: why is it that sometimes when we wake up it feels like only a few minutes passed but then you check the time and it’s been HOURS, why does it feel like you closed your eyes momentarily?

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: why is it that sometimes when we wake up it feels like only a few minutes passed but then you check the time and it’s been HOURS, why does it feel like you closed your eyes momentarily?

In: Biology

7 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Has anyone ever had a dream within a dream?!

Anonymous 0 Comments

Your brain guesses how long you slept by your dreams. If you don’t sleep hard enough, you won’t dream. Your brain thinks you didn’t sleep long because you didn’t dream.

Anonymous 0 Comments

You’re brain also tunes in to environmental queue to shape your perception of time passed. If it’s dark when you go to sleep, you don’t dream, then you wake up when it’s still dark it might feel differently than if it’s light when you wake up.

Anonymous 0 Comments

If you stay in light sleep you may not reach REM or detailed dreams. Your brain uses the memories of these dreams to guesstimate how long you were asleep.

No dreams means no memories from sleeping means no way to make an accurate timeline of the night.

So your brain does what it can with what it does have and connects the memory of going to sleep directly to the next one of waking up in its mental timeline – making it feel like the hours only lasted minutes.

It sticks out as weird because it doesn’t always happen this way, when we do make it into deep dreams there can sometimes be a long time line formed – it could feel longer than the whole night!

Generally I recall either more or less time than I was actually asleep, less if I don’t dream as much.

We still don’t know a huge amount about dreams and sleep, but we’re still learning!

Anonymous 0 Comments

When asleep you lose consciousness and many of the things that come with it, most notably perception of time. You are only perceiving the moments that you spend falling asleep and waking up, and you cannot perceive the hours that you spend asleep. The stitching together of these moments make you feel like a short time has passed, since in your conscious mind that is exactly what happened.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I’ve only had this happen to me once like a couple weeks ago and it was *bizarre* I blinked and it was daylight out, it was confusing.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I’ve always wondered if, since our perception of time is lost when we sleep, everyone is perceiving different moment in time from a relative point-of-view.

To better explain my idea, say Person 1 goes to sleep at 10 pm and sleeps for 9 hours and wakes up at 7 am. To Person 1, although he slept 9 hours, it only felt like ~15 minutes because of the concept brought up by OP. Person 2, on the other hand, did not go to sleep. This means that, after Person 2 consciously experiences 15 minutes going by, it is 10:15 pm, while Person 1 *feels* like he has also perceived 15 minutes pass, but it is 7am.

Could this mean that everyone’s consciousnesses are *out of sync* with each other based on relative perception of time passing? Anyone else ever thought about this? Makes me think that “the present” isn’t a definitive thing that exists.

People have probably written extensively on this topic and I have no idea, it’s just a thought I’ve had for awhile. Probably came to me in the shower or something.