My Sleeping Secrets

More on sleepy matters…

I had the chance to discover the following eccentricities about my sleeping habits.

If I am really sleepy these are what I do, arranged ascending order of probability
1. I get groggy and begin to whine
2. Become extremely rude and uncouth and mouth profanities of the highest order
3. Drop down dead and doze off, with ultimate disregard for my surroundings, snoring sonorously.
Heaven on earth: The satisfaction of a good night’s sleep.



My 5 cents on the best ways to sleep in a moving bus:
1. Sleep to your right, if the left side of your neck develops a crick.
2. Sleep to your left, if there’s a crick in your right side.
3. Sleep with your head down, chin touching your chest, if your neck turns stiff, 270 degrees.
4. Try pushing the seat back, if you figure out how, and if your clothes don’t stick to your back from sweat between your skin and the upholstery.
5. Cushion your head with a pillow made out of your palm. If they hurt from the weight of all the crap inside your head, forget it, cos a surgery to excavate all the crap is too much of a bother.
6. Cross your leg for that stylish and debonair siesta, and if you wanna carry home an awkward limp as a bonus.
Inspiration: A particularly uncomfortable journey to Thirupathi on an AP Tourism board bus.



The semi sleepy state:

1. Have you ever experienced wakeful sleeping? Not the one you drift into when someone goes on and on about something you care a damn about, or the dazed condition afflicting the first benchers of a singularly boring lecture in college. Its something that’s been happening to me on and off.. It’s a state that I drift off to at the snap of someone’s fingers.. Not to be confused with the hypnotic control of a handsome hunk. The activity around you could be something of utmost interest, but still your mind goes blank. A sort of lull creeps in and you simply refuse to think.

2. Another variant of the semi sleepy state, a rather sinister version occurs when I go to bed way past midnight. A few precious hours before daybreak are all you get, and your body attunes itself to make the most out of it. But every time I slip into such a deep slumber, something dreadful happens, I struggle to get up, pushing the air around me, kicking my limbs in all directions, silent screams lost in space.. And I wake up, only to find that I m still struggling to wake up.. And so I battle through the different layers, waging a never ending war against sleep. Then I grow tired and give up the fight, still groping along the saturnine walls of my mind for a wormhole to wakefulness, materializing out of nowhere.. Desperate and mortified, I pray to the heavens above… Chanting the lord’s name.. And that’s when I wake up, gratified to find myself on my bed, the sheets perfectly starched and tucked in, my hands up, fingers securely locked under my head, completely no sign of trouble whatsoever.

In case, anyone’s had similar experiences, this might throw some light::

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia

A gist of it:

Hypnagogia (also spelled hypnogogia) and hypnopompia are the names of experiences a person can go through when falling asleep in the case of hypnagogia, or waking up, in the case of hypnopompia. When in a hypnagogic or hypnopompic state a person can have lifelike auditory, visual, or tactile hallucinations (known as hypnagogic hallucinations), perhaps even accompanied by full body paralysis. The individual is aware that these are hallucinations; the frightening part, in many cases, is the inability to react to them, even being unable to make a sound.