I do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and a common submission technique is to cut off blood flow to the brain (known as a blood choke).
I've lost consciousness twice after being put into a blood choke. The experience of regaining consciousness is visceral. For those that haven't experienced it, it's very much like a turning on a computer.
Initially, your brain does not (or cannot) process input like vision, sound, touch, etc. Slowly, over about 30-60 seconds, you begin to see and hear but they don't make any sense. You've completely lost the context of who and where you are. Then you begin to recognize colors and shapes, sounds of voices, etc. Eventually, you see and hear everything but still haven't built a concept of the context. Lastly, your brain seems to begin making sense of all the inputs and you regain full conscious awareness.
If you think it's just like waking up from a dream or from a nap, you're wrong. It's a completely different experience, one that's so profound that I distinctly remember the entire episode even years later (and I have poor memory recall generally).
I've had the same, but in the opposite direction -- and then back again -- from hypoglycemia (low blood sugar). Over a much longer time period (several hours). Craziest thing I have ever experienced.
Basically, when you have hypoglycemia, you lose "fine" things first, and you sort of lose things in order, from "fine" (picking things up, balancing, seeing small details) towards "coarse" (talking, walking) and then of course to very "coarse" things, like being able to wake up/see.
And the physical symptoms are exactly mirrored by the mental symptoms. "fine" mental things are like the ability to formulate a complex thought with a lot of abstraction: do a math problem, talk about the future or the past, etc. "Coarser things" are like being able to think verbally or interpret the basic meaning of things -- like, what is that thing over there called? Then, you lose extremely "course" things, like being able to reason at all about what is going on in the world around you.
Oddly enough, the last thing that goes is emotion. Emotion is the baseline of how every piece of context is categorized. Things feel good or they feel bad at a level far below anything resembling what they are. At a level below speaking, having distinct thoughts about distinct objects or people, having any sense of time, place, or meaning. Emotion is always there.
It really is impossible to articulate, because words are a complete fiction.
I wish everyone could go through that, because it really makes you realize the fiction of your own "self" as a real thing.
> Things feel good or they feel bad at a level far below anything resembling what they are.
This primal good-or-bad feeling is known as Vedana in classical Buddhism. On an at-home meditation retreat two months ago I had begun to see this arise in every interaction with almost everything. So much so that someone set off a firecracker outside my house (pretty normal in my neighbourhood but at an unexpected time) and I first noted that something unpleasant had happened, then noted that my eyes had flinched, then heard the sound, then recognised the sound as a firecracker. (I was in the shower at the time, wide awake.) The first glimmer of almost every experience was this vedana.
Emotion seems to be a form of super-intelligence or pre-intelligence. Every time I worry about the rate at which we are supposedly approaching "artificial intelligence", I ask myself how close we are to being able to synthesize artificial emotion. Seems like a comfortable 1000 years, if not much much more.
I slept once on the mats. I literally remember feeling like I was in a fuzzy and comfortable dream and waking up to my partner shaking me and asking if I am alright. I blurted out something like "What are we doing?" and I was wondering why my partner was sitting next to me and where I was and what was going on. But not in a panicked or concerned way. Like some parts of my brain knew what was happening. But the thinking me was trying to put together all the sub-conscious streams again and get them routed correctly.
Turns out his cross collar choke was tighter than I thought. It was not unpleasant and I had a mild buzzy/headache-y feel for the rest of the day. It all felt a little dreamy and is one of the strongest memories I have had in recent years. Definitely something I remember clearly.
Also: if anyone is in the Denver area we have mats at our office :)
I once woke up in the high school bathroom, laying on the floor. I was alone. I have no idea how I got there, what happened before, and how long the thing had happened. It seemed unlikely that you could be in a high school bathroom THAT LONG without someone else showing up.
It's not happened since. A one-time event. The confusion I woke up with so profound and complete and slow... I think about it often. I think about how the brain, and its consciousness, can have a bug or a crash.
I don't tend to have a headache afterwards, but your description matches up to my experience of coming around after fainting. I tend to feel fuzzy and dreamlike and it takes a few seconds to work out what's going on.
I once crashed while snowboarding and lost consciousness.
When I woke up when the ski patrol started talking to me I did not have a profound experience like you, it was simply like waking up a little tired, but I was “there” instantaneously.
Did not remember the falling though, so it must have been quick.
I guess the mechanics of “turning off” matter.
A different scary thought: how can you verify you are still “you” when you go to sleep and wake up tomorrow?
Edit: I also remember when I had surgery and they injected the sleeping drug, I felt my body disappearing as the drug circulated in my bloodstream, and I lost consciousness instantly as it reached my head. It was a weird experience.
I have orthostatic hypotension, which doesn't affect me as much since I've gained weight, and I've lost consciousness from standing to quickly up, but sometimes it doesn't all go away. I black out, a moment later I am somewhere, I don't know who I am or where I am, a moment later the rest fills in.
The way I understand it as the blood pressure drops your brain stops to function properly but it might still somewhat function. As blood pressure goes back up more parts of the brain resume normal function but the "functional" state of the brain might still be abnormal. The current state is unstable, especially when new functionality starts to come back online and resume normal behavior, and the state of the brain quickly moves from a unstable state to a more stable normal state.
Yup. I have this too and have had similar experiences, but they've only lasted a couple seconds. I wasn't able to get a detailed picture like OP was describing.
I had something similar on nitrous oxide, except that there was this sense that there were parts, like crystals, which were made to slot together and they were hooking back to each other, one by one, and each addition added some kind of functionality. Unfortunately, the whole thing was rather fast -- I come out of general anesthesia like a shot, I am told -- and I was unable to observe more than that.
That sounds like a slow motion version of waking from anesthesia.
Waking from sleep feels very fast, but I've been put under for surgery more than once now, and coming around from surgery doesn't feel like waking up. It feels like something else completely.
Fainting works in reverse for me. Everything becomes harder to understand, sound becomes muffled like in low motion, vision starts to fade until you are in total darkness. And it's not similar at all to fall asleep, it's quite scary.
if you did not have full conscious awareness when regaining first sensations, then what was it that remembers this experience? I'm saying that there was full consciousness already present as you remember everything.
Definitely not the same. I feel when you dream you feel some time has passed. I've lost consciousness a number of times for different reasons and the common feeling is it doesn't feel like any time has passed. One moment I was awake and the very next I'm on the ground, my head hurts and have no idea what is going on.. for the first 30 seconds I wouldn't be able to tell you my name, where I am, what I was doing, etc. Then it all just comes back after a minute or two and you realize what happened.
It's nothing like that. Your memory is wiped out, you don't know who you are, you don't know when you are. It's like you're in an alien world, nothing looks familiar. Your ears are kind of buzzing and ringing, your visual field is fucked up, etc. The last layers of your neural network aren't turned on yet. It's pretty weird.
I think the more interesting point seems to be that the way you appear to wake from dreams is very different from 99.9% of people. For most people, waking from a dream is absolutely nothing like that.
Nope. I've also experienced this (just sort of fell to the floor unconscious and then woke up 10 seconds later). It was like my brain was slowly paging in bits of memory that had been stored out to tape. Like, who I am. Where I am. Why I am there?. When I wake up from most dreams, I have a bit of trouble remembering what's true and what's dream, but I know where I am, who I am, and why I'm there.
Do you regularly wake up extremely groggy and drained? That usually only happens to me if I am awoken mid-REM cycle. Perhaps that's worth investigating for you?
I've lost consciousness twice after being put into a blood choke. The experience of regaining consciousness is visceral. For those that haven't experienced it, it's very much like a turning on a computer.
Initially, your brain does not (or cannot) process input like vision, sound, touch, etc. Slowly, over about 30-60 seconds, you begin to see and hear but they don't make any sense. You've completely lost the context of who and where you are. Then you begin to recognize colors and shapes, sounds of voices, etc. Eventually, you see and hear everything but still haven't built a concept of the context. Lastly, your brain seems to begin making sense of all the inputs and you regain full conscious awareness.
If you think it's just like waking up from a dream or from a nap, you're wrong. It's a completely different experience, one that's so profound that I distinctly remember the entire episode even years later (and I have poor memory recall generally).