A while back I developed my ability to get into a lucid dream state and often had a situation they call "false awakening". This is where you dream that you get out of bed and start your day, but you are really still in a lucid dream. Sometimes it's easy to call BS on a dream and pop into lucidity, but I found it troublesome in the false awakening scenario.
But the point I was going to make wrt the original post is, if this strange quick passage of time happens to you, it might be that you dream that you're laying in bed, awake, when you're really asleep. That's exactly what I've experienced with false awakening.
It takes quite a bit of effort, or at least it took me quite a bit of effort, to regularly get into lucidity. The effort is many times during your regular day you question reality and you do little tests of reality that don't usually work very predictably in the dream world. That habit transfers over to your dreams, and you increase your ability to call BS on a situation where a reality test fails.
That's pretty interesting. Yes, that may be going on.
Here's what happens most times I'm trying to fall asleep (I know, you're not supposed to "try"): I'll lie there for a while, then all of a sudden I'll realize that what I was thinking about made no sense. For example, I was thinking that I was a number, or how some event was represented by a musical phrase. For a while it seems to make perfect sense, then I stop and think: no, that doesn't make sense.
Other times, I'll have what I call a microdream. I'll think that I'm biking to the store with my brother who is brain damaged (I don't have a brother). It's a very short duration thing.
This a pretty clear example of a
hynogogic state, but my guess is that some of these hallucinations, although they seem momentary, last for many minutes.
I have a twenty-five-minute recording of pink noise that I often listen to when napping. At the end of that time, the volume gradually decreases, and then a alarm gradually increases in volume.
When the volume starts to decrease, I invariably think, "Okay, is that decreasing now?" IOW, I'm awake enough to be reasoning.