more literal when tired??

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I used to take things very literally as a child....but I don't anymore. However when I'm really tired I go back to taking things literally to a ridiculous extent (at least I did this last week when I was sleep deprived). In my last class a guest lecturer said "okay now everybody shut your eyes I'm going to talk about legislation" and a couple people laughed. I closed my eyes and waited for further instructions .....until he continued with the lecture and I surreptitiously glanced around and realized everyone had their eyes open! That's only one example....kept happening to me this past week. Anyone else?

Yes, very much so. A lot of things tend to get more severe when I am tired.

I lose all kinds of communication function when I'm tired. Palilalia gets worse, I get actual echolalia, I tend to rely on memorized phrases that sound kind of appropriate and topical but sometimes makes no sense, get very literal.

It was yet one more reason I try to get enough sleep all the time.

this is also true for me.
i assume my brain is just too tired to "apply" the secondarily gathered knowledge over a lifetime about idioms and hidden meanings and just goes back to "normal" mode.
something else also happens when i get tired, which amuses my husband to a great deal. i start to replace words with words in my mother tongue and only realize from his grin that i must have said something silly again.

Absolutely. I get much worse when tired.

When I get tired, I tend to jumble up loved ones names along with some other issues. Very embarrassing, common mix ups are calling my Mother my bf's name and vice versa, when really tired I have almost called one of them the cats name. Does anyone else have this happen to them?

if I'm tired I seem to type in lists and whatever comes to my mind and I can not modify it very much.

Lists, as in, this format I'm writing in now. I can not write paragraphs. Or long sentences very well.

I'm not tired right now, but this is much easier to type in. I wanted to show an example.

If I type in long sentences it's just this huge stream of thought, again, without modification.

Today I'm not tired and in a very good frame of mind I noticed that I could respond better to people. I could say things like "By the way" before I said something, when normally I could not do that.

When typing and tired / stressed I get things mixed up.

Yes, tiredness makes it harder to hide your 'basic' self -it becomes more of an effort to try and maintain appearances.
Exhaustion can hit me like cycling into a wall, so thinking & speaking gets harder, even slurring my words, so it's harder to not take things literally when i've got other things that are taking up more energy and focus than usual.

Being tired is bad for me. Everything gets worse. I always try to get lots of sleep.

I do tend to become very literal when tired, my creativity also goes though the roof when tired, which is why do most of my creating in the middle of the night.

When I'm tired or stressed, I lose the ability to talk to people "normally"--I take everything literally and my word choices make it sound like I'm reading from a textbook... My brain has no extra energy to remember that, in social situations, words go beyond their dictionary definitions--or to remember that most people won't know what I'm talking about if I start comparing everything to biological mechanisms.