[phaedrus]

If a person or alarm doesn't wake me up, I often will not wake up naturally. At all. One time I went to bed at midnight on Friday and didn't wake up until Monday morning at 1 am. Waking up for me feels like coming up from being deep under water in a lake. Sometimes the lake is frozen over: when the alarm is going off I get close to enough to waking be aware but get trapped under the "ice" and can't make the transition fully out of sleep.

Conversely I have great difficulty falling asleep before 3 am. My diurnal cycle isn't just late, it is 100% reversed: daylight makes me sleepy and darkness keeps.me awake.

I had a sleep study and they said I do not have narcolepsy because I took 11 minutes to enter REM sleep and the cutoff for diagnosis is 10 minutes. However, they also expect you to "sleep" between 8pm and 4am for the study. Wtf? I'd like to see the doctors who think that constitues a reasonable time for a study try sleeping at mid afternoon, see if they can sleep normally that far outside their cycle times.