I can appreciate your insomniac experiences, but the one I REALLY hate is the one where you’re dead tired, and you’re juuuust about to drift off, when you’re suddenly hit with the sensation that you are NOT, in fact shifting into “SLEEP” mode, but are, instead, about to pass out — to shift into “UNCONSCIOUS” mode — so your autonomic responses kick in, snapping you back wide awake, and it takes another half hour to get relaxed enough to make another run at actually getting the body to shift into “SLEEP” instead of “UNCONSCIOUS”. Of course, with each successive repeat of this experience the psycological disruption becomes greater, requiring more offsetting input to combat the rise of the visceral panic reaction, and that further exacerbates the whole situation making the prospect of getting real sleep all the more remote.
Of course, this can devolve into a descending spiral, because, if you DON’T succeed in getting some real sleep, you’ll just be MORE fatigued the next night, which will make recurrence of these events more probable and more pronounced thus all the more inhibiting sleep, and I don’t want to explore what happens as that descent continues. The bottom line is that persisting with the drive to successfully achieve the actual “SLEEP” mode is paramount in preventing the situation from spiralling out of control.
Or you actually do achieve sleep, and end up dreaming about being awake.
To such a degree of realism, that you swear you were awake.