What word best describes the experience of starting something, and ending up, before you know it, far deeper into it than you had ever intended, or far more embroiled, involved, or even having finished or done it irreversibly. An example might be, say, opening a book out of curiosity, and finding yourself, the next thing you know, dumbfounded to have finished the whole book, almost as if it had happened by some driving involuntary osmosis or in a blackout.
Example sentence with blank for desired word: Having opened the tome with the intent of reading only the first paragraph, she found herself, in what seemed like hardly an hour, staring at it's back cover almost as an alcoholic might awaken from a blackout to an empty liquor cabinet, and wondering at the _________ way some deeds are done in life, almost as if they are done to you.
Best Answer
I think mindless or unconscious would fit best in your sentence, but I know what you're talking about. Sometimes you drive somewhere and don't remember how you got there. In AmE we use the phrase "auto-pilot" for this, and it has extended to tasks that one performs seemingly automatically.
As in, "I was so tired on Christmas Eve, I baked ten batches of cookies on auto-pilot."