I lay down for a nap during the day. I woke up and immediately craved something sweet. I went and ate a marshmallow. It was extraordinarily delicious. I ate another one. Not bad either. It got me thinking. This isn’t the first time this has happened—immediately after sleep, when you haven’t properly woken up yet, or conversely, when you’re falling asleep, sensations become very vivid. Once, as I was falling asleep listening to Physical Graffiti, the instrumental parts seemed to break into pieces and imprint themselves on my consciousness like slabs of sound.
Is the brain not yet properly calibrated upon waking, causing it to perceive sensory signals at the wrong scale?
Or, while the eyes are closed, is it free from visual information and therefore automatically amplifies the other senses?
In any case, this is most likely connected to nighttime, when less information comes in and the body, over the course of evolution, developed the ability to amplify signals in order to detect danger more effectively.
Observation
2005-09-22