
Relaxing Sleepy Science
Why You Wake Up Feeling Like You_re in the Wrong Reality
That unsettling feeling upon waking—that you're in the wrong reality, that the world is a dream, or that you're watching yourself from outside—is more common than you think. Known as depersonalization and derealization, this state is defined by the Mayo Clinic as a "persistent or recurrent feeling of being detached from your body, or that your surroundings are not real" [citation:1]. Research shows that sleep deprivation itself can fuel these dissociative states by fragmenting the mind, causing the brain to process the world as if in a movie or a dream [citation:5][citation:10]. For some, this is a temp...






