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Comment by brianbreslin | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only person who wonders how someone could sleep so deeply that they don't notice the train never moved? I'm guessing he was on ambien or something?

It could have been worse, he could have woken up at some town in the middle of the journey.

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> Am I the only person who wonders how someone could sleep so deeply that they don't notice the train never moved?

When I sleep at night, I never wake up due to my house staying in place. Why would it be different on a train?

Fair, but if your house were to move to Glasgow whilst you were asleep, I bet you'd wake up.

Noticing something didn't happen is much harder than noticing something did, particularly when you are sleeping.

My joke, which clearly missed, was about expectation. Not waking up because your house remains still (as you expect it to) is different than sleeping a train you're expecting to, at some point, be moving and undulating. I say this as a person who falls asleep in moving vehicles—and wakes up if they stop for more than a few minutes.

I can't sleep in anything that moves even slightly. I was on a ferry when it was stuck in ice. I had been awake since the morning before, I couldn't sleep on the ferry even immobile due to any vibration.

If I was on a train I'd feel any motion no matter how smooth.

Right, but that just emphasizes the parent comment: if there’s nothing to disturb your sleep, why would you wake up to notice the train isn’t moving.

I fell asleep before take-off in Canada (YYZ) for the UK (LHR) a few months ago. I slept most of the way; it was only through conversation afterwards that I found out there was almost a 3h delay before we even started taxiing.

If you're saying you have awareness while sleeping of something that should happen, and you'll wake up if you don't detect it, I certainly don't share that.

I think one of the main purposes of sleep is that your mind shuts down and you have no clue what happens during that time.

Anything else and it wouldn’t be sleep.

For some reason, your comment reminded me of one time in elementary school. I got some from school around 3:30, felt tired and then went straight to bed. I woke up around 8:00 and started freaking out, thinking that I had woken up at 8AM instead of 8PM (the sun was still out and resembled the sunrise). I rushed to get my stuff ready to leave for school and went downstairs. Saw my dad just sitting there, so I yelled at him that I'm going to be late for school and why didn't he wake me up. He gave me a confused look and said, " I guess you slept well, it's 8PM."

Been there. Switched to 24-hour time (8:30 PM = 2030).

Now I'm only annoyed by the number of devices, applications, and people that don't support 24-hour time. :)

That's not how sleep works at all. Your sleep goes through many different phases and your brain is continually monitoring its surroundings for danger[0]. The reason why you feel like your mind is shut down is because, on a normal night of sleeping in your comfy home, nothing extraordinary happens. Try sleeping in the wild, it will be a whole different experience.

[0] https://www.jneurosci.org/content/early/2022/01/06/JNEUROSCI...

The wild is a very different environment from a train ridden by a dude with years of acclimation to it.

A comfortable train seat or train bed is definitely a place where a tired person can and will ass out. I’ve slept through a plane takeoff and food service and thought 5 minutes passed, only to realize it’d been hours.

> thought 5 minutes passed, only to realize it’d been hours.

When my son was eleven, I took him on a flight from NYC to JNB. He passed out after the dinner service, somewhere near Bermuda. He then complained to me that he couldn't get to sleep... as we were just crossing the coast of Angola. He absolutely refused to believe me that he'd been asleep for about ten hours.

I managed to sleep and snore while watching some music videos on my phone in bed. I could swear that I didn't sleep, but my gf had other opinion. It's also common for me to do midday nap and still hear everything that goes around me.

The article mentions that he had been using the Sleeper train for 15 years, so I imagine he's used to it.

Maybe because it wasn't moving, he slept more deeply than usual?

every night when i sleep, i call the process "shutting down". i do NOT hear or feel anything, my family members have to rage shake me to get me up in the middle of the night if there is an emergency, earthquake or something of that sort. i NEVER hear the alarm clock in the morning or during the night, that means like last month i had to catch a 4 AM flight and i could not guarantee that i would get up at 2am, change and leave so i did the next best thing, i stayed up all night. (this was when i was alone for some reason)

i listen to audiobooks when i am "Falling asleep", been doing that for the last decade, without fail. one time my phone broke and i felt "weird" sleeping without some narrator speaking to me.

the rage shake thing, that is real. funny thing, i can sometimes "hear, like being in a well and looking out kind of feeling, but can't put 2 and 2 together with regards to something is trying to wake me up"...

I was in an earthquake once and only woke up when I hit the floor

funny. i remember falling from the bed and speaking some expletives and jumping back up automatically. no in the moment attention towards what had happened or why

I wonder if this is a result of some kind of sleep paralysis?

dont know.... i have read about sleep paralysis but i cannot remember any of the symptoms.

in our culture, we have the story of the sleep entity which is akin to sleep paralysis in all of its symptoms but i've never felt that.

the "shutting down" thing for me is because in the morning, like most people there is no sense of passage of time but generally no dreams also. its like you wink and boom, 8 hours have passed.

my mum has the lightest sleep on the contrary. we can walk outside their room, on tiptoes and flick a switch and mum is out in 2 seconds. polar opposite.

back many many years ago, i was into the whole lucid dreaming thing and boy that was amazing. then when inception came up, the two connected and it felt quite great but it petered out somehow and i have yet to get that mojo back... sad

I have the same problem. I have become immune to alarm clocks. Sometimes I wake up late, and notice that my alarm never went off, for a time I thought there was some bug with iOS until I realised that I was turning off the alarm in my sleep and not remembering doing so. Other times, I just completely sleep through the alarm.

oooo... i have a suggestion. it is janky but it works but i am too lazy to keep up with this.

it can be a million dollar app idea so saddle up.

>I have become immune to alarm clocks

100% me but i've found a cheat. i have observed i am immune to the alarm "tune" itself and not the loudness of it. my tests revealed if i change the alarm tone without listening to it first, the next morning i do "hear it".

for the app itself, if there was an alarm clock app that does "random tune", that would be it. i remember back in 2010-13 there was this IOS alarm app, sunrise or something. they had that. sadly after going over to android, i have yet to find an alternative.

and yes, i have tried those radio alarm clocks, they just drain the battery and the selection of music is not always suited for waking up so it doesnt matter.

try it just now. put your phone to mute/low audio and randomly select an alarm tune without reading/hearing what it is. you should "hear" it in the morning

You're not alone, but I think we're in the minority. If I were expecting to be moving all night, I'm confident that the stillness would eventually disturb me. I tend to wake up to any unexpected noise or movement.

I get this, but do you wake up due to lack of expected noise or movement?

I'm struggling to understand the mechanics of being disturbed by stillness.

Once you're asleep you're unlikely to be aware the train has moved or stopped. I got the sleeper to Exeter sometimes (not sure it still exists, this is over a decade ago and it wasn't advertised even then). If I fell asleep at paddington I wouldn't wake up when we (didn't) move. Similarly, it got to exeter around 5am but didn't leave until 7ish, you could select when they woke you up: on arrival or 30min before departure. I never woke thinking "we've not moving when we should be"

If you mean the through sleeper to Penzance then yes, that still runs and the down train still seems to be booked to stand for almost an hour at Exeter, but it now departs around 4-ish, so quite a bit earlier. Going the other way it stays in the platform at Paddington for quite a while, so while it's booked to arrive shortly after 5:00, you can stay on until around 7-ish.

One interesting thing I've seen in older timetables (late 70s / early 80s) is that in some intermediate locations (e.g. Carlisle) they apparently did the same thing with through carriages which were then shunted onto/off the main sleeper train in order to let passengers from that station board earlier/sleep longer than would be possible based on the arrival/departure times of the main portion of that train.

I've slept on the train plenty of times.

Once you get used to the journey I honestly don't know how, but you often wake up just before you stop. Fortunately I've not missed my stop when sober.

I'm sure the first few journeys would be harder to sleep through, but once you get used to it, it would be weird to not fall asleep if you plan it as rest time.

I just don't think I could fall asleep in Glasgow though...

I was able to do this on Amtrak on a particularly hell commute. Get on train, get seat, zonk out. Wake up a stop or 2 before mine. Felt like some kind of super power.

Having traveled overnight on trains several times, I can confirm that I would regularly wake up when the train stopped at a station. But this was probably because the train's state _changed_ from moving to stopped. In this case, since the train presumably never even started, I can understand why the passenger didn't wake up.

Doesn’t seem odd to me; I’ve slept through customs stops and other events on sleeper trains in the past. I’ve fallen asleep in busy hotel lobbies and often fall asleep on planes before takeoff.

I would at least check that the train is indeed leaving before going to sleep. Even more on a day when there were disruptions. It is at least important to be able to hear any announcements.

It's pretty normal to have a few beers before boarding that train. You sleep like the dead.

I've slept through aeroplane take-offs. Landings normally wake me up with a jolt though.

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