Awake or asleep? Who knows...

Are you awake or asleep? Probably at least somewhat awake if you’re reading this, but do you know when you slept and when you were awake last night?

This fascinating vague hinterland between sleep and wakefulness turned up in an applied behavioural science course on the science of sleep I’m doing. It turns out that when we turn around to grab that lost duvet, we’re awake, but probably not aware. If we’re in the lightest kind of sleep (level 1) and get woken up, we might not realise we were sleeping. I’m thinking about all those evenings when I really didn’t think I slept but time still seemed to go very fast. I felt certain I hadn’t slept at all, but there was probably plenty of level 1 snoozing.

If you’re up all night and too active to slide into proper slumber, you’re still likely to have very brief instances of micro-sleep: 10-30 second snoozes you have no idea about, with your brain battling to pull you back awake. A lot of our normal capabilities deteriorate greatly in that tussle. There’s a reason why you shouldn’t be driving in that state.  

It isn’t that surprising, of course, that something as biologically fundamental as sleep is done more on autopilot than with awareness. After all, autopilot rules so much of our thinking and acting when we’re very much awake, too. There’s less to take action around in the sleep department, but it’s still worth being aware.

The next time someone tells you they saw you were asleep,  just accept that they could be right. It might be your body, but in this case, you’re not necessarily going to know what it has chosen to do.

Photo by Kate Stone Matheson on Unsplash