a) Cool :) and I definitely agree with the crazy part, I think I remember stumbling on this by chance and not quite being able to sensibly reconcile/accept what was going on in my head (neurologically) lol ("well that's broken engineering, hmph")

b) Thanks for the info - really interesting! By "video call that got stuck" I presume you mean everything just jumped forward, do you remember how you integrated/perceived that? I guess you weren't surprised because there isn't really a "THAT wasn't supposed to happen" intrinsic response for this as it's a behind-the-curtain area there's no need for the brain to anticipate :P

Just read through https://pmj.bmj.com/content/80/944/328... wow you really fell a dozen miles through a can opener there :( I can only imagine trying to sleep dealing with all *that* D: aaagh. (Actually no I can't)

For what it's worth I'd *definitely* read through a long-form run-through of what happened (and it's quite possible that a few doctors might as well given the sparse section on neurological impact in the linked paper), although my curiosity is checked somewhat by empathy. I guess it's a tradeoff between deferring recall/contemplation of stronger impressions and catching the most long-tail/incidental memory fragments at the edges of the mental map - the kind of thing for which there's no wrong decision.

I'm only aware of one other clinically-"interesting" experience involving severe lack of sleep, caused by consuming slightly too much acid: https://www.stilldrinking.org/essays.php (this is the whole article list, everything prefixed with "The Episode" is listed halfway down the page; ctrl+click ftw?). At one point this person describes a moment at an early stage of the everything-falls-apart where he woke up then experienced falling asleep compressed into the span of ~a second while being consciously aware of the process (sounds uncomfortable :v). A bit of a mildly-orthogonal reference but potentially vaguely interesting.

Your mentioning about the TV picture being frozen, that you kept hearing the conversation, and having memories be out of sync and having hallucinations inside them, are also fascinating as well. Generally there is a fundamental separation between focus vs not-focus (trance? or vaguely in that direction) and a mutual distinction between awareness (central point) and daydreaming (drifting). (Might even say "daydreaming" is "map" and "awareness" is "reduce" a la MapReduce.)

It sounds like you were sufficiently exhausted that the crosstalk or general cohesion/interconnection that keeps things (subconsciously?) in lock-step had broken down, so when your vision got poked and woke back up again you were still able to discern that the TV picture had been frozen - thinking about it, it might reasonably be argued that the vision system being asleep is akin to daydreaming (where there is not particularly strong focus, recall, memory, etc), so when it woke up the logical answer (especially factoring in exhaustion) should have been "...wait, I don't know". But it seems the information about the picture being frozen was still being "recorded" in working memory (focus), kinda violating a theoretical distinction between not-focus and focus - or alternatively illustrating an interesting nuance between the frozenness being controlled by one system that was shut down, and awareness and memorization that this was what was going on being run by something else that was still running. The intuitive expectation would be that background crosstalk/interconnection would keep both of those systems activated.

Hmm, followup question that I should have asked before running off with theories: when you say you knew the picture was frozen, presumably you weren't focusing on that, right? I'm guessing you were maybe in some sort of half-asleep "I'm just staring in the direction of the TV and the picture isn't moving and that's perfectly normal" until you went to get up...?

Memories being integrated out of sync sounds like a bit of a delirium thing :(

I've occasionally had moments where I've wondered if something actually happened or if my brain just made it up on the spot. I think the same mechanism sometimes kicks in when I'm dreaming and narrates "and all this happened" by injecting the narration as a false memory of a sequence of things having happened and summary impressions of that. I've very occasionally been recalling the bits and fragments of dreams that make it to the next day and gone "...I... don't think that's exactly how that played out..." and come up with this vague theory of recursion. (I'm trying to figure what shape hole to put "hallucinations inside memories" through and this is all I can think of.)

Wait, do you maybe mean that the memories contained a sort of dynamic, changing, unresolved (ie unstable) component that your brain represented by expressing it visually and tying it into the memory itself? Hmm, that's almost a kind of perceptive synaesthesia!

Thanks again for the reply :)