Deep sleep paralysis

    I've heard of sleep paralysis before.  It's where your brain wakes up before your body does.  Somehow the mental block that keeps you from moving and walking around while you dream hasn't switched off yet.  You're fully concious, but you can't move.  Most of my friends who have experienced it say that it's very frightening.  It takes several seconds for the body to wake up, and during that time they lay there with their eyes open staring at the ceiling, fighting down panic because they seem to be paralyzed.  What I experienced sounds similar but it was much deeper.
    My mind woke up, but it was as if that was all that happened.  I couldn't feel my body or open my eyes.  I couldn't even remember who I was, or that I was supposed to have a body.  I didn't panic, because I didn't realize that there was anything missing to panic about.  The only way I can describe it is to say that I was like a speck of consciousness floating in an endless black void.  Like some kind of distilation of Descarte's famous statement, "I think, therefore I am."  I was unaware of anything beyond my own existence.
    I wonder if I would have eventually started to worry if I'd had enough time to think about it.  Or would I have been content to just drift through the nothingness without memories or thoughts, just awareness?  But the rest of me was slowly waking up.  The first thing I became aware of was my body.  I was laying on my back in bed with a blanket over me.  That's right I had a body, didn't I?  I didn't try to move, but I don't think I could have at that point.  The physical sensations I received from my arms and legs were faint and distant, as if they weren't really mine.
    Realizing I had eyes, I opened them and looked up at the ceiling.  The ceiling was familiar, because this was my room, and I was laying in my bed.  With that realization came the memories, and I remembered who I was.  It didn't come as a sudden revelation, just as if a door had quietly been opened in my mind and I was now free to enter it and see the memories within.
    As this was all happening the feeling was returning to the rest of my body.  I lifted my arm slowly until the covers fell away and I looked at it.  Yes, it was my hand, right where it should be.  Putting my arm back down I flexed my fingers and toes experimentally, as if they might not have been mine.  In another moment the strange unfamiliarity with my own body faded and I was fully awake.
    I keep thinking back to that moment just after waking.  Was I myself, when I was nothing but a point of consciousness aware of nothing but my own existence?  Did I have a personality when I didn't know who or even what I was?  At the very least I was self-aware.  Although everything else seemed strange and unfamiliar at first as I came awake and became aware of it, at no point did I feel like that core awareness at the center was anything other than myself.