Not really sleep deprived but in a groggy morning state.
I wear contact lenses. The morning time process of putting them on is very similar to the night time process of taking them off. On several occasions I confused these two processes and it always happened in the morning. I basically attempt to remove my contacts even though they’re not in. I take my thumb and index finger and grip my bare eyeball in a gentle pinching motion. i do this multiple times before realizing my mistake. Lol turns out you can touch your bare eye with zero pain or discomfort
I can have trouble sleeping and have to battle fatigue at times. Not long ago I crunched the bumper of my car into the side of the garage because I was too mentally fatigued to drive. Didn’t do a lot of damage, scratched the bumper and did minor damage to the the wall, but something I would have never done if I was properly rested and alert. Mental fatigue is a strange thing, it can make you fail in performing simple tasks you do routinely.
Was in a hotel. Hadn’t slept in a week. Woke up, leaned over to get out of bed. Still asleep, slipped crashed hard into sharp bed table corner. Even asleep, quick reflexes meant I didn’t cave my skull in. Instead, I found myself in a ball on the floor, my arm split open , entire forearm blue black and purple, gushing blood. Still have a scar from it 2 years later.
My favorite time was when I tried to pour myself a bowl of cereal. Got the bowl, milk, and cereal out. Poured the cereal into the milk jug. Put away the milk, cereal, and bowl. Walked away for some reason. Came back and couldn’t find the bowl of cereal I just made. Looked all over for it. Finally gave up and got the milk, bowl, and cereal out to try again. Poured the cereal into the bowl this time. Poured the milk. Cereal is coming out of the milk jug. Suddenly flash back to a few minutes ago when I was picking up spilled cereal off the counter and shoving it into the milk jug because it missed when I tried to pour.
The worst time I was so sleep-deprived that I managed to throw some trash in the toilet and then I peed in the trash can.
Had a bad spout of insomnia mainly due to extremely high stress levels. I was sleeping 1-3 hours max every night for months. I somehow still got the minimum amount of work done but I was a zombie and have basically no recollection of what I did during that time. I ended up having sleep depravation psychosis essentially and when I would sleep and have any thought or dream, I thought it was absolutely real.
Strangest thing I did during that time was probably dropping my kids off at school and leaving them (this was during summer break). That was eye opening for me.
I’m thankfully in a much better place now. Still high stress job and a lot of anxiety that I carry with me home but I’m working on it!
When my son was just a couple months old I was still suffering pretty heavily from sleep deprivation. I don’t think that really passed until he was a year or so old. Here’s some fun ones:
accidentally put his diaper on backwards a handful of times… Which always led to pee everywhere, or worse.
dumped a couple scoops of baby formula into my coffee instead of sugar, a few times
caught a diaper blowout of baby poo with my bare hands because I couldn’t react fast enough to grab a baby wipe instead (in my defense, I had just laundered the bed but he was sitting on it with me and my immediate thought was just “OH god not again”)
Was up for ~24 hours when I decided to drive two hours to go to my parents house. This was a mistake. I had spray water at my face to keep my eyes open to drive. Made it to my dest. without incident. Never again.
LPT: Park your car in a safe spot, start the timer on your phone and close your eyes. Just keep them closed for a length of time that feels like 5 minutes and then open them up again. Check the timer, realize you just took a 30 min nap, and continue driving safely. I’ve done this many times, and I’ve always felt very refreshed afterwards. Also driving suddenly became 64000% easier, which was a nice bonus.
After pulling an all-nighter and working for around 22 hours, I went to the school I was then teaching at. I thought I was doing my usual thing, i.e. sitting at my workstation that was hooked up to a projector und demonstrating something while explaining what I was doing when one of my students interrupted me to tell me that I wasn’t doing anything that made any sense and on top of that I was slurring my words. I asked the other students whether that was true and they reluctantly agreed. I excused myself and went to the toilet where I had a cry, which is extremely unusual for me. After that, I aborted the lesson and went home where I slept for more than 12 hours. Not a good memory.
When I was 18, I flew over to Australia from London via LA, stayed up all day and arranged to meet with some people that is meet on the plane for a beer, all good, having a drink in a pub out at Coogee Bay.
I was sat on a bar stool, closed my eyes, woke up standing next to the pool table having flicked all of the “next game” reservation coins onto the table. A very large Australian guy was saying “I hope you know where all those came from”
My new friend hustled me out of there, thankfully.
Sometimes I like to sprinkle a little cinnamon or nutmeg into the morning coffee grinds before adding water. One day I accidentally added dried garlic flakes instead.
So, while very tired, I managed to find myself at a local coffee shop. I ordered my coffee, went over to the stand where the milk/sugar and stuff is.
What I intended to do next was to get a couple of sugar packets and put them into my coffee, and throw away the paper package, as usual.
What I actually did was, grab two sugar packets, tear them open and dump their contents directly into… the trash. Yep. My brain skipped over the part where this step requires putting the package contents into my coffee.
I stood there for a minute while my brain tried to process what I had just done.
Once my brain caught up, I mentally facepalmed, dropped the now empty packets into the garbage, grabbed my coffee and went to sit down and drink it. I punished myself with drinking black coffee because I was too tired and stupid to deserve my coffee any other way.
I pulled out of my parking lot at work, blinked, and suddenly found myself half way home with no memory of how I got there. I was so freaked out I pulled over to check my car for damage (there wasn’t any). My route home involved a highway and several stop signs and lights at very busy junctions, goodness knows if I stopped for any of them. Drove very carefully the rest of the way home and swore never to drive tired again. I’d just pulled a 14 hour shift, and had a newborn at home so wasn’t getting much sleep to begin with.
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