A study on consciousness

Some things really intrigue me. For example, whose job is it to tuck the legs into the asshole of a roasting chicken?
More importantly, I'm intrigued by what goes on when you slip/are slipping into unconsciousness.
I pondered this on the train today as The Girl was starting to nod off on my shoulder.
I was thinking about how nice it feels when you're really really tired and you start to fall asleep.
This reminded me of when I was overseas last year and The Girl was still back at home.
Due to the US to Australia time difference, I had to either get up super early to call her or alternatively set my alarm and get up halfway through the night to make the call.
Which wasn't so bad. I mean, I'd set my alarm for 3am, get up, make a coffee and then lay down by the phone and start dialing.
This was usually fine although occasionally I'd have had a really big day of snowboarding and after an hour or two's worth of talking I'd start nodding off.
Usually this was no problem and I'd be roused by The Girl yelling 'Are you asleep!?' down the phone.
On one occasion though, I was doing the talking and then started to nod off.
Now it wasn't like my voice trailed off, oh no. If only that was the case. What actually happened was much more umm... insane.
There we were chatting about something actual and relevant, when ever so slowly I started to fall asleep and my mind failed to tell my mouth that I was asleep and that I'd started dreaming...
What transpired involved me telling a story which went something like this:
"So I was walking out to the other ski lift and then all of a sudden there were heaps of soldiers. They were falling from the sky so I just walked over and started picking them up off the snow. There was thousands of them falling from the sky. Tiny green toy soldiers with parachutes."
Then I was dragged back to reality by The Girl.
"JIMINY!!! Hey!! What the hell are you talking about?"
"Oh, umm... the soldiers... I had the umm... soldiers..."
Then actually coming to:
"What the hell was I just talking about? Was I talking about toy parachute soldiers?"
The Girl was as bewildered as I was.
Weird stuff. I hope I don't usually talk in my sleep. People would be privy to some crazy goings on...
Although when I was on school camp a friend sleeping on the bunk above me declared loudly "No, I'm not the tooth fairy!"
A few days later he went to hospital as his mum realised he'd been bitten by a spider and they had to drain a huge amount of ooze out of his septic hand.
It would seem spider bite dreams are apparently even crazier than cheese dreams. I don't really wanna test that theory though.