Do you ever remember falling asleep?

Yes, but for me it’s usually a gradual process, where the waking world fades subtly from my awareness and blends into the “betwixt and between” before sleep and dreams. So I’m often still aware of the room I’m falling asleep in, but also dream elements, without usually realizing what’s real and what’s a dream because my perception is slowly melting from material reality into dream logic.

Yes. It is a rapid process where you “drop off.” I have caught myself doing it.

No, but I have insomnia, so I feel like I’m never fully asleep.

I’m sometimes aware that I’m in that space between being awake and asleep.

Yes, I have been aware. Sometimes I remember what I was hearing at the time I fell asleep, too.

Not really.

No, I can only remember drifting into dream world. It’s hard to describe really. Usually the process of falling asleep is like this: I have a conversation with my own mind. At first I’m very aware of the topic. Then the conversation gradually falls apart. It’s like a casual conversation between friends where someone starts a topic then people gradually talk about something else that strays far away from the initial topic. Then I enter the “small dream world”. This dream world is less structured and is hard to remember once I wake up. If I pass this stage I enter “big dream world”. This is when I start having real dream and act like a normal dreaming person.

Almost never, no. This is why dreams often don’t have “beginnings”. You can remember the end of the dream, but the dream always seems to start randomly in the middle of events.

I have instructed myself to take notes on what happens as I’m falling asleep. From what little I was able to retain it was that small back ground things, like a TV in another room, were still there, or that I was still thinking about something I’d been thinking about, but they just started getting really surreal and weird!

Occasionally. The transition from wake to sleep usually consists of a dreamlike state in which my fixates on a nonsensical thought.

^^^ Good explanation. It’s like a mild acid trip (but I’ve never done acid.)

I become aware of my body growing heavier and stiller and somehow farther away, to the point where I know to move them I’d have to first wake back up; of the view behind my eyelids becoming darker and gaining a sense of depth; and of the sounds I still hear becoming gradually more surreal. It’s at this point that, if I have something in mind, I can usually start to construct what I guess is a lucid dream, or at least arrange different elements that I want to show up in my dreams later that night.

I don’t know that I’m ever aware of a “moment” that I’ve fully fallen asleep, though I guess at some point there is a threshold, some line between waking brainwaves and sleeping one. I certainly don’t remember it.

On nights I’m having a hard time falling asleep I’m not aware of any of this. I’ll just be laying in bed feeling fully awake, and then I’ll wake up some random time later, (maybe I got a full night’s sleep, maybe it’s in the middle of the night), surprised that the time has passed.

Wish I could give you bunches more GA, @Soubresaut.

When I was little, <5, I learned that when I was drifting off to sleep, if I was overwhelmed with a sense of spiraling down, down, down in a black vortex, it meant I’d have a nightmare if I didn’t wake up. One time I tested it and just let myself fall…and had the worst nightmare. I still remember it, too.
I didn’t test it again. I’d wake my self up and start over. Sometimes I had to do it a couple of times.

Aw, thanks!... Quick edit, too. Pretend the “them” in the first sentence is “it”... I changed “limbs” to “body” before hitting submit, and I see now I didn’t catch all the references to them it!

I never even noticed!

The closest I come to being aware of the moment of falling asleep is when I jerk back to wakefulness with a shock as though I had stepped over the edge of the pavement. This seems to happen just as I literally ‘fall’ asleep.

I’m grateful that I never notice it. I close my eyes and then..nothing.