notes-science-neuro-wakingUp

i notice that sometimes when i am sleeping, it seems like i just happen to wake up for a few seconds, not thinking much, and then there is a salient noise. I have a hypothesis: it is actually the salient noise that woke me up. At least some of the time when i am asleep, i am actually processing information as when awake, but this is not being recorded by memory (perhaps it is actually in parallel with another, dreaming or deep sleepish thinking, thought-process, or perhaps those are on pause and i am just lying there). But when there is a stimulus that wakes me up, i still have the short-term memory of the last few seconds, which then gets encoded into LTM.

i.e. although it seems like i woke up by myself and just happened to hear a noise immediately afterwards, what actually happened was that i was woken up by the noise and wouldn't have remembered the previous few seconds except for that.