Sleep Deprivation

Everyone says, don't they, that in the first few months after birth you won't get any sleep. I was absolutely dreading this as I love bed and am an eight-hours-a-night kind of woman.
The strange thing is that I have found it quite easy surviving on two to three or at most four hours a nights sleep for the past ten weeks. At the beginning everything was a bit of a blur, but after a while you simply adapt.
There are some casualties. My short term memory doesn't seem to exist anymore. I cannot remember any small thing. I have to write everything down. I forget appointments and faces, and which child was on which breast at the last feed. I live in a haze of present. I also live in a strange mental world where dreaming and waking merge. At the very beginning, in the first weeks after the birth, I would drift in and out of sleep and hold conversations in which I would say things like, "Make sure the animals are off the ark". That half dream/half wake state has never really gone away. Images frequently waft into my mind - the oil rigs off the West African coast for example - they drift accross my inner eye like clouds. I think, 'what are they doing here? what is that?' and then they drift off again.
In the last week, this has improved tremendously mainly because my babies have been sleeping from seven pm until three am without a break (I know, AMAZING) before going back to sleep. I am now far more rested than I have been in weeks. And yet the feeling of my mind segueing in and out of sleep even when I am waking, remains.
This evening I had dinner with a friend. I told him that I wished I'd had a vaginal birth, so that I could experience that ship-in-a-bottle feeling. He told me that ships in a bottle get there because the maker pulls up the rigging once they are in. I didn't know that so I said, 'gosh, that's amazing'. And then I said, 'so how do they get the geese in the bottle?' And he said, 'pardon'. And I said, 'the geese, how do they get in the bottle?' He looked really puzzled, and then my mind jolted to, and I realised I'd just been assailled by one of those half asleep, far too tired, exhausted persons' image (though goose in a bottle? where did I get that from?).
I haven't found the sleep deprivation so bad really. Normally, I cannot function without my sleep. But this sleeplessness is sleep with a purpose. I am loosing sleep to feed. At the centre of my exhaustion are my daughters little bodies pressed against mine on my night time sofa, drinking milk. However tired I get, or overwhelmed, they remain still, at the heart of it. My sweet daughters.