About seven-eight years ago I was suffering from a sleep disorder which was interfering substantially with my life. I underwent treatment at a sleep center at a hospital in St. Louis. As part of the treatment I spent a night under observation in the hospital. I was placed in a special observation room with about eighteen electrodes connected to my body. I was kept there for most of the next day too, and observed as I attempted to take four short naps according to a schedule.
Prior to this study I was given a programmed interviewed. There were a lot of routine questions about how long it typically took me to fall asleep, how often I took naps, etc.
Then the interviewer went into a special series of questions, and prefaced them by saying that they might seem bizarre but they should not concern me. They did seem weird, as they all concerned phenomena I had never experienced that I could recall. I was assured, however, that they were extremely common experiences. Some people have them once in a great while or only once that they remember. Other people have them all the time for prolonged periods in their lives. While they all seemed crazy as hell to me, they are not, generally, considered signs of mental illness.
I was asked, for instance, if I ever see people at the foot of my bed as I drift off to sleep, or shortly after I awaken.
After this interview I talked to some of my coworkers at the government office where I was then employed. Some of them said they had such experiences quite frequently, and took them as a matter of course as part of the normal experience of falling asleep. One man talked about the dark figures who walk from one side of his room to another. Another man told about the voice which calls his name. It never says anything else, just: “Lou…Lou… Lou”.
I’m a lawyer. I once represented a disability claimant who had severe mental illness. One of his less severe problems was that he saw faceless dark people in his bedroom at night. This in itself need not be a symptom of a serious maladjustment. His problem, though, was that as he was mentally ill, he would accept these people as genuine when he saw them, become starled into complete wakefulness, and would remain terrified and be unable to fall asleep for a long time. Sometimes it got to be a vicious cycle; he’d become tired, see the men, wake completely, then become tired, see the men…until he became so exhausted that he had no “choice” but to sleep despite the figures which terrified him.
That you did not feel moved to discuss this experience with your wife immediately suggests to me that you were not in a fully-conscious state when you “saw” what you did; dream-like experiences are dealt with using a dream-like logic.
As for the sleep study I mentioned:
The next day I was asked about my sleep habits during the night. I remembered my experience quite vividly. I knew that I had been awake for roughly an hour and a half in the night, and was able to tell the approximate time that I awoke and that I fell asleep again. I also recalled that I had awoken briefly one other time, and had seen a new attendant who had come on duty during the night come into my room to adjust some equipment. As for the naps, I knew perfectly well that I had failed to sleep in each attempt.
In fact, I didn’t even come close. I had been awake for two prolonged periods, not one, and they added up to nearly four hours. What’s more, I had been awake briefly–sometimes for just a second or two-- 62 times. This was the essential feature of my disorder; that I awoke spontaneously throughout the night, destroying any chance of experiencing an ordinary sleep cycle. As for the naps, I was out like a light during two of them. And I didn’t have a clue that any of it had happened.
Most people wake several times during the night (say 3-5 times), and have no memory of it the next day. The realm of sleep, and the states we enter before and after, are mysterious stuff. All kinds of things happen to us, and we are likely to forget them later. When we do remember them, there is a substantial chance that we do not recall the experiences accurately. This helps account for the cranks one hears of from time to time who insist that they go to bed each night, but they have not actually fallen asleep for years. (There is a clinical term for the condition a person suffers from if they haven’t slept in years; it’s called being dead).
Summing up: what happened to you probably isn’t all that unusual or serious, and you very possibly don’t remember what it was actually like as well as you think you do.
