An excerpt from Now I Know -
Why We Wake Up With Crusty Eyes
They go by many names — crusties, eye boogers, sleep dust, goop, or sometimes simply “sleep.” But whatever you call it, you’ve experienced this: you wake up in the morning and, in the corner of your eyes, there are shards of a hard, yellowish-white crust hanging out. Why does this happen?
The short version: When we sleep, we don’t blink.
Eye crusties (or whatever you call this stuff) are made up of something called rheum, pronounced like the word “room,” which Wikipedia describes as a “thin mucus naturally discharged from the eyes.” Rheum protects our eyes from dust and whatever other bad stuff would otherwise irritate our eyes — it’s a barrier watch catches the bad stuff before it causes us any problems. Of course, we don’t want specks of dust or whatever floating around our eyes, so we have to get rid of the rheum pretty often. Blinking takes care of this. Blinking moves tears from the outside of the eyes inward, toward our tear ducts. And when that happens, the tears wash the rheum away ever so subtly; unless you’re thinking about it, you probably don’t even notice it happening.
http://nowiknow.com/why-we-wake-up-with-crusty-eyes/
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