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I hope you’re feeling better, Dave.

For someone who falls asleep as easily as I do, near-sleep delirium is
actually a not entirely unfamiliar experience. I recall clearly
nodding off in class, vainly trying to fight the tide of alpha-waves
soaking my lobes. The interesting things would happen in response to
stimulus. If, through my fogged aural perception, I heard the far-off
sound of the rest of the class laughing, I would cough up from my
reverie a complementary laugh and smirk … and invent some sort of
completely nonsensical explanation for what everyone was laughing
about. If there was a particularly pregnant pause, I would realize
that the instructor awaited a response from the class, and on several
occasions I barely stopped myself from blurting out completely
grammatical nonsense. (As I jolted suddenly to the level of alertness
necessary to hold back the babbling, I was able to hear the words
echoing around my brain, in that two- or three-second aural buffer. As
you say, Dave, syntax OK, semantics not-so-much. Things like, “The
red-black tree stays balanced because of the carpet on the staircase.”)

The worst of it was the notes I took in this state. On rare occasion,
the uninitialized-memory ramblings would make it, intact, to motor
neurons, and then to ink. Astonishing.