Agent,
Please don't worry, your experience before falling asleep does not mean that you are crazy.
You might have also noticed that you occasionally "jump", or feel as if you suddenly have lost your balance, just as you are falling asleep. This happens to me nearly every other night and appears to be quite common in people.
I occasionally have a much worse experience, one that I've "suffered" with my entire life. As I'm falling asleep, my mind sometimes remains awake while my body becomes paralyzed. I invariably panic when I sense it is happening. I fight to regain control. Sometimes I tell myself, "If only I can move a finger, then the control will spread to the rest of my body." It requires all of my concentration to agonizingly regain control of my body. Once I do regain control, I'm usually hesitant to go back to sleep because it usually happens several times in the same night. My wife has long known that when I make any noise at all, or when my body shakes, that she's to immediately waken me.
I used to suspect that this problem stemmed from my unhappy childhood. My abusive father would often wake me with a punch or a kick. I learned to sleep with "one eye open" as a child, and as a result I had problems sleeping, and with sleep-walking, for a number of years afterwards.
From what I've read on the subject, I now think that both my problem and the more common problem of loss of equilibrium, results merely from some of our normal functions turning down, or going off-line for the night. My problem appears to be that my systems go off-line in the wrong order.
Sleep makes for a fascinating subject. I remember a Chinese friend once told me that when he was in the Red Army, they were occasionally made to march all night. He said that some of the soldiers could actually sleep while marching. I thought that was pretty cool.
Michael
