Sleepybyes, close the eyes...

Last night, I fell asleep. While that may sound rather unexciting to most people (and rightly so), what I should also add is that I remember every second of it. Now what do you have to say about that? Huh? What? I know what. You're thinking that Drew's been out picking wild mushrooms again. But no. I've always had this weird thing happen to me where I'll be lying in bed (usually) and as I fall asleep, I can tell that my body is becoming rigid and I can't move my limbs, fingers, ears, etc. This kind of feels like being paralyzed (to the best of my knowledge and appreciation of what it would feel like to be paralyzed; I haven't compared notes with a quadruplegic or anything, I'm just taking a considered guess), and this feeling of paralysis is, well, not a lot of fun. It's nice to have control over your limbs and to feel it slipping away as you enter semi-consciousness is a bit weird so I usually get all panicky and have to try to wake myself up again. I do this by yelling. When I say yelling, it's not really yelling at all. Because I can't really open my mouth to make any words, or even an 'aaahhh,' sound so it's kind of like an alarmed groan: not pretty at all but the vocalisation makes my brain reconnect with my body and I get control back. And C has usually pushed or shaken me by this stage so the physical world comes back to me, which I like. Control. Nice. Last night I turned a corner. I could feel everything slipping out of my control, and where I would usually get all uptight and start to roll over, I thought 'It's OK, you're just falling asleep, go with it'. So I went with it. First, I went all hypnogogic and started having weird dreamy things. I was in my friend's back yard, walking from the clothesline to the garage, and as I walked I was scooping baked beans with a spoon out of a tupperware container and dripping them all over the lawn. Yeah, I thought it was weird at the time, too. Then I felt control/sensation slip away from my upper body but I still had this dreamy, false sensation where I was sort of dreaming about where my hands were, and there was a small child by the bed holding my hands. Now I knew this wasn't real, as most small children are sound asleep at this hour and can't get out of their cots and walk through the house at 12.30am. So I concentrated on getting a bit of control back in my hands and managed to move my right hand slightly and was able to feel it resting on my left upper arm. I just let things go again after that. You know when you're really drowsy, say in a meeting, or watching TV late at night and you start to fall asleep. You may literally nod off as the sleepiness kind of overcomes you and your head drops forward, waking you up again. Well that's kind of what this was like. It was like that nodding off sensation multiplied by about ten. Huge waves of sleepiness washed through my head, forcing my eyes to stay sleepily shut, and with this came foamy white noise in my ears until I was, as far as I can tell, asleep. I had lost sensation totally in my body but still had a false sense of sensation (which I knew was false at the time) and imagined myself rolling over in bed to lie on my back, even though I knew I wasn't. Then I began to think that I would be uncomfortable with my brain thinking I was on my back when I really knew I was on my side. I just couldn't let myself go knowing that my brain and body were that much out of whack. Things become a little fuzzy then but I think C moved in bed and that woke me up enough so that I could actually roll over on to my back and fall asleep again, though I stopped remembering stuff at around this point. Somewhere in my memory I can remember a similar incident that happened when I was about six. I kind of thought I must have imagined it or something but maybe last night wasn't the first time this has happened.