Published on 12, July, 2020
20M, I'm 5'41 (165 cm), I weigh 146,8 pounds (66,6 Kg), I'm Asian, I don't smoke nor drink and I haven't been taking any medicines on a regular basis.
I have been having trouble sleeping lately. I always wake up in the middle of the night. And always after I wake up, my heart starts beating so fast, I don't know who I am or where I am and I don't remember anything. Once my mom came into my room and woke me up accidentally. Even though I saw her face, I didn't recognize her. For some reason I thought she might attack me, so I freaked out. That was the worst one that I have ever had. I haven't told my mom about all of this, because I don't want to worry her.
I thought that I might have just been watching too many scary movies. But I've been also thinking about the fact that my head was hit once about 3 years ago as a possible reason for all of that. I was in school and playing with two other boys at that time.They lifted me up and dropped me accidentally. As a result, my head got hit on a locker. I blacked out after that. The next thing I remembered was that I was sitting on my chair with my hand covering the back of my head. When I looked around, I couldn't recognize anyone. I was shivering. And when I looked down, there were so many toilet papers with blood on them. I didnt know what's happening, until I realized I was holding one piece of toilet paper in my hand. That evening, my mom took me to the hospital, But the doctor said that there's nothing wrong with my head. They simply took care of my wound and let me go.
Even though that I've been having those "wake up from sleep not remembering anything" for too long already, I didn't pay much attention to it. Until now, it becomes so serious.
As mentioned by others - I'd go to my GP to start with. Mention the head injury. Make some notes about your symptoms & concerns before you go just to be sure you don't forget when you're there. if you're fobbed off & it continues go back. Pestering can often be the only way to get the health care you need.
It's worth chatting with your GP about it, to make sure there are no signs anything is going on that needs looking into.
But it's also worth keeping in mind that sometimes your brain can do all sorts of odd (and even alarming) things and it isn't necessarily an indication of anything being seriously wrong so I would try not to panic.
Especially related to sleep and in the few moments when you go from sleeping to waking, your brain can kind of get odd glitches, that's why you get things like sleep paralysis-which is part of a group of disorders (parasomnias) that can occur when falling asleep and waking or during various sleep phases. The fact that you only get this when you wake up might suggest you could be suffering from some sort of parasomnia.
I get hallucinations when I wake up in the middle of the night sometimes (it's like sleep paralysis without the paralysis) and I've noticed they have become much more frequent and more vivid recently (almost every night, I think from a combination of not sleeping well and various medication I've been trying out for my migraines). Everyone is more stressed than usual at the moment, and stress almost always affects your sleep-quality, quantity, sleep patterns etc-which increases the chance of parasomnias. They can sometimes be frightening, but they're pretty benign and sorting out your sleep hygiene can often mitigate these sorts of things so it happens less (I am sure when I am sleeping better I won't be getting my hallucinations so often!).
Edited to add: something to help you sleep would possibly not help here if you do have some sort of parasomnia! Medications can increase the chance you get parasomnias (as exampled by my migraine medication-it's drowsy medication that's meant to also help you sleep better and it's just made mine worse!)
In the short term your doctor may be willing to prescribe medication such as Zopiclone which will help with sleep. Long term less so, it could be that you just need to create a better sleeping routine.