"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - unam.

Finally one day at the end of the class, Professor Robinson went "wugga mugga
mugga wugga wugga. . ." and everybody got excited! They were all talking to each other
and discussing, so I figured he'd said something interesting, thank God! I wondered what
it was?
I asked somebody, and they said, "We have to write a theme, and hand it in in
four weeks."
"A theme on what?"
"On what he's been talking about all year."
I was stuck. The only thing that I had heard during that entire term that I could
remember was a moment when there came this upwelling,
"muggawuggastreamofconsciousnessmugga wugga," and phoom! ­­ it sank back into
chaos.
This "stream of consciousness" reminded me of a problem my father had given to
me many years before. He said, "Suppose some Martians were to come down to earth,
and Martians never slept, but instead were perpetually active. Suppose they didn't have
this crazy phenomenon that we have, called sleep. So they ask you the question: 'How
does it feel to go to sleep? What happens when you go to sleep? Do your thoughts
suddenly stop, or do they move less aanndd lleeessss
rraaaaapppppiidddddllllllllyyyyyyyyyyyyyy? How does the mind actually turn off?"
I got interested. Now I had to answer this question: How does the stream of
consciousness end, when you go to sleep?
So every afternoon for the next four weeks I would work on my theme. I would
pull down the shades in my room, turn off the lights, and go to sleep. And I'd watch what
happened, when I went to sleep.
Then at night, I'd go to sleep again, so I had two times each day when I could
make observations ­­ it was very good!
At first I noticed a lot of subsidiary things that had little to do with falling asleep.
I noticed, for instance, that I did a lot of thinking by speaking to myself internally. I could
also imagine things visually.
Then, when I was getting tired, I noticed that I could think of two things at once. I
discovered this when I was talking internally to myself about something, and while I was
doing this, I was idly imagining two ropes connected to the end of my bed, going through
some pulleys, and winding around a turning cylinder, slowly lifting the bed. I wasn't
aware that I was imagining these ropes until I began to worry that one rope would catch
on the other rope, and they wouldn't wind up smoothly. But I said, internally, "Oh, the
tension will take care of that," and this interrupted the first thought I was having, and
made me aware that I was thinking of two things at once.
I also noticed that as you go to sleep the ideas continue, but they become less and
less logically interconnected. You don't notice that they're not logically connected until
you ask yourself, "What made me think of that?" and you try to work your way back, and
often you can't remember what the hell did make you think of that!
So you get every illusion of logical connection, but the actual fact is that the
thoughts become more and more cockeyed until they're completely disjointed, and
beyond that, you fall asleep.
After four weeks of sleeping all the time, I wrote my theme, and explained the
observations I had made. At the end of the theme I pointed out that all of these