete lack of sleep that is the problem, it is lack of functional rest. Usually leading to lack of functional waking time, as well?

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

From the end of the article:

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.

A few years ago I had severe sleep issues caused by anxiety disorder. Instead of getting proper medication, I used marijuana, phenibut, and eventually benzos (prescribed by a doctor) to sleep every night. I was only on the benzos for a couple weeks but that was enough. Combined with everything else, I was in a bad place. I stopped the marijuana immediately, and over the next 3 months I weaned myself off the phenibut. Phenibut, if you've never heard of it, is one of the most addictive drugs out there. During that time I would maybe sleep an hour at night, if that. Some nights I never went to sleep at all. And occasionally I would dream while I was half-awake. It was such an odd experience - one that is very hard to describe. I was aware that I was still somewhat awake, but my mind would start to dream. Maybe it was just hallucination. Or maybe I really was sleeping, but I just thought I was still awake. Overall it was a terrible experience that felt very much like torture. In the end I get on the proper meds and I sleep fine now with no more issues.

PSA: Remember kids, just say no to drugs.

I experienced this chronically. It was so pervasive that I would convince myself the next day that I was exhausted with only six hours of sleep. I started tracking my sleep with an Apple Watch and soon realized that, I may wake up, it’s usually for minutes and not nearly as often as I thought!

I have definitely experienced this sometimes. Usually it's when I've had too much to drink. Very restless sleep and sometimes I'll tell my wife how I was awake all night counting the hours and she'll tell me I was sleeping haha

When I went for a sleep study, I was wired awake for half the night, up in bed reading waiting for the study to be over. According to the study though, I was in sleep stage 2 the entire time I was sat up in bed reading.

This is quite common for me. I am a chronic insomniac, but there are also nights when I "feel" I'm awake, but somewhat know that I'm not.

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).

https://web.archive.org/web/20240611151714/https://www.scien...

https://archive.ph/9yqQY

This makes sense to me because for years I have felt like I'm laying in bed awake yet I also feel like I got some sleep. I described this as " I didn't sleep at all last night, but maybe I did because I feel slightly rested even though I was awake." Knowing my background, hyper vigilance and PTSD are probably at play.

"The researchers exposed people to a distressing emotional experience for three days in a row: they had to listen to a recording of themselves singing—often out of tune—to karaoke, which aroused shame." Heh.. The researchers have been pretty creative :)

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

My favorite is when I roll out of bed in the morning absolutely convinced I got no sleep. But then I review my night, yup, tossed, turned, used the bathroom, tossed, turned, opened the window, tossed, turned, rode a unicorn to work in the Thousandth Broken Dimension, tossed, turned, fluffed my pillow... record scratching noise wait, what was that about the unicorn?

Guess I got some sleep after all.

I actually often have dreams that I'm lying awake in bed. Sometimes I wake up and am in a different position, which is the only way I know it was a dream. I imagine there's a lot of times I think I really was lying awake when I was really sleeping.

I know for a fact that during some of my insomnia episodes, I would fall asleep and dream of struggling to fall asleep. I would know it because of false awakenings and sometimes getting the dream to be lucid and noticing something wrong with the environment.

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

Anecdata: I have observed that my migraines come in cycles with the subjective experience of not having slept. I know I've slept, because I have long stretches of unconsciousness as confirmed by the clock on my nightstand. But I don't feel like I've slept. Then I'll have a migraine and a few nights of really great (subjectively) sleep before the cycle starts over again.

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.

I sleep pretty well in general, but when I do sleep poorly I also experience the same thing. I am so convinced that a dream is reality that I wake up confused and have to take a minute to orient myself mentally.

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.

Until age ~40 my sleep cycles were chaotic and stressful around the clock, and the morning was very stressful and sometimes (racing to work in morning traffic barely 30 minutes awake) probably dangerous. I would abuse snooze alarms. I would misplace things (keys, etc) by putting them down at night and confidently making a mental note to remember. Then on the other side after sleep a complete blank and a bomb-level search under stress to find them.

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.