then suddenly i was awake and feared that they will start the procedure with me still conscious! despite the drugged state i started to think of something to tell them that i was awake, that’s when i did the ‘what time is it’ gesture with my both hands. then i heard a voice “it’s 9am. the operation’s finished”.

time did not pass. no dreams. weird

I’m one of those who have a pretty good internal clock. If I need to wake up early, I normally do so shortly before the alarm goes off. And if I wake up in the night, I most often have a pretty good sense of the time even before I check the clock.

Coming out of anesthesia was very different. I had no sense of whether any time had passed or not. If I’d been told that the operation had been postponed and I’d only been out for 30 seconds, I would have accepted it without hesitation.

I’m curious, did the anesthesia mess with your circadian rythms? In other words, can an extended bout under anesthetics cause jetlag? Or do our circadian clocks march on, but are just cut off from the rest of the brain as those highways are shut down during anesthesia?

It’s reviewed here: http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2009/03/igniting_the_flame_of_consciousness.php and here: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16775-consciousness-signature-discovered-spanning-the-brain.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

The real horror stories come from people who don’t react normally to it, who are paralyzed completely but aware of their surroundings and can continue to feel pain. So when they go under the knife its incredibly traumatic. Doesn’t happen very frequently at all but it does happen from what I understand. Really interesting.

I’m one of those who have a pretty good internal clock. If I need to wake up early, I normally do so shortly before the alarm goes off. And if I wake up in the night, I most often have a pretty good sense of the time even before I check the clock.

Coming out of anesthesia was very different. I had no sense of whether any time had passed or not. If I’d been told that the operation had been postponed and I’d only been out for 30 seconds, I would have accepted it without hesitation.

It did indeed seem like a discontinuity.

A few years ago I was anesthetized for more than 8 hours. Waking was very different from waking from sleep. I felt that no time had passed — perhaps due to anesthesia + cooling my blood. It was a strange and wonderful feeling (ecstatic that I was out of surgery).

The perceived jump in time was eerie. Recently I’ve been reading John Locke and his concept of identity. Extrapolating from Locke, the sense of personal identity involves, in part, creating a story of your life which is continuous in space and time. No discontinuities. Anesthesia felt like a discontinuity.

A second really weird thing about waking from surgery. I heard the people in recovery discussing when to take the breathing tube out. They decided on 10 minutes. My mind felt alert, my throat hurt, and I wanted the tube out. When it came out, they watched as I tried to breathe on my own. Although my breath was shallow, I could do it. But then a sudden fear: breathing took extreme focus and conscious attention. I didn’t have it in me. I wanted to relax and rest, not work and breathe. Fortunately, the effort needed to breathe didn’t last long and I was soon breathing automatically.

Anesthesia is a weird thing.