h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The disappearing person thing: I must admint I can't try that right now, but my immediate thought is that you have a dominant right eye. I have a feeling this would work the other way around for some people, ormaybe even not at all. Any vision experts care to comment?

I know that this forum seems to have died down, but I just had to add something when I read about falling asleep on your arm and waking up to an arm that doesn't seem to be yours(something that happens to me all the time). But taking it further, a very good friend of mine fell asleep on a bench in a train station. Somehow he leaned on his arm, against a metal part of the bench, in such a way that he lost almost all circulation for quite awhile. He had to go to a hospital and his arm did not fully recover until about a week later.

I knew there was a reason for using pillows!

Actually the disappearing person trick is supposed to work on *either* eye - it has to do with automatically focusing on a moving object. Frankly, I've never tried it either. But I've had 2 people tell me about it, and say that it worked, so I thought it worth mentioning.

Does anyone get this feeling: you're in bed and trying to get to sleep. Then your brain becomes aware that you're losing consciousness, and you're suddenly AWAKE.

Now this might just be me, but at the point when my brain is aware that I'm dropping off, I'm suddenly CONVINCED that if I don't stay conscious, I will somehow never wake up again. Unnerving, to say the least.

Anyone else get this? Thought not.

Ok, stuff about sleep.

Jerking awake when you were almost asleep is some wierd response left over from when we lived under water and it is in order to make you go back up to the surface and breath, (According to a friend of mine who studies these things. There's a long word for it which I have forgotten). I assume that now it kicks in when our breathing slows enough when we are almost asleep that someting inside gets worried and gives us a kick start. This can be experienced as a falling sensation and hitting the ground or just a suddenly jumping or starting violently. This reflex may be missing from some people and threrefore explain some incedences of people suffocating while asleep, particularly; babies, people who snore a lot and old people.

Another sleep thing which I hate is when you wake up and can't move/think someone is holding you down. This is to do with that motor cortex thingy that someone mentioned earlier. However if you go to a large english language dictionary and look up 'succubus' (think that's how you spell it) and related entries you will find that there are all sorts of related phenomena reported. There was a whole X-Files episode about it! There are also a large number of legends which have grown up around this feeling of paralysis, so go look it up in a libraray. It will be there in the true horror section or the unexplained section depending on your library.

The one I really hate though is when you are almost asleep and then you think someone calls or shouts your name right next to your ear. Scares me silly. Any explainations????????????

FABT

Sorry, clarification required, I think. I know lots of people get the jerking awake when they're almost asleep bit, what I wanted to know is if anyone jerks awake convinced that they've just saved their own life?

While there's a plausible theory that humans may have had a *partially* aquatic phase a few million years ago, I'm not sure how many more millions of years it is since our ancestors actually slept under water. For all I know, it may be so long ago that they would have had gills anyway.
I *suspect* a more recent evolutionary hangover may be a kind of mental reflex to help us avoid falling asleep and then falling out of trees. I've had definite instances of jerking awake when dozing underground while perched precariously on a small ledge.

I once had a rather nasty experience similar to Dinsdale's - One summer, when caving in the Alps, I caught a nasty flu - I barely had the energy to stand up for a couple of days, and was feeling seriously out of it. The second day, I got a splitting headache, which I rectified with a couple of codiene tablets once my mates returned to the campsite with the medical kit, had a glass or two of wine, and went to bed. Everyone else was dog-tired, and went straight to sleep, but I'd been dozing all day, so started drifting off quite slowly. Before my eyes closed, I started having negative hallucinations, in the sense that if I didn't keep looking at objects in the tent, they started disappearing one by one. Part of my mind knew I was dreaming (or tripping), but I was still quite convinced that if I didn't keep looking around at things and people, they would end up vanishing forever. It was quite a scary sensation, and seemed to last for a couple of hours, until I managed to see sense and get to sleep.

The negative hallucination bit sounds close to when you have a fever. I used to get loads when I was younger. Your brain comes up with these very strange ideas - once I thought the colour of the table would hurt me if I looked away.
But some still sane part of your brain is thorughly enjoying every minute of it. Like Laurie Lee joining in his 'death bed' conversation in Cider with Rosie.

I've also noticed this phenomenon. Wherever I hike a new path, it seems really long. However, when I hike it again, it isn't nearly as long. My theory is that the first time, you have no idea how long the journey is, and keep imagining that it is longer than it really is. The next time, you know how long the journey is, and know when it's almost over. Also, on the second journey, I recognise the "small successes" you mention, and I see that I'm making progress.

I do tend to get quite trippy when I have a fever, and it can be quite enjoyable, if a little hazy. In the case of the slowly disappearing world, I definitely wasn't enjoying it - feeling at once both very sleepy, and yet needing to stay awake to ensure the continued existence of the world was a very lonely and frightening sensation.
The really bizarre thing was that I was definitely aware initially that I could have woken one of the guys in the tent with me, and got them to talk me down, but I didn't, as I would have felt silly. However, the fact that part of my mind was then still capable of logic and embarrassment-avoidance had no effect at all on my certainty that all around, pieces of the world were slowly popping out of existence. I think I eventually managed to convince myself that it was impossible to wake anyone else up, almost like everything except me was frozen in time. I think in this case, the fever and codeine were equally responsible.

Fevers. Whoo boy, they can be fun. I seem to spend most of the night thinking about something that's completely unimportant (even to my fever-ridden brain), but my brain just WON'T stop thinking about it. Last one I can remember was that I had to get some people I'd never met before out of a maze. I knew I was awake, I knew this was pointless, but my brain just wouldn't let me stop thinking about it and go to sleep.

i get something like that alot, I always run the days events through my mind over and over again each time changing something until my entire day has turned into a strange story that i can then not stop thinking about. The thing is this usually keeps me up forever!

Donald D. Hoffman's book, "Visual Intelligence" is an excellent introduction to the "Whys" of these types of questions. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in figuring out how and why they see the things they do.