Schrödinger's Snooze

[simont]

I went to bed last night, and lay there having insomnia. No obvious cause: no persistent thought or worry running around my head, no physical discomfort. I just lay there, fully awake, failing to naturally descend into sleep.

I lay there all night, in fact, watching the clock gradually advance from 1:30 to 7:30. Then, rather to my surprise, at 7:30 I woke up from what felt like a deep sleep.

So I can only guess that some of that insomnia was actually a dream of insomnia; but I have no way of judging how much. In other words, I have no idea how much sleep I got last night. A sort of Schrödinger's Snooze, I suppose.

(I can't even gauge it by how tired I feel now, because what usually happens when I don't get enough sleep is that I feel perfectly fine and awake for part of the day and then suddenly become sleepy later on. So if that happens, I suppose, I'll be able to make a decent guess.)

Comments

[ptc24.livejournal.com]

I seem to do quite a lot of wake up, look at clock, spend a little while awake, go to sleep again, repeat until getting up time, more or less like you describe, except maybe for the "fully" in "fully awake". This happens quite often.

Part of the problem is that in half-awake states I expect that my sense of the passage of time is even/far worse than normal, so as you say it's a very unquantifiable sleep.

[sunflowerinrain.livejournal.com]

Apparently people being examined for insomnia sometimes claim they haven't slept when they are on film with eyes shut, snoring peacefully[citation needed]. I know someone who once thought he had been awake all night, and he had most definitely snored.

I'd not heard of dreaming that one is awake as an explanation, but it sounds reasonable. One can dream that one has got up, dressed, and gone out; and then found it's all to do again when the alarm goes off...

"Schrödinger's Snooze". Love it.