The other day it happened when I was looking at some brain tumor cells in a microscope: All of the sudden it hit me how crazy it was what I was doing. Here are these ridiculously amazing self-replicating lipid bags, and they are growing in a plastic flask because I am soaking them in nutrients (which includes fetal cow serum)! And they came from another preson's brain 20 years ago. I am a human, looking at cancer cells from a dead human, and all the other humans pitch in a little bit so I can try to figure out to stop them from killing humans.
Speaking of "waking up", it remembers me of the book "the toaster project" by Thomas Thwaites (link for the lazy of youes http://www.thetoasterproject.org/ ). Personally it often falls on me about near-raw food. As an early human I'd never had tried to squash those little hard and untasty grains of wheat to mix them up with water and bake it: I couldn't even invent bread, what am I good for at all?
We look at the human eye and think: "No way. How could that have come from stepwise iteration!?" But when you look at the Earth and see just plants, rocks, dirt, etc., the International Space Station just doesn't seem to be a possible outcome for any conceivable path for even a very smart apes to take.
I think about this when we buy produce and the sign casually claims that the banana I'm buying is from Costa Rica. WTF? When I lived in Michigan and would buy fresh (never frozen) wild caught Mahi, it would dawn on me that the fish I just bought was likely swimming off the coast of Hawaii less than 3 days ago. That's fucking nuts. Just dropped my weekly quotient of "f" bombs in one comment. Thanks.