I’m lying in the dark and something like oblivion starts to flood my mind. Am I falling asleep? It occurs to me that I don’t actually know. For all the thousands of times I’ve fallen asleep, I can’t remember a single one. I don’t know what it feels like to stop being conscious. If I am in fact falling asleep right now, I realize, then what I’m experiencing in this moment will be gone from my mind when I wake up.
A tiny part of my mind panics: I don’t want to be erased! I don’t want to die! I’m jolted back to full consciousness. I lie still for a while, my thoughts slow, my mind starts to fill with something thick and sluggish and quiet, a part of me panics again. Not most of me; I know that I need to sleep. But enough of me to manage a veto, or at least a filibuster.
In the morning I wake up. I remember the cycle of drifting off towards probably-sleep and being repeatedly pulled back by a tiny fear of oblivion. I don’t remember how it ended.
(My feelings about this are so complicated and connected to so much other stuff in my head that it’s hard to really express them properly/coherently. And it might be TMI anyway.)
(I get the impression from reading about other people’s experiences that there’s quite a range of hypnagogic recall ability, and I’m towards the worse end of the scale. TBH, #1 quality-of-life tweak I would make to the human brain is improved hypnagogic recall. Since there are already people who have it, it’s clearly possible to set up a brain that way.)
Tags:
#obligate dozing fetishism + poor hypnagogic recall + psychological Issues regarding memory and existence = cruel joke of Nature #(of course it’s bedtime now isn’t it) #(I suppose I shall go nobly sacrifice very-near-future!me for a better-rested tomorrow) #(like every goddamn night) #reply via reblog #amnesia cw #death tw #infohazards #(you can really see the mishmash of grandfathered blacklist-tag formats on posts like this) #sexuality and lack thereof #people who can distinguish between their drive for sleep and drive for sex fascinate me
Brinens and Things 