After experiencing this yet again, I’ve decided to post about it. Over the past few years, I’ve developed an occasional problem where I wake up, usually just a few hours after I’ve gone to bed, and spend the next hour or so having “fever dreams.” What I mean is that I’m about perfectly halfway between being awake and being asleep, and have constant racing thoughts that go together in a dreamlike manner - completely illogical but narrative, with dialogue and characters and events and so on - while still tossing and turning and being acutely aware that I’m not asleep and am not getting any rest.
I call these “fever dreams” because I’ve previously only experienced this while trying to sleep with a fever, usually zonked out on medicine. It’s quite annoying, as it’s a guaranteed loss of at least a good hour of sleep.
I spent a lot of last winter hanging out with my friends working the Sleep Diagnostic center at the hospital. They’d put sensors on nearly all parts of the ‘sleeper’ and put him to bed. With night-viewing cameras, we’d watch them sleep and it was crazy what their perceptions were. Some claimed to have tossed and turned all night when they slept like rocks. Others claimed to have had hours long dreams when their brain waves indicated 2 or 3 dreams in REM sleep lasting only minutes at a time. Some took almost all night to get to REM sleep while others fell into it right away. And the scary ones held their breaths for almost a minute at a time every few minutes, all 8 hours of the study. These people perceived they slept fitfully and awoke feeling as if they had gotten no real rest. They’d fall asleep at work and their families claimed they snored terribly.
Cyn, RN
