The Fantastic Letters Of Prof Scrub: The hypnopompic state

Dear eager Scrubs,

Good morning. Prof here with another valuable lesson.

Todays tutorial is on a topic that is the bane of my life. It is a condition that seems to affect all of you in my lectures and really gets on my nerve endings.

Often when I'm lecturing on such fascinating subjects such as the Krebs cycle or the stages of cell mitosis, I find many of my pupils in the hypnopompic state. It is very frustrating for a man of my high calibre to have such disrespecting students, and what is even more riling is that many of my students do not even know what this state of sleep is!

The hypnopompic state is a transitional state of semiconsciousness between being asleep and being awake and occurs just before waking from sleep (the hypnagogic state is the same thing but occurs just before dropping off to sleep). People often desribe not being able to move or speak but are fully aware of their surroundings. They may have visual or auditory hallucinations, often quite scary but are unable to vocalise their fear or scream out loud.

Most common folk suffer this bizarre state once or twice in their lifetime but my students seem to undergo this state once or twice a lecture! Let me give you an example...

A young, fair and voluptuous female student of mine turned up late to one of my award winning lectures on synapses and the neuromuscular junction. This already had me agitated to my wits end and as I headed towards the climax of my lecture, I noticed her fast asleep, head on desk. I marched up to her in anger and slammed my fist onto the desk.

She startled and stared straight at me. I asked her what I had been talking about for the last 30 minutes but she was just motionless. I told her she had disturbed my climax and she did not at all seem sorry. She did not say anything. I asked her again, and nothing. No movements, no words, just drooling - this lasted 10 seconds. Typical i thought, waste of my bloody time, sometimes I wonder why I bother with these invalids. Bring back the ruler is what I say...

I think I have developed a treatment for this condtion. For all those students in the hypnopompic state in my lecture - A rude awakening across the face with one of these should snap them out of it: