Sleep and General Anesthesia Not Similar, Says Study

I don't know about you, but I had a very startling introduction into general anesthesia.  I had four fully impacted wisdom teeth and needed a prompt operation.  In my late teens, this would be my very first operation and the very first time I'd be placed under general anesthesia.

"It's no big deal," I was told.  "You just fall asleep."

But the problem is that when you wake up after being asleep, you have the sensation that you have been asleep.  Waking up from anesthesia was like suddenly having a chunk of my life obliterated.  One second I was sitting comfortably in the operating chair counting backwards and the next I had pain and cotton stuffing my mouth nearly up to my eyeballs with no sense of lost time in between.  Actually, a second is too long of a time span. It was eye blink or perhaps less than that, for me.  For the rest of the world, a couple hours had gone by.

For me, going under anesthesia was NOT like falling asleep.  A study published in the 2010 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine compared general anesthesia and being in a coma. 

A new study published in the October 25 Current Biology showed that the brains of mice switched to sleep mode when given isoflurane.  The part of the brain receiving the most interest was the hypothalamus, which can become quite active when the body is asleep or under anesthesia.  The same neural pathways were fired in sleeping mice as mice under isoflurane.  In this way, anesthesia is like going to sleep, but tell that to the lab mice.  Isoflurane caused neurons in the mouse brains to fire that told the rest of the body to fall asleep fast.

Can you dream when under general anesthesia?  The studies didn't talk about it, but I did some research.  Usually, people don't dream when under anesthesia.  But rarely, people will claim that they did dream.  This may be a result of the confusion one experiences when coming to.  After my anesthesia experience, I thought I did briefly dream of Peter Gabriel leading me down a yellow hallway into a yellow room, but now I wonder if the "dream" was just wishful thinking to try and calm myself because of the pain and nausea I was experiencing. 

Anesthesia like isoflurane is not thought to place people in a REM state, when most dreams occur.  Most folks who claim to have dreams under anesthesia were given ketamine or propofol.  Perhaps that's why I felt so disoriented when I came to (besides the pain, that is) because I was asleep in many respects and yet could not dream.

Image of patient recovering from surgery by Bob J. Galindo for Wikimedia Commons.