I think I have. Last night I had a hell of a time trying to get to sleep. I would start going into sleep paralysis, but I wasn’t losing consciousness. Then something would click in my head and I’d snap out of my sleep, my heart racing and my breathing heavy. My body also hurt, like it had tried to shut itself off for the night and was groaning back to life. This happened like 5 times before I finally dozed off. It’s also happened other times recently.
WTF?
Not quite as bad as you describe, but there’ve certainly been times where I was walking-into-walls, drop-down-dead exhausted, and as I’ve been about to fall asleep, I’ve latched (mentally) onto some stressful thought and BANG :eek: (in this context that’s the wide-awake smiley). It’s one of the reasons I routinely go to sleep with the TV on (set to a timer) or an iPod earbud in one ear, playing a podcast - gives the brain something to focus on other than Bad Stuff.
I’ve seen sleep terrors - both of my kids went through bouts of them, but that’s quite different from what you describe. They would be sound asleep, and wake up screaming and seemingly terrified or enraged, but were utterly unreachable. This led to us dragging Dweezil out of a hotel at 2 AM once, to drive him around in the car, lest the hotel get complaints and call the police to arrest us for what sounded like a murder in progress.
Anyway - are you experiencing any unusual stresses lately? That’d certainly contribute to what you describe. I highly recommend the iPod treatment in any case.
Hmm. I’ve woken with sleep paralysis. Not a very nice feeling, thinking that you’re awake but not being able to move a muscle, you feel like you can’t breath though I’m pretty sure you’re still breathing normally. I’ve also had some dreams that have had me struggling awake, gasping for air, cowering in a little ball in the middle of the bed under the covers, moaning. The one that sticks out was a short scene involving me walking home from school and seeing an Alsatian dog driving a white station wagon. As he drove past he stared straight at me, looking into my soul. I don’t know why, but that dream fucked me up. Normally I enjoy nightmares in the same way I like a good horror movie, but not that one.
::::shudder:::: +1 on that one.
I had my first (of very few, thankfully) episodes of that when I was about 11. I’d awakened early (this was summertime), then went back to sleep. When I woke again about 10 AM, this happened and it was the single most terrifying thing I’d ever had happen. I finally managed to make a noise and that broke the spell and I was “fine”… of course “fine” meant I stumbled out into the kitchen and scared the crap out of my mother by bursting into hysterical sobbing.
For some reason (hah) I was terrified of falling asleep again and was up until something like 3 the next night. After that, my mother called the doc for a few days’ worth of sedatives for me.
It’s been nearly 40 years and nothing else has frightened me that badly until a recent vasovagal incident. With any luck, it’ll be another 40 years and I’ll be dead first.
I’ve had mild cases every now and then.
More often, I’ll be on the verge of sleep and I start to dream about something, then I fall – and jerk myself awake. I think that’s pretty common.
In the Eighties I had a period of serious depression related to thyroid and parathyroid tumors. Before they were diagnosed I was prescribed an antidepressant called Sinequan.
It caused sleep paralysis and hynogogic hallucinations. I told my therapist and she suggested that perhaps I had been executed as a witch in a former life. Um.
Scariest few weeks I’ve ever had. Terrified to go to sleep for all the bogies in the dark and the physical sensation of being sat upon by a very large gnome.
Green ghouls outside my window whispering, “Let us in.” Pretty Jungian stuff got tapped but good.
I jest but it was truly nothing to take lightly and caused marital and work life problems which took quite a while to resolve.
If you seek help you’ll need someoned who is skilled to sort the tangle out. For me it was discontinuing the medication and having the tumors removed but not until I finally got to the Mayo and they figured it out.
Happens to me all the time. It’s not scary anymore, and I don’t even fit it. It’s more annoying than anything.
My 4.5 year old daughter has been learning about the body in kindergarten lately. She knows what various things do such as the heart, the veins and arteries, the lungs, the brain and so on. She has since become aware that she can feel her heart beating which has led to nights where she claims she can’t sleep because her heart is keeping her awake, poor thing.
That’s actually how my panic attacks started. I was around eight. It’s a horrible feeling.
I’ve never had sleep paralysis but sleep panic hits me pretty often. The worst was the night after I had my baby. I was so exhausted but right as I’d feel myself fading I’d jerk up. It wasn’t the same as the dream state where you feel yourself falling backwards, it was more of a “oh my god I’m going to die if I fall asleep” thing.
I’ve never had any of the hallucinations, and the panic I used to experience could typically be described as mild. It used to be a bit of a scare when I was wide awake, but couldn’t move. You struggle, you try to scream, but you can’t do anything. It would terrify me when I was a small child, because my mother would tell me foolishness, like it was demons or whatever. I later found that sleep paralysis is not abnormal, that there’s no ghost sitting on my chest, and if I just wait a minute, I’ll be able to get up. Since then, the panic has vanished. Sleep paralysis is a nuisance, but no more.
Just a few times, and very mild by comparison. The most memorable was when I fell asleep watching a movie, on the couch, with the remote in my hand. I had a kind of waking dream - I was only asleep a few minutes and couldn’t have had a cycle that would result in normal dreaming - about rats attacking me. I grabbed one of the rats by the tail and threw it. And threw the remote across the room. Luckily I didn’t break anything.
Yip. Made me fear going to sleep for a while. The anxiety was so great I couldn’t stay in bed. Had to wait 72 hours to be able to fall asleep.
I did and it was the most terrifying thing I’ve experienced. It was so real and it wasn’t till I was an adult that I realized what it was.
I was about 7 or 8 and I was sleeping in my parents bed. Sometimes I’d go to bed there and then when they came to bed, someone would take me to my bed.
Something suddenly jarred me wide awake. The bed was moving in an up and down motion like it was breathing and I was stuck there, awake but I couldn’t move. I held my breath to make sure it wasn’t just me breathing and imagining things and it kept moving. I tried to call out to my mom but I couldn’t shout, all I could do was lay there. At one point my body started spasming, I think from the terror. I grew up in a very fundamental christian home and at the time I thought there was a demon in the bed with me, making it move.
After a while, I don’t know how long, it stopped moving and I was able to get up and run out of the room.
All my life I wondered what the fuck that was until just a few years ago I heard about sleep paralysis and waking dreams.
Ever since I’ve been “grown up” (22 or so), I occasionally have dreams where I think I’m awake, lying in bed, my room is exactly as it is normally, except there are things coming out of the walls or a miniature UFO buzzing above my head.
One night I saw an enormous spider directly over my husband’s head. Now I’m not scared of spiders but he is seriously phobic, so I go straight into girl hero mode. I wake him up and say “Leave the room now. Shut the door.” He is so asleep he just does what I tell him without saying anything, and then I switch on the light in order to destroy the monster. That’s when my rational mind goes hey, you’re switching on the light so that you can catch the spider, but that means the light was off, so how did you see it in the first place?
:smack:
That’s when husband walks back in, now thoroughly awake and very confused, and I have to try and figure out an explanation for why I just woke him up and kicked him out of the room, one that does not involve graphic descriptions of imaginary giant spiders on the ceiling just above his nose…
Yes, I have had it and it’s very scary to feel paralyzed. It takes me a few moments to move. I don’t know wht causes it? Luckily I have only had it happen a few times. The last time it happened I was running a fever and had the flu?
I have occasional bouts of waking dreams (mine usually focus on home invaders coming into our bedroom or things flying around the bedroom or burrowing in the bed), sometimes resulting in me sitting straight up in bed or turning on the light to look for the things, and sometimes I have instant adrenaline rushes for no apparent reason (just lying there minding my own business, then my heart just jumps and starts racing), but neither of them bother me too much - it’s just a little brain spasm, I figure, like a muscle spasm.
I have “sleep anxiety” - difficulty falling asleep because I have this anxiety/paralyzing fear that my heart will stop beating or I’ll stop breathing. I’ll be on the cusp of falling asleep, and jerk awake afraid of losing consciousness. I also get this strange epiphany when falling asleep of my own mortality - that my body will be gone one day - and it causes more anxiety. This happens frequently… sounds strange, but anyone who has had it knows what I mean.
Thank goodness for Alprazolam 
My husband once had what I think was a sleep panic. He was between waking and dreaming. I got up from bed to go down the hall and use the bathroom. As I got up, he made a comment, to which I responded, “Kiss my ass.” Apparently, his brain heard a deep male voice say, “Nice ass.” He thought someone had broken into our condo and apparently made the leap that they were raping me down the hall. So he called the cops.
Imagine my surprise when I walked down the hall to find him, stark naked (we both slept without clothes on then), crouching on the other side of the bed with a bat in one hand and the phone in the other, talking to a police dispatcher. It took me about two or three minutes to convince him that he had been dreaming and that no one was in the condo. While he walked around checking things out, I took the phone from him and had to then convince the police that I wasn’t a hostage and that he wasn’t on recreational drugs.
That was a weird, weird night.
I asked my husband if he knew that I sat straight up in bed some nights and turned on the lights to see who was breaking into our house, and he said I was asleep and just imagined it. Thanks, dear. :mad: