Parasomnia In the Playground

[The Vorpal Tribble]

Huh, finally found a word for it.

I keep seeing so many folks with insomnia I thought I'd start a thread for the reverse. Those of us who have no problem sleeping. It's the waking up!

I personally don't sleep overmuch, though I never have problems falling asleep anyplace, anytime or anywhere. I actually sleep much like a cat. Sleep a few hours, wake a few hours, repeat.

Parasomnia seems to deal a good bit with dreams and comes in all sorts, and I seem to have most of them. I've had everything from night terrors to sleep walking to something called Slow Wave Sleep where you are half way in between.

Where I deviate from the standard parasomnian however is the fact that I am intensely restful after heavy episodes of these. It's when I go nights in which I don't recall dreams that I am fatigued the next morning.

In fact, they actually aid my writing. A good bit of my inspiration and insights come while I'm asleep. Answers to questions I wonder about get answers, I can see things clearly, and really the whole thing seems to be kind of freeing.

My 'night terrors' I actually began to fought since I got into adolescence. I may have a week of the most violent, macabre, psychotic dreams ever... but I turn into something that battles them, ripping apart the nightmarish creatures and rescuing or saving someone or someone close to me.

I don't suffer from almost all the standard causes, such as youth or age (parasomnia only seeming to effect the very young or old), depression, bouts of insomnia, or indigestion. I also never take medication, even for headaches.

Not even sure what the purpose of this post is exactly except I've always held a fascination with dreams because of this phenomena.

[Icewalker]

I've never had terribly interesting sleep phenomena myself, except due to waking up early in my circadian cycle I almost never remember my dreams (and extremely rarely do I have bad ones). However I am very interested in the neuroscience behind sleep and the bits of it, and that's quite an interesting sleep and dream pattern.

Also, those sound like really epic dreams. Particularly lucid?

[The Vorpal Tribble]

Also, those sound like really epic dreams. Particularly lucid?
Y'know those shows where the person is thinking they are awake, but then something happens and they realize they are still asleep and then wake up only to find they are still asleep? Yeah, I get those.

They are so lucid there are many times I can't remember if a thing happened or if I dreamt it (excluding the crazy things).

My dreams seem to be more often 'adventures' than good or bad dreams, having elements of both. But even the terrible dreams I usually work into a story, so I never much mind them. In fact, if I wake up too soon I'll usually pick up where it left off the next night. Sometimes I'll journey to a place that I went to as a child and met others who said they were asleep, they will recognize me and we'll exchange stories about our lives since we last met.

[Mr. Mud]

The...

...Exact same thing happens too me tribbs. And I have sleep patterns sort of like you when time permits. Maybe it's related to that? No idea. Also, my night terrors are few and far between, but when I get one, I'll usually have them for a week or so.

Odd.

[golentan]

Umm. I have both para and insomnia.

I can sometimes be unable to sleep for days, but when I sleep I tend to oversleep unless forced awake. Even then, I set my alarm half an hour earlier than I need to so I can take the 30 minutes I need to begin processing.

[Mando Knight]

Being awake is actually only a lapse in being asleep. :smalltongue:

...I have a terrible time getting up in the morning. On weekends, I'll get up at the crack of noon. Or 2. But then I stay up late because I'm not sleepy enough yet.

Also, anti-depressants make me nearly narcoleptic. Thus, I get prescription stimulants that keep me wired for hours and seriously suppress my ability to gauge my hunger. Luckily, I developed the instinct "eat around noon and 5-6 pm, even if I'm not that hungry" a decade before I started either drug, so I don't need to worry about accidentally starving...

[Kallisti]

Parasomnia? They have a word for people like me? Hmmmm...

What you describe sounds a lot like me, except that my dreams tend to be so weird I can't even make stories out of them. At least I can figure out I dreamed it...

I get pretty damn nasty night terrors sometimes. Usually for a week or a week and a half. I tend to have pretty dark dreams. Maybe that's why I write horror so much?

[Innis Cabal]

Umm. I have both para and insomnia.

I can sometimes be unable to sleep for days, but when I sleep I tend to oversleep unless forced awake. Even then, I set my alarm half an hour earlier than I need to so I can take the 30 minutes I need to begin processing.

This is probably not parasomnia at all, but your body catching up on sleep due to insomnia.

[golentan]

This is probably not parasomnia at all, but your body catching up on sleep due to insomnia.

Nope. Even on the lucky occasions when I get to sleep easily it's the case. 10 hours minimum/16 often without interference isn't normal, even for catching up.

So no.

[Serpentine]

YES! Absolutely! You sound just like me, VT, right down to the adventure/horror dreams.

Most of the time, I take a long time to get to sleep. I've been getting better recently - 10-20 minutes fairly regularly - but my default is still 30-90 minutes.
Then once I am asleep, it's nearly always very hard to get myself up. No matter how long I sleep (left to my own devices, 2pm for 10+ hours is not unusual) I still feel too tired to get up. I also often have extra trouble getting up because... well, I want to finish my dream. I'll spend an extra hour or so in bed just trying to get back to or recapture a particularly entertaining dream...

Mah sleepings are brokeded :smallsigh:

[arguskos]

I have the lengthy sleeping issue, the difficulty waking up issue, and all that. However, I do not dream anymore. I haven't in almost 10 years. I take about 2 hours to GET to sleep, spend about 10 asleep, and the rest of my day is a useless mess usually, since I'm exhausted for most of it. :smallsigh: Yaaaaaay. Go me.

[Innis Cabal]

I have the lengthy sleeping issue, the difficulty waking up issue, and all that. However, I do not dream anymore. I haven't in almost 10 years. I take about 2 hours to GET to sleep, spend about 10 asleep, and the rest of my day is a useless mess usually, since I'm exhausted for most of it. :smallsigh: Yaaaaaay. Go me.

You have. You just don't remember them. Anything that enters REM sleep dreams.

[Serpentine]

Are you in smarty-pants mode, Innis? :tongue:

[Innis Cabal]

No :smalltongue: Trying to clear up that misconception. Every living creature that enters REM sleep dreams...retention is a completly different thing. While dreams may not fully be understood, they seem to (as a theory) be a way of archiving data. As said, its a theory, last I knew.

[Serpentine]

The last three posts of yours I've read from you are one-line factoids :smalltongue:

[Optimystik]

Weird, I've noticed something similar but didn't even think it was anything special.

[Demonia]

who cares it's realy interesting!

[Lappy9000]

While I have been quite blessed to have never had any sleeping conditions, I do tend to force myself awake on nights like this one where applied creativity is needed in vast amounts. Mostly 'cause I can't write until around nine o' clock at night. It's worth noting that most of my homebrew posts are made in the early AM hours...

[Syka]

I don't think I have parasomnia, but I certainly have weird sleeping patterns. I can sleep 10 or so hours at night, and then take a 2 hour nap during the day. While I can function on 7 hours, I can't get less than that, and lately I've been prefering 9-10, up to 11. Even after that much, I still wake tired. (I can, technically, function on less than 7, but medically it is a very, very bad idea since my abscence seizures are sleep deprivation triggered and we've found 6.5 or less hours to be the threshhold.)

But yeah, I sleep a lot. This bugs Oz sometimes, lol. Probably because he has an inability to nap during the day no matter how tired he is.

[the geekish one]

Y'know those shows where the person is thinking they are awake, but then something happens and they realize they are still asleep and then wake up only to find they are still asleep? Yeah, I get those.

They are so lucid there are many times I can't remember if a thing happened or if I dreamt it (excluding the crazy things).

My dreams seem to be more often 'adventures' than good or bad dreams, having elements of both. But even the terrible dreams I usually work into a story, so I never much mind them. In fact, if I wake up too soon I'll usually pick up where it left off the next night. Sometimes I'll journey to a place that I went to as a child and met others who said they were asleep, they will recognize me and we'll exchange stories about our lives since we last met.

I've had dreams where I wake up, shower, get dressed, go to school, etc. Then I go home hang around for a while, and go back to sleep. Then I'll wake up (for real) and think it's the next day.

Other than that nothing very interesting.

[AshDesert]

I'll normally go to sleep between 10 and 10:30, and then sleep until noon-2 when it's my choice. No matter what time I get up at, I'm very tired and groggy. I almost always take a nap at 3-4 in the afternoon, even if I wake up at 2:30. Every so often when I wake up in the morning on the weekends I'll take a nap at about 10.

My dreams (when I remember them) are very intense, and I often think I'm awake while I'm dreaming, no matter how ridiculously unrealistic the dream is. I've also once dreamt that I woke up, ate breakfast/lunch thing, went through my whole day, then went to sleep again, and then woke up in real life. I thought it was Sunday until I went on my computer and had a major does not compute moment.

[Kallisti]

I hate the "going through your day" dreams. I think the worst bit is when you actually go through the day, you keep half-expecting things to happen the way they did in the dream and they don't, and you get deja vu no matter how familiar your surroundings are. Plus, getting woken up for school on what I'm convinced is Saturday is a pretty poor way to start my Friday.

[AshDesert]

I hate the "going through your day" dreams. I think the worst bit is when you actually go through the day, you keep half-expecting things to happen the way they did in the dream and they don't, and you get deja vu no matter how familiar your surroundings are. Plus, getting woken up for school on what I'm convinced is Saturday is a pretty poor way to start my Friday.

Well, I've only had a "going through your day" dream once, and it was on Friday-Saturday night, so I pretty much woke up thinking it was Sunday, and it was Saturday, so that was pretty nice:smallamused:.