Sleep. Sleep is fucking weird.
Sometimes when I'm trying too hard to fall asleep, I can't help but take notice of how strange and almost creepy the actual process of falling asleep is (which then keeps me up, so... yeah...). Like, no one ever remembers the actual moment when you fall asleep. What does it feel like to fall asleep? I don't know. Every morning I wake up, remembering what it felt like to lie in bed and wait for sleep to come, but not what was actually happening when I fell asleep. I can sometimes even recall various things I was thinking about that night that may have kept me up for a while, but I have no idea what I was actually thinking about when I slipped into a dream. And most people don't remember their dreams very well, either. I know I don't. I almost never remember my dreams -- meaning that the entire night just seems blank which is... weird. Because, again, I don't actually remember falling asleep. In fact, hell, even when I do remember parts of my dreams, I never really remember what it felt like for a dream to start -- because, again, no memory of actually falling asleep.
Which is why it's sometimes just weird to think about when, say, I know I need to get to sleep soon so that I'll be well-rested enough for the next day, and I'm just trying to quiet my overactive mind and just go into sleep mode, but like... I feel like I'm waiting for something and I have no idea what that something should be. What should it feel like to fall asleep? I don't know -- I don't know what to expect.
And after this train of thought plagued me for several nights, I started to realize that just the entire concept of sleep is just so bizarre. On a regular daily schedule, you lie somewhere, virtually unconscious as you wildly hallucinate (with your eyeballs darting every which way while it happens...), and then, if you're like most people, you'll wake up with a healthy dose of amnesia. It is just the strangest fucking experience when you think of it like that. It just makes me wonder -- how did something like sleep even evolve? At what point did it become advantageous for a creature to lie defenseless and unaware of its surroundings -- vulnerable to predators and things -- for potentially hours at a time, on a daily basis?
For obvious reasons, when I do try to sleep, I try not to think about the fact that I have no idea what sort of sensation I'm even waiting for, the fact that sleep is a really bizarre concept in general, or the fact that the morning will just be there sooner or later, with me not really knowing how I got from point A to point B.
Edit: OH, and then there's also the fact that, when you wake up, if you somehow do manage to remember at least some of your dream, it often gets erased right in front of you. Like, sometimes, you wake up remembering your dream, but then your thoughts go elsewhere so that, when you think back to it, it's suddenly gone, even though you remembered waking up and recalling more of it. But sometimes, there are mornings when I wake up, having a pretty good idea what I dreamt about, but then, as I try to think about it more, trying to recall more details, I find that more and more of the memory turns blank, so that even portions of it that I remembered a mere two seconds ago suddenly turn up void. And I realize that more and more of the memory deteriorates at an insanely fast pace until suddenly I remember almost none of it. Has that ever happened to anyone else? Because if so you are fully conscious of your memory being erased even as you recall it. That's really fucking weird.