Strange Sleep

This morning I experienced a very curious phenomenon.  I woke up to my alarm, of course, and went back to sleep.  I have several alarms, you see, to wake me up in stages.  Little did I know that I had forgotten to set my last alarm, the one that requires me to get out of bed to turn off.  So there I was, lying in bed, half-aware, and eventually it occurred to me that I should probably be awake.  I rolled over to check my phone, and it was 9:18.  I closed my eyes.  One alarm at eight o’clock, I told myself, one alarm at eight thirty, and now it’s past nine.  I should be up by now.  I could swear that no time passed by at all except the time it took me to think that.  But I opened my eyes again and checked the clock, and it was 9:35.

Sleep is a funny thing.  Sometimes I sleep so deeply nothing can wake me up (though I do that less often now since the occurrence of an embarrassing incident at camp three years ago).  Other times I can’t sleep at all and stay up until at least four o’clock in the morning just waiting to feel tired.  (This latter happening is unfailingly accompanied by an intense desire for pancakes.)  I dream in the mornings, just before I wake up, and often I become aware that I’m dreaming for brief moments, but then fall easily back into the dream.  Sometimes I remember my dreams in vivid detail; other times only a few snippets remain (a choir concert and hot pink shirts, and I was late, I think).  And that’s just me—there are so many other quirky sleep habits that people have.

It’s interesting, isn’t it?  And it’s one of those things that can’t really be explained by someone outside of your head.  I mean, scientists have many theories about sleep and dreaming, and they can fabricate ways to test these theories, but in the end how do you really know what’s going on in someone’s head?  And if we can’t do it when people are asleep, how can we hope to understand people when they’re awake?