sleeping (nothing profound yet)

I haven't thought about this stuff enough to have any really unique ideas, but I do want to mention that I am fascinated with dreaming and with hypnogogia. One thing about dreaming that I find most interesting is the coexistance of some kind of relativistic dream time with an actual awareness of time. For instance, you can set your alarm for 7 a.m. and wake up at 6:59 a.m. each morning because your body just knows when your alarm is about ready to go off. That indicates that some biological clock in you is keeping time with the real time of the waking world. However, on that same night that you wake up at 6:59 right before your alarm, you can have a dream in ten minutes that spans a whole day, and really feels to you like an entire day in duration. So that indicates that there is some sense of time inside of you that isn't in conjunction with real time at all, but rather is molding to fit your thoughts. How can a person have a consistent time clock and also inwardly distorted time without getting confused at all? How do we keep these different experiences of time- subjective and somewhat objective (as objective as can be in this relativistic age) separate? And also, fascinating to me, how do we have a better sense of time when we are sleeping than when we are awake? My perception of time when I am wake is never accurate to the minute after eight hours of not looking at a clock the way my sleeping internal clock is.
I know the physicist view time as a kind of accidental side effect of a kind of accidental entropy, but I think it is so interesting that everything in the phyisical world from purely physical processes like rock weathering to very high-order biological processes like sleeping and knowing when an alarm is set for are all so tied up in the regularity of time.

Another thing that interests me about sleep in a very personal way is hypnogogia. I never used to have hypnogogic phenomena, but one of my best friends growing up was narcoleptic, so I heard enough from her about sleep paralysis and hynogogic hallucinations that when they started happening to me at the end of my senior year in high school, I knew what was happening and it made the ordeal a little less frightening. Before any kind of hallucinations, I experienced the sleep paralysis. It started out just like feeling that waking up involved clawing my way out of a deep well. It was probably a delayed product of four high school years of lack of sleep, and I know I was profoundly exhausted by the middle of senior year, but it was so weird and sudden. Waking up suddenly became a difficult process. My alarm would go off, and my mind would wake up and hearing the alarm and be aware of the world around me, but I would be unable to open my eyes or move for several seconds (the length of paralysis has even increased in the past few years). I would just lay there knowing I was awake but being unable to move or open my eyes or anything. Over the years incidences of this grew more frequent and more severe. Now it happens to me often, and it is up to a minute or two before I can move. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night because I'm sleeping on something wrong, but I literally cannot get my body to move, so I eventually give up and go back to sleep. It's really scary sometimes. Especially if I am in a place with people around me, because I can hear their conversations and feel their motions but I can't get my body to respond. It is like... well, being paralyzed. I don't really like it, but I am also at the same time really fascinated with it. I want to learn more about it.
I usually get sleep paralysis when I am waking up, but there have been a few times when I've been really tired that I've gotten it upon waking up.

Recently, in the past year, I have also started getting a few hypnogogic hallucinations. For instance, a few weeks ago as I was waking up, I felt some guy grab my thigh. This wasn' t just a sensation in a dream either. This was an actual physical boy that I saw grab my thigh while I was awake. Of course there was no boy there, and when I tried to fight back it was useless. Today, I was struggling to get up from a nap when I heard, dinstinctly, outside of me and not in my dream, my friend saying my name. I thought she was in the room with me, so I battled the sleep paralysis to open my eyes and turn over, but she wasn't there.

I wonder if when I am older and out of college and actually getting a decent amount of sleep these effects will end. They didn't come out in me until I had been getting an inadequate amount of sleep for sustained periods of time. So maybe they wil go away with the reverse. I don't know. And at the moment I have nothing of philosophical interest to say about them except that they are really fascinating. It is kind of the opposite of the random noise generated by my mind when my body is awake but my mind is asleeep. In these instances, my mind is awake but my body is asleep.

school is destroying my creativity and curiosity

I believe that for people that think too much in general, school is pretty much a damper on excess creativity. For instance, reading for school has always gotten in the way of my actual reading. Now what I am noticiing is that with my mind all occupied with organic chemistry and neuroscience etc etc in the quantities they feed it to me, there's not room for anything else, even speculation about those topics.

Example: in neuroscience we are learning about the visual system. In high school, that would have generated a lot of interesting anatomical and philosophical questions in my mind. Now, I am so overwhelmed with just the data fed to me that I don't find myself extrapolating off of it mentally at all. I don't think beyond becuase it's alreadfy hard enough to swallow most of what there is in front of me.

Also, in high school I thought about philosophy and theoretical physics literally like al the time. Now I barely ever think about either because my mind is so cluttered with cyclohexane conformations and convolutions of multidimensional probability distributions of functions of random variables. Those things are interesting too, but given that they have been discovered and fairly thoroughly exhausted, I really don't think about anything original ever.

It's one frustrating thing about school here. I only have so much mental capacity, and school takes up all of it. There's no room left over for creativity or original questions. There's not even room enough for everything I have to know for school. For days on end, I think of nothing intellectually interesting or unique. I am becoming boring or something.

It's really quite tragic. Maybe I should read another Brian Greene book or something in my loads of spare time.