I've been doing a lot of thinking about sleep, especially because I have become increasingly more of a crazy sleeper and/or dreamer. Last night, Karl and I listened to a show on NPR about the fear of sleep as we played Scrabble. They had all kinds of stories from people who, for one reason or another, were afraid to fall asleep. One guy shared about his "disorder" that would cause him to act his dreams out while he was sleeping - a really bad case of sleep-walking. The final straw was when he jumped, not out of, but through a second-story hotel room window in the middle of the night because he was dreaming that he was about to be hit by a missile. How weird are our minds that we can come up with this stuff and we have the potential to actually carry them out in real life and not know it?
For the past several nights in a row, I've had a freak out about something in my sleep. Last night it was that Karl had to get up because he was going to be late. I started firmly tapping on his knee cap and insisting he check the time because he was going to be late to wherever he had to go. He told me he was not going to be late and that I should go back to sleep. I could not believe he was acting so non-chalant about being late. He didn't even care! He reluctantly checked the clock after telling me to be quiet and go back to bed. The time was 3:15am. Sorry babe! I was obviously dreaming, but Karl couldn't get back to sleep for a while after the hoopla. I have only vague recallections of this occurence and only after Karl announced that I will now be sleeping on the couch for my offense.
The night before last I woke Karl up at around the same time because I was convinced that there was a gigantic spider in the bed with us. I'm talking the size of a cat. I stood up on the bed and jumped over Karl's sleeping body and kept telling him very adamantly to get out of bed. He refused. I got so mad at him that he didn't care that there was a huge spider in the bed. He just told me that he couldn't get out of bed and I kept telling him that that's a ridiculous thing to say. Over and over we went back and forth until I woke up and realized that I was probably dreaming. I was still a little perturbed that he just flat out told me he couldn't get out of bed. I calmly climbed back over Karl and checked under the sheets - just to be sure there was indeed no spider cat in our bed - and fell back asleep instantly. I asked him about it the next morning and he vaguely remembers the ordeal, but he thought that it was hilarious that he told me he "couldn't" get out of bed.
Apparently, this kind of stuff happens a lot in our bed at night and it's becoming more frequent. The show we listened to mentioned that people who act out their dreams have a Dopamine deficiency so their bodies aren't able to regulate their sleep cycles. I'm not really sure if that could explain why this has been happening to me almost every night lately, but it's worth looking into I guess. I don't really want to sleep on the couch, and Karl's getting pretty tired of being woken up to me insisting that he get out of bed.
The last time this happened was when Soren was first born. Almost every night for 2 months, I would wake up sometime after having nursed Soren in bed, frantically try to find him in our sheets. Somehow my brain never remembered that I put him back in the co-sleeper after I was done feeding him and I was convinced that he was under our sheets. I felt the same exact panic that any parent would if they thought their baby had suffocated, except I was literally half asleep. Every night Karl would comfort me as I was madly tossing sheets all over the bed repeating "I can't find him...I can't find him!" Karl would ask me if he was in the co-sleeper and, of course, he always was.
Dreams are such a weird thing to me. We have other lives and crazy thoughts to live out that we would never have in our waking hours. I'm getting a little scared that my dreams aren't staying put in dreamland and although I know (or hope) this happens to everyone once in a while, my "episodes" are becoming more and more frequent. I guess I've got some research to do...
1 comment:
I had a friend who had night terrors: He'd wake up screaming and screaming but didn't know why. Once he walked out into his family's living room, picked up the phone, and started walking back to his room. His dad told him that he'd take any calls that came in the middle of the night, so my friend sat the phone down and went back to bed and didn't remember any of it.
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