# weird half-asleep 'thought loops'?



## yogurt

For as long as I can remember, I'll have this occasionally happen to me. I'll wake up at some odd hour of the night, after a few hours asleep or less I'll wake up and be in some sort of dream state that isn't quite asleep but isn't quite awake either. While in this half-awake state, I'll be going over these really strange thought patterns that I guess made sense within the context of whatever dream I was having. The thing is, as I'm sort of awake, I'm perfectly aware that I'm both not asleep and am having these strange dream-like thoughts, but they'll make perfect sense. For example, last night this happened to me, and I think I dreamed that I was the tour manager for a band that I liked, and I had the job of taking inventory on the socks that each band member would need on the tour. Something woke me up and I was stuck in the half-asleep/awake state, still going over the intense "sock inventory" train of thought that I guess was present in my dream. It was as if I had some sort of method to figuring everything out about the "sock inventory"... and it was very precise, and also made perfect sense at the time. I really couldn't explain the train of thought now aside from saying just this, as it is completely foreign to me now that I am entirely awake.

Like I mentioned earlier, this occasionally happens to me, and has since I was a child. It usually happens when I take a very long nap and sluggishly start to wake up after a few hours... or when I sort of wake up in the middle of the night with a cold or some other illness... or occasionally when I am anxious about something that is to take place the next day and sort of keep waking up throughout the night during an average night's sleep. Also, say, if I intensely study for an exam and only sleep a few hours during the night, I'll find myself really rehearsing the material in my head in incomprehensible ways when I am just waking up the next morning.

I really never thought anything of this until a few months ago... as I'd always assumed that it was normal to be half-asleep/awake and not quite be 'all there', but of course my heightened self-monitoring that I have from my development of derealization has me afraid for my sanity, and all of that typical nonsense. I'm not all that worked up over it though, because I assume that if I've been having these 'symptoms' since as long as I can remember, I'd be worse off right now than I am. So I'm posting this to see if anyone else notices these delirious thought loops that appear to be thought residue left over from dreaming and nighttime mental events.


----------



## yogurt

I did a little Internet research and, in case anyone is curious, I found that that state between sleeping and waking up is specifically called the "hypnopompic" state (the state between the reverse, wakefulness and sleeping, is "hypnagogic") and is characterized by "emotional and credulous dreaming cognition trying to make sense of real world stolidity." So in that state, distorted thinking and rules that applied to the dreams that you were having carry over into the real world, causing you to go through the same thought loops over and over again in order to try to make sense out of reality using the sense of mind that you had in the dream. I imagine that doing so would cause disorientation and confusion... and I guess might make someone who over-monitors their mental life fear that this is some kind of delusional state (like I did). This is pretty interesting. I've read about hypagogic hallucinations and sleep paralysis (and have had plenty episodes of the latter in my lifetime), but I've never heard anything about the quality of half-asleep/awake coginition. Unfortunately, I can't find too much online about this subject.


----------



## CECIL

Yep I've had this happen to me quite a few times. It often occurs when I am sleeping past the time I need to wake up to do something, almost like my mind is deliberately trying to keep itself busy so I won't wake up.

The 2 strangest ones I've had though -

1. Was about 17 and got drunk at a friends place, eventually going to sleep on his floor with a few of my friends in the room. All night I had these thought loops that our heads were connected up with network cables (we'd been playing computer games all night) and I was sending messages back and forth. Not coherent messages but just packets of electronic data, so there was no story line or end. I even woke up a few times during the night, shook my head and went back to sleep only to go back to exactly the same "dream".

2. When working at a fast food outlet, I was "dreaming" that I was at work stuffing chickens but also aware that I was laying on my bed asleep. That one was wierd, lol.


----------



## yogurt

That's pretty interesting... I'm really fascinated by this stuff now. Thanks for sharing your stories. I feel like I've had something like the cable wires thought loop once, though I can't remember what it reminds me of specifically.

Another recent one that I can remember happened one night when I was anxious about something that I had to do the next day... and I kept waking up (but really only being half-awake) as a result. So I'd wake up really frustrated, and each time, I was frantically going over this mechanical formula in my head as to why I kept waking up. It was some sort of mathematical concept that factored in the position that I was lying in with the way that my bed sheets were folded, etc.


----------



## CECIL

Yeah sounds familiar. It always seems to be something very mundane and mechanical that gets repeated over and over. Some bizarre idea or motion that you keep going through. For me I am always aware its happening and wanting to break out of it, though sometimes I can't and sometimes I know the only solution is to get out of bed, which I am reluctant to do :evil:


----------



## fairy_fangs

This happened to me as well. Last night was the first time for me but it wasn't on a loop? More like I was half asleep but knew I wasn't asleep.. If that makes any sense. If I had a random thought sometimes it would automatically turn into this small 10-minute dream? I remember there was 3 of them. They were all triggered if I thought about a person or situation randomly.I'm awake now and it's been over 12hours since this happened yet I rember them all very clearly. Every last detail. I'm confused is that the same thing?


----------



## Surfer Rosa

Falling asleep for me is borderline psychotic, and completely goes away upon waking.

There are a few compound reasons for this.
1. Not going to sleep "normally": worrying, total exhaustion, modern life.
2. Dissociating: depersonalization, with no identity fragmentation or fugue, is supposed to be a mild to moderate form of dissociation.
3. Hypogogia: (looking up this term should help) thought patterns between waking and sleeping can include hallucinations, word salad, totally abstract thinking, fragmented thinking, thought looping...To quote my psychiatrists, it's pathological when these happen in a fully awake state. (Your brain goes into high and low phases between waking, dreaming, and deep sleep.)

Some ways to combat it.
1. Accept that psychiatry doesn't consider it psychotic.
2. Consider it an even lower state than dreaming, and imagine what restful sleep you'll have when you enter the lower phases you are approaching.
3. Think about something nice and simple, like a crush or a fuzzy pet. Focus on the aspects of this, to counter some of the randomness.


----------

