I frequently have this thing where right before my mind drifts off, I have hard time distinguishing between what is real and what is just my mind coming up with stuff…a sense of reality that kind of make sense but not really? Memories will mesh. Some memories feel completely made up or too absurd. Part of conversations will feel like they never happened or completely different things were said in them. This mental trickery often makes me really question my grip on reality …did that happen? Did it actually happen like that? The flow of thoughts stop following a path. And even though my mind seems to be a on a nonesensical path, things make sense like they do in dreams. It honestly makes me feel like a crazy or a high person.
I know this is my brain shutting down(it’s one of the signs I look for to know I’ll actually legit fall asleep soon) I also know this is probably a “duh” moment, but it has always made me curious if other people experience their pre sleep experience in the same way.
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Yes, sort of, although I’ll have this moreso just after I wake up. But yeah sometimes before too. Like I’ll think things are real when they aren’t, getting up in the morning like “I have to find an excuse to stay home from school today” and I haven’t been to school in years. Or I’ll be sad my dad died before realizing wait he’s alive.
yeah all the time. sometimes i’ll wake myself up because i have a moment where i’m a little too conscious and i suddenly realise the youtube video i left playing isn’t actually the voice of a ted talk that i’m attending, and my brain just made that up for some reason.
Yes. For me, like you said, it’s a sign that I’m about to finally fall asleep
I listen to audiobooks every night when I go to sleep. A lot of times I will start dreaming about what I’m hearing before falling fully asleep. It can be pretty neat.
Hypnagogia is the transitional state from wakefulness to sleep, also defined as the waning state of consciousness during the onset of sleep. Its corresponding state is hypnopompia – sleep to wakefulness. Mental phenomena that may occur during this “threshold consciousness” include hallucinations, lucid dreaming, and sleep paralysis.
This happens to me all the time. One of the most vivid and memorable occasions was back in college when I worked at a movie theater. I had a weird lucid dream-type experience where I was back cleaning out one of the theaters after a show when someone threw a booster seat near me. I remember flinching in my sleep and that’s what “woke” me.
Yes every night
Most of the time for me. Sometimes feels like I lived a whole day in just 30 minutes. Most of the time it is fun. They feel like YouTube shorts with echos of other shorts blending and dancing like waves.
I notice this happening most often if I smoked some pot before laying down. The most interesting thing for me, is that normally I’m the kind of guy who can’t picture images in my head (forgot what that’s called) but when this happens I can 100% see the images as clear as watching a movie.
I don’t know what the technical term for this is, but in my house we call it “twilighting.” Not awake, not asleep, just kinda hanging out in a weird twilight zone. It’s your brain starting to process stuff from your day and just generally doing its brain thing that it normally does when you’re asleep, you’re just not quite asleep enough yet.