The nod-off of indeterminate length

The later my younger son's bedtime gets, the later I start my movies these days. He likes being in the public space of our living room, and often does not vacate it until nearly 10 o'clock. That's how I get a lot of late-starting movies and a lot of instances of nodding off while watching them. I maintain my ability to pause the movie if I'm going to really fall asleep, but I tend to have a number of micro sleeps, where I feel like I might have been asleep for 30 seconds. 

In fact, I've discovered when I go back that I have usually only missed about one line of dialogue.

These experiences are quite bizarre in that sense. You know you have mentally disengaged from the movie, but you don't know how long. If you did know how long, though, you might not bother going back to see what you missed.

The example from Thursday night was the 1996 movie Freeway starring Kiefer Sutherland and Reese Witherspoon. There's nothing special about this particular movie in terms of the phenomenon, it's just when I happened to think to write about it. In fact, this movie is so unspecial that I hate to even give it the spotlight of a poster on my blog. But I'm democratic that way. If someone reads this post looking for a recommendation of Freeway, they won't find it. In fact, I found this such an ugly movie -- from both a filmmaking perspective and a moral perspective -- that I decided to give it the rare half-star on Letterboxd. Yuck. (So much for the idea of seeing Witherspoon at her youngest and charmingest.) 

In retrospect, the idea that I would want to go back and watch anything in this movie again, to be sure I didn't miss it, is laughable, unless only to deepen my understanding of how wretched it is. (The movie has a 6.8 on IMDB. I will never understand the world.) But when this was happening most near the beginning of the movie -- a phenomenon I cannot entirely explain, because I should only get more tired as I go -- the verdict was still out on Freeway, so I did rewind 30 seconds to see what I'd missed. (I did ultimately get tired enough later to fall asleep for more than an hour, but I paused when I felt that coming on.)

And only at the very end of those 30 seconds would I finally get about one line of dialogue I had not heard. 

It's a strange phenomenon to be sure. You find yourself entering the fugue state of a waking dream, enough that you've already started populating your dream with characters and locations and a storyline. This occurs for long enough that you know you have not seen or comprehended whatever was playing on the screen in front of you. 

And then when you check back, you determine this period of time was no longer three or four seconds. 

The whole experience of watching a movie too late, elongated infinitesimally by needing to do these short rewinds four or five times in some films, may be starting to have an impact on my life. Because I try to avoid at all costs the whole "I'll just go to sleep and finish the movie tomorrow" thing -- tomorrow, I want to start fresh on something new, especially in the case of garbage like Freeway -- I find myself going to bed close to 2 a.m., and on the rare occasion, much later than that. I can't imagine this is not having some impact on me as I plow through my day during one of the busiest periods I have ever experienced at my job. (Don't get me started on this initiative we're supporting that was rolled out too quickly and replete with too many errors.)

In theory, I've already gotten that sleep, on the couch, during my pause. In reality, we know that chopped up sleep is lesser sleep, and any benefits I reap from sleeping from 11:30 p.m. to 1 a.m. is mitigated by the act of awakening and re-slumbering, plus the inevitable difficulty in getting back to sleep when I do finally retire to my bed.