Droid Sleep

I've never understood how I sleep, those moments of temporary extinction as H.G. Wells so aptly put it. 

I constantly hear of people who suffer from insomnia or other sleep related problems. I don't. I can sleep on top of a concert speaker playing heavy metal........I've slept in Carnivore during one of those rowdy music sessions. I can also sleep under a 100 watt bulb, even a blinking one. 

All I need to fall asleep is to decide that I'm sleeping. I used to say I have a contract with sleep, for which I can quickly get an order of specific performance via a quia timet (legal jargon for anticipatory) injunction under a certificate of urgency, so to speak.

And my sleep is always deep and satisfying.....the only thing capable of giving me less than perfect sleep is a tooth ache.

The flip side of this equation is that any occurrence within my sensory range which threatens my person (and for a paranoid person, that's a whole lot of shit) suffices to wake me from blissful slumber. Every time anyone so much as touches the handle to my bedroom door, my ears and eyes snap to attention, you know like the way a cats ears almost psychically flick towards those tiny sounds that only cats should be concerned about. I guess that's a good thing, especially given that I instantly fall back to sleep once the "threat" is past.

The more puzzling weird thing about my sleep is that my ears seem to record everything that goes on in my sleep and then plays it back in fast forward just before I wake. I wake up to the memories of the auditory aspects of the nights happenings, almost without fail. Freaky, right? 

Amongst the weird things my ears have been "privy" to while I'm asleep is various discussions about me by people who "know" me to be asleep at the time. I've even overheard the heartbreaking phone conversations of someone I thought was (should have been) attracted to me until I overheard them on phone describing their "type" (I was not remotely within that description).

So the question is, do I really sleep or do I just think I'm asleep? But so long as I'm rested the following day, who cares? Right? They say you can't survive an extended period of time without REM sleep, and since I'm alive (technically), that means I do get that kind of sleep. Again, right?

I don't believe in taken longer than 20 minutes to write an inspired post, and yet within that time, some quick Internet research has informed me that my (hitherto) unspoken theory is well founded.  Don't you just love how humanity's collective knowledge and belief is accessible to any research savvy person with Internet access? 

Anyway, it would appear that (obviously) your ears still hear everything as usual and send this information to the brain which then discriminatively decides which of these sounds it will transmit to the conscious part of the mind. That's how you get to wake up to the louder sounds. 

Since you hear everything, the brain wakes you based on a library collection of which kind of sounds should be a concern of the conscious mind and which should not. In my case, physical proximity of unauthorized persons (my exes and some of my bedmates seem to be allowed to enter my room without waking me) ranks highly among the things to be processed consciously.

It also makes sense that my subconscious would remember everything it's heard and that my conscious mind would have access to these memories but in a de ja vu sort of way. Until I'm convinced otherwise, that's the explanation I'm going with. It's either I accept that or I start to believe that I'm schizophrenic and that I don't actually sleep but that another personality simply takes over at night.

Wow. Finally a post that has some research going into it. There's hope for me yet.

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