asleep at the wheel?

Last week knocked me out quite well. So little sleep, so much work... so many worries... Today I just closed my eyes on the sofa, next to my powerbook reading a book to me and next thing I knew it is four hours later, the book seemed to have closed itself...
Not many emails have been coming onto my mailbox lately, maybe because I have not replied to so many... why would anybody write me if I do not reply?
The mail application filters out junk and spam, so I checked up on that folder just to find an old email from a bank, reminding me in a typically edgeless tone that my statement was now available online... (a week or so ago...)
I managed to log myself into the secure area where they were hiding the statement from me, just as I had requested, originally with the intention to maybe save another tree...
I was expecting a positive balance on the card... yet what I found looked more like a bloody crime scene. I had obviously assumed that the account was in good standing for a while, had not paid and now there was a huge number there, and many little red numbers. The tone of voice here was not quite as edgeless, more of a sharp one, like broken glass... finance charges, increases of rates, all the things seem to have happened at the same time... so weird.
I felt a bit like the man in this British commercial I saw just this past friday.
The first scene is the face of a calm man in greenish light, asleep, the voiceover is calm: "This man, will die in his sleep tonight. He is warm, comfortable, surrounded by his loved ones." (Does not sound too bad, does it?)... then the camera zooms away and we see that the man is indeed surrounded by his family and warm and comfortable, but only because he is in a speeding car on a highway. The greenish light was coming from the car's instruments...
Okay, it was not quite as bad... but it was still very odd to "wake up" to something of a slightly negative surprise...
Oh and one more odd observation. The chapter of the book was almost finished when I woke up. Not completely finished though... so I must have woken up and turned off the reading. I returned to the point in the book which I remembered from the moment before I fell asleep... Now what was read to me appeared completely new, as if I were hearing it for the first time... only now and then, every 15 minutes or so, was a sentence that was completely familiar, absolutely clear and just somehow seemed to make sense in the context now created by the minutes and minutes I must have missed because I was asleep.
I know I am jumping around here, but I recently read about a study in which overly tired men in Germany were tested in a driving simulator. They were observed as they fell asleep for just a second or two. The dangerous "second sleep"... The men would then be asked how long they perceived to be asleep. Some were not sure if they had been asleep at all. One of the men thought that he had fallen asleep for about two seconds, had been asleep at the simulator wheel for a full 45 minutes... Now imagine he had been the pilot of, let's say, the Staten Island Ferry...
Today's experiences somehow reminded me that I sometimes ask myself how awake I am when I am convinced that I am awake. There are some days, some weeks, some years even that appear to have taken place as a chain of small, aware events, connected by whole passages of sleepwalked life...
How much of what I have written here is actually based on anything that I can truly say that I fully experienced?... Hmm... the warmth of the powerbook on my lap is telling me that I am awake... the smooth keys under my fingertips are suggesting the same... but... hmm... now I lost the thought... ; )