People often imagine danger creeping in when they stay awake too long, the nodding head, the heavy eyes, the drift into sleep they try to fight off. What they don’t expect is a version of sleep that arrives without warning, sometimes without their eyes even closing. Doctors call it microsleep: a brief involuntary shutdown of the brain lasting from a single second to about 30. Most people don’t realise it’s happened until they jolt awake, re-read the same sentence, or drift across a lane while driving. Sometimes it’s even stranger, you blink, and in that split second there’s a whole dream, a scene, a story arc that plays out as if you slipped into a parallel universe and returned in the space of a blink. Microsleep is generally defined as a short, uncontrolled episode in which the br

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