Dr. Matt Walker

Usually the relationship is terminated very quickly.

I'm the only one who gets away with it because I'm a card-carrying sleep scientist.

And even then, yeah, American Airlines sometimes takes umbrage.

So you get these slow rolling eye movements.

and the brainwaves start to sort of slow down again.

But you mentioned something else, and they are called hypnagogic jerks.

And as we're going into this first stage of sleep, I told you that the principal stage in which we dream is rapid eye movement sleep.

It's not exactly true because everyone has had this experience that just as you're drifting off, you start to have these little mini dreams, almost sort of diet or dreams light, L-I-T-E.

And you can almost wake yourself up based on the fracture point of cognition.

And what I mean is you're thinking, okay, so tomorrow I've got to get to the studio.

I'm interviewing that desperately annoying British guy, Matt Walker.

And then there was the elephant in the room with a helicopter wings on its head.

And you almost just think it wakes you up because you think, wait, wait, sorry, excuse me, go back, rewind.

What just happened?

That's the point at which you've transitioned over into what we call the hypnagogic state where you can have these hypnagogic dreams, but you also get these jerks.

We don't fully understand what happens, but what we do understand is that as you're going into sleep, you start to lose different aspects of your sensory perceptual apparatus, not lose in the sense of where did they go and I can't find them, but lose.

the processing of those.

Now, many will remain during sleep.

One of the things that starts to degrade is what we call proprioception.

And you've spoken about this before, which is knowing how your body is sort of positioned in space.