Sleep impairments

[AlohaDawg]

I don't have trouble falling asleep or getting up. It's the in-between part that has given me occasional trouble.

I have a friend here in my office about to retire. He's in his 70's. A week or so ago he dreamed he was standing in the way of a careening truck. In his sleep he leaped out of the way of the truck. He broke his hand, suffered minor injuries to various other body parts and hit his head. He's OK.

When I'm 70 I can't imagine what I'll be doing while I'm asleep. I'll need a padded room.

Here are some examples of what I consider to be my sub-conscious losing it's grip on my sub-reality:

1) Despite my age (37 this year) I still have the following dreams with alarming frequency:
 
    A) I show up for a final in either high school or college. I have to          take the final although I have never taken the class. Invariably, the final is either some obscure kind of calculus or a foreign language I've never learned

    B) The good old fashioned naked-in-public. Sometimes not naked but wildly inappropriately clothed. Last night my subconscious decided that my psyche was no longer sufficiently affected by this scenario so it upped the ante. I'll let you all post your theories on that....

2) Frequently I will wake up in the middle of the night with an extreme need to urgently act to save my family. Never is there a clue as to what needs to be done, and what the danger is. Almost always, I'll look around the room and fixate on a shadowy object, often things on the TV stand straight ahead. They become mind-controlling objects and I have to shake myself loose of them. This process can repeat itself 5 times, each time as bad as the last.

3) I have this red mark on the back of my neck. One odd friend of mine casually remarked that it looks like a classic abduction mark. Ever since then, I've joked about that but sometimes I don't feel like I'm joking and when that happens, I feel like I'm crazy.

4) I used to have the worst sleep paralysis. If you've never had this, it is the weirdest.

So, not that I'm serious about aliens or anything but what kind of weird things do yo do when you are sleeping?

[jough]

When I can actually sleep for more than two hours, which is rare, I tend to hurt myself and others due to thrashing about.  I do find the drugs help, but it depresses me to have to sedate myself just to sleep.  So I tend to reserve the meds for when I have an overnight guest.

Also, when I just wake up I tend to be half dreaming and half awake, and will talk to whomever is next to me as if they were part of my dream, often helpfully shouting "Look out!" or some such to them.

I've also been told that there are times in the middle of the night that I talk a little in a foreign language, but it's not any of the languages that I actually DO speak a little.  I didn't believe this until a resourceful young lady recorded me one time.  It sounds eastern european, but then again, it could just be mumbling with really good inflections.

[Asherdan]

I sleep solid, hard and long...let me rephrase.

Earlier life experiences have resulted in me being able to push my self into a solid sleep under most any circumstances.  If I'm having trouble snogging off, I go through a couple of simple mental exercises to help clear the mind and relax.  Dreams to me are almost always fun, when they're vivid enough to pull me into a semi-conscious state I either enjoy the ride or start playing director and interact with whatever is going on.

The only problems sleep and I have are quantity and age.  I'm in 'Dawg's bracket and I spent 16 years of my life either slamming into other people violently or physically preparing to do so.  So occaisionally my slumber is cut short by good old-fashioned joint pain.

I've also been informed I fart copiously and with great intensity of stench in my sleep.  This bothers me not at all.

[AlohaDawg]

I'm told I both fart and snore. These tend not to bother me either, although I have once or twice snored loud enough to wake myself up.

[slink]

I generally sleep a hell of a lot better than I used to, despite, as mentioned briefly in some other thread, the fact that I cycle through narcolepsy and insomnia. Some weeks I can't stop sleeping. Some I can't sleep at all.

It's odd at the moment, as I have just started dreaming again, for the first time in a year or so, or at least, being aware of the dreams. I never have nightmares, or conventional dreams in any way, but they always leave me waking up feeling really fucked up. Usually because it was either the way I want my life to be, or because it was just so weird that I spend the day trying to comprehend where the hell it came from.

I used to have real sleep problems though. I used to sleepwalk, sleep with my eyes open (both of which freaked people out no end) and suffer sleep paralysis. usually I wouldn't call that suffering, but by god it was horrible!

At the moment I'm just in a state of insomnia (not quite but pretty much) where I can get to sleep, and sleep for a long time when I do, but the actual getting to sleep is so diffficult... I have to ba conscious for at least 18 hours to stand a chance of passing out.
I read an interesting New Scientist article about sleep patterns, and the round-the-world-yachtsman who did research on how to get decent catnap sleep. It was showing how if you wake up during REM sleep you will wake up fairly painlessly, but if you wake from deep sleep it take ages to stop feeling groggy. This is what I've been doing the last fortnight now, is waking up from REM sleep and thus waking up halfway through a dream. It has though meant I wake up fairly fast now.

I hate sleep. it always feels like such a waste of time. But I'm too old now to stay up two days straight like I used to regularly.
"Oh look, it's daylight, well, if I stay up I'll be able to get to sleep at midnight..."
I always ended up staying up 'til about 2 whenever I tried it though...
Apparently the natural points at which you feel tired are around 6-8pm as well as 2pm ish. I can vouch for that!


Oh. And I do occasionally wake up at various points of the night with cramp in my leg. Which sucks and tends to involve me half-unconscious rolling around/jumping up, nigh-on in tears, screaming. Worst is when the cramp is in both the shin and calf muscles, and possibly top and bottom of foot, so nothing I do fixes it, or I have to increase the pain on one side to fix the other. Ack. Given the cramp I had driving home earlier, I fear tonight might be such a night. Time to go eat a banana or two!

[Gimpson]

I used to have the worst sleep paralysis. If you've never had this, it is the weirdest.

I've probably had ten to fifteen episodes of SP, most recently a couple of years ago.  I'm convinced that the alien abduction and out-of-body experience phenomena are related to SP, and it's always something that's fascinated me.  I found these researchers who survey folks who have SP, and I've gone to the local med school library to read some of their published results, and it seems that they agree.  

I always wanted to try to relax during a SP episode and experiment with the OBE aspect of the experience, but I always would panic.  The researchers seem to think that whatever causes the experience also kicks the fight-or-flight center of your brain into overdrive, so it seems that trying to relax wouldn't have cut it anyway.

[slink]

I'm convinced that the alien abduction and out-of-body experience phenomena are related to SP, and it's always something that's fascinated me.

I saw a really interesting documentary years ago, which was the first time I could put a name to what was happening to me regarding sleep paralysis, about how alien abductions were probably SP.
It also featured an interesting thing about a Canadian myth of a ghost/witch who visits people in the night and paralyses them, which was being put down to it as well.
The other one it covered was odd sleep walking. There was a guy who, in his sleep, killed his in laws, and woke up in his car covered in blood with no memory of what he had done. A bit scary really.
Given my parents watched me, when I was about 4, walk through the living room at night, and pee in the drinks cupboard in the kitchen, and then later on I'd find myself waking up in odd places, it did make me think about tying myself down or something. Fortunately the really odd sleep behaviour seems to have dissipated with age for me.

[CortJstr]

It always takes me 0.5–1 hour to fall asleep but once I do I'm gone. Concorde used to fly over my house at like 1:15am and once you learn to sleep through that you can sleep through most anything.

My SO will often be in a semi-awake state and convinced that somebody is in the room and that they will see her naked. She's not afraid that they'll rob us or anything, just that she's naked and they'll see her. Then when I tell her she's dreaming she gets really pissed at me for not believing her. More than once she's woken up in the morning furious at me with no idea why.

[arkabee]

sleep paralysis sounds frightening if those pages are any indication as to what it really is like.

i never really give much thought to how i sleep.  my gf fusses at me on occassion because when i go to bed i go to sleep.  my response has been, why are you going to bed if you aren't going to sleep?  this does not amuse her.  i try to make up to her by explaining that i don't always go to sleep right away, some times it might take 5 minutes!  this does not make her any happier, however.

i guess i'm pretty lucky.  that being said, i hate sleep as i hate other addictions.  i hate to go to sleep, but once asleep i hate to get awake.  sometimes i feel as though i am on a 25 hour day or somesuch, because i always seem to be able to stay awake, happily, longer than i should, and thus do not sleep as long as i would want to, and then am tired, but by night time i am awake again, etc.

it is rather interesting to me, though, that i can recall being able to stay awake for longer than necesary periods of time (all nighters) as little as 2 years ago but now i am compleely unable to do so.  24 hours is pretty much my max now.

i do not recall ever having a nightmare about clothing, though.

however, in a pre-100% awake state that i normally have in the mornigns before coffee etc, i have had moments of slight awake terror at the thought that in my groggy state i had not put my ##### on before leaving the house.

[Bozack]

I have a lot of trouble falling asleep, but not as much as I used to. At this point, I've basically worked out something where I sleep about 4 or 5 hours a night during the week, and then crash out on the weekends. My problem is thus: I never really feel tired at night, so I could just stay up until noon or so, when it starts to hit me. Usually I'll be awake at four or so and realize that I have to go to bed.
Also, once I'm out of bed, if I've slept at all, I don't really feel tired, but those first few steps.....christ.

[CortJstr]

My problem is thus: I never really feel tired at night, so I could just stay up until noon or so, when it starts to hit me. Usually I'll be awake at four or so and realize that I have to go to bed.

This is me. If I'm still up at 10 then I won't feel tired again until 5 or 6 am. But I'm always tired as hell when I wake up, regardless of how much I've slept. For a while I worked at a video store and that was great because it encouraged keeping reverse hours. I'd wake up at 3pm to be at work by 4, stay until 1am, then go to bed at like 7am. During this time I saw the Dana Carvey stand-up special on Comedy Central approximately 138 times. PING!

[slink]

my gf fusses at me on occassion because when i go to bed i go to sleep.  my response has been, why are you going to bed if you aren't going to sleep?

Yea. I wish I could do that. I always, like I say, have to wait 'til I am tired enough to sleep, but I still have to spend a good half hour in bed trying to stop my brain from thinking so much that I can sleep. The one thing that helps solve this is if I am stoned, which is pretty much my medication now. It's the one thing that lets me get to sleep, and let's me concentrate on my own thoughts enough to say, work on my novel or music.

24 hours is pretty much my max now.

Yea, like I say, smiilarly. It can take me 18 hours to be tired enough to sleep, if I break through that between 10-midnight slot, but then if I am awake for much more than that, I just start to hallucinate and fall over. And yet a couple of years ago I used to stay up for days on end because I hate to have to sleep. But yes, I hate waking up so much!

[wombat]

 my gf fusses at me on occassion because when i go to bed i go to sleep.  my response has been, why are you going to bed if you aren't going to sleep?  this does not amuse her.  i try to make up to her by explaining that i don't always go to sleep right away, some times it might take 5 minutes!  this does not make her any happier, however.

And she's still your girlfriend?  Hang on to her, because she's obviously a saint.

I actually have less trouble with the falling asleep part than I used to, these days.  I've traded it for not being able to stay asleep, like waking up at 5 am when I don't need to be up till 7 or 8, or waking up for a couple of hours in the middle of the night.  Which is no better than not being able to fall asleep in the first place.

[V-Adore]

I have recently developed a remarkable skill (talent? mutant power?): I can wake up half an hour before class, every weekday, regardless of just when that is. (Also regardless of when the alarm goes off. My typical pattern is "alarm goes off at 7; it gets turned off. Alarm goes off at 7:30; it gets turned off. I wake up at 8:30, throw clothes on, and head off to my 9:00.") I get the feeling there's something wrong with this, but I'm not totally sure how to reverse it.

Perhaps not coincidentally, I have a lot of academic anxiety dreams. The most common is a dream in which I realize, usually around the end of a semester, that I have failed to attend one of the classes I've registered for; the rest of the dream is usually my freaking out about it and trying to find some way, any way, to get credit. ("I bet I can take the final blind! I'll cram! That'll count for something, right?!") The best variation on this was the dream in which I realized, as finals loomed, that I had never bought textbooks and responded to this with remarkable calmness. ("I'll buy them this week and read them before finals. It's fine; I have a decent grasp on class material!")

[andalucia]

Last year I got down to 4ish hours or so of sleep a night, but this year when I find myself still at home any evening, I go to sleep early out of boredom.  I fall asleep with relative ease and usually wake up half an hour to an hour before my alarm goes off.  
Life is efficient and pleasant.