Published on 12, July, 2020
I suffer from the dual evil of nightmares and insomnia and need help.
For example, today I woke at 4am from a nightmare and I cannot fall asleep (insomnia). I am also afraid to go back to sleep because in the past I have had nightmares following nightmares when I fall asleep after a short break.
With inadequate sleep I get up tired. With nightmarish sleep I get up tired.
I don't have sleeping tablets at home as a precaution. Because in my recent past I've attempted suicide by overdosing with tablets.
So I sit in bed. Either reading , worrying or on the internet.
Any Help or advice is much appreciated!
Another problem I have that's related to insomnia, is falling asleep during the daytime.
This can happen on buses, trains or most often at home in the early evening.
An incident that's happened several times. Is that I lie down on the bed around 5pm. Then when I wake up. I have no idea where I am or what's happened and I'm in a state of panic. Last week I woke up around 6:30 ( I could see the time on a large clock). I was lying on the bed with my daytime clothes on. It was light and I had no idea if it was morning or evening. I was certain that I'd slept all night with my clothes on. It was only after i switched on the TV. I realised it was still evening and I'd only slept for an hour!!!
I often wake up disoriented , also never quite sure what day it is, this morning I woke thinking I had a couple of hours before getting ready for work,, I then start thinking through,,so what did I do last night? What was I doing yesterday? I then realise it is in fact Saturday morning. That is a nice thing to suddenly realise as my whole body and mind relaxes, thank goodness for that,
It isn’t so nice waking on a week day thinking it’s a day of the weekend to then realise work is the order of the day.
I do have really vivid dreams, I used to have two main nightmares as a youngster,
One nightmare was of me accelerating down a cylindrical corridor, it was narrowing as I went further along it, the speed just got faster and the further I got the tighter it got. Eventually when I could no longer move forward and the pressure was so intense I couldn’t be squashed any more I would wake suddenly wondering what had happened, several minutes would pass until the nightmare slowly was remembered. So being crushed into an atom at speed,
The other nightmare was more about senses!
I know why the nightmare was vivid as it was a re run of reality, a remembered event played out over and over.
As a toddler my gran became seriously ill, me and my mum went into the old hospital to visit her, the corridors were long and echoey.dark and cold and smelly.
We met other relations waiting to go in and see her, they were all very sad, whispered voices so I couldn’t hear what was being said,
when it was my mum’s time to go in to see my gran I was left with the other relatives, they decided to get a drink from the coffee machine, when they returned the smell of sickly coffee was overwhelming to me, I heard extremely loud footsteps all the time we were in that corridor, Lino floors bare walls, so my senses were being over whelmed with sound smell the coldness the dark shadowy corridors, I was really struggling ,
Then suddenly my mum reappeared crying and shaking,,,her sister my aunt was with her, everyone started crying but I didn’t know why?
I later found out my gran had passed away.
we were not told this, we were not told about the funeral either, it wasn’t something young children told about!
The first dream was long before the hospital dream, something about being accelerated into an ever increasing compressed ball until so small I didn’t exist.
Words and thoughts over the years as to the meanings were often,
Am I
Coming to an end?
shutting down?
life is zooming along and I can’t keep up,?
Am I zooming along so fast I am missing everything?
I also rarely sleep longer than four hours,, although as I age I do sleep longer due to physical fatigue.
These days I suddenly just zonk out, once asleep I cannot be woken easily.
The whole ritual of getting ready for bed/ sleep has always instilled fear in me! I am not tired, why should I lie in bed staring up at the ceiling when I could be doing what I want, everyone is asleep so I could enjoy myself without the constant overwhelming feeling that I am not really there, always felt I was watching it all, never felt truly connected.
just realised how much I have written, a troubled mind and all that, unloading helps in whatever form it takes,
thank you if you managed to keep reading this long,
aspie hugs to all () () () () ()
I've experienced that too. My wonky sleep patterns mess up my sense of time in general, I think; it's not unusual that I lose track of the time of day, what day of the week it is etc. It can also happen if I overload and go into a shut-down; this almost always segues into a deep-sleep, which I can be very hard to rouse from.
I also seem to micro-sleep a lot, which is supposedly common for insomniacs. This can be for only a few seconds at a time, and can be hard to even notice unless there's been an obvious change in my surrounding while I've been "gone" or if someone else notices. It's definitely not the same thing as the spells of dissociation that I get; those also mess with my time perception, but I retain at least some self-awareness, even if not awareness of my surroundings.
Snap! This happens to me too - if I'm doing something that requires attention, I'm 110% awake. Whenever I can drop down from 'alert mode', if I get slightly warm & comfortable, I'm gone.
It's not like normal sleep - it's like blinking - but I wake up hours later. I can then 'blink' again and I lose another few hours. I can then wake up in the middle of the night disoriented in the darkness and blnk again and it's 9am.
Life gets complicated when you lose track of days.