After arriving back home last night from the airport at round 2am, and then needing to jump right into my first meeting this morning, I have been in a bit of a fugue state. It’s not that I haven’t been able to function, but that at any given moment today when nothing is going on, I fall asleep — sometimes for just a few seconds — and then wake back up again as needed.
The apotheosis was my subway ride from a meeting on 59th Street this afternoon. On the local R train, I feel into what felt like a deep and restful sleep between every two subway stops — between 59th St/5th Avenue and 57th/7th Avenue, then again before every subsequent stop: 49th Street, Times Square, 34th Street, 28th Street 23rd Street, 14th Street/Union Square. Finally, at 8th Street I woke up from a deep slumber that had apparently occurred in the three or four minutes since we had stopped at Union Square, sprang out the doors, and went on to my meeting at NYU.
All in all, a bit of a crazy day, and I am sure I will sleep very soundly tonight.
But what I want to know is this: How did my subconscious mind handle all of this? At what level was there cognitive processing? Clearly it couldn’t have been a very high level, or my subconscious would just have let me sleep for the entire journey from 59th Street down to 8th Street.