ELI5: Why does having general anesthesia feel like you blink and you're in the recovery room when normal sleep feels like time passed?

No one really knows. Seriously we do not understand how it works. An anaesthetised unconscious state is not like sleep at all but more like a coma, though the exact details of what happens remain a mystery so far. Obviously the parts of the brain that are responsible for creating a sense of time having passed when we sleep are also prevented from working or prevented from recording it for a while.

Explain Like I`m Five: good questions, best answers.