To sleep, perchance to dream
Jul. 22nd, 2012 09:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stephbgI'd like to talk about sleep. Those who can, do. Those who can't, blog.
I've felt particularly unwell for quite a few weeks now, and I've noticed the increase of one of my more unusual symptoms: audio hallucinations. Sleep has been particularly poor, and I've tried adjusting my agomelatine to compensate. It still does a good job of putting me to sleep, but I can't stay asleep for more than 3 or 4 hours at a stretch, and I think the strain has been showing. My concentration in particular has suffered, and when that goes it is impossible to work.
I've been hearing things. While it's true this has included human voices at times, they haven't been "Voices", if you know what I mean. They don't talk to me and tell me to do things. It's more like snatches from a radio being tuned. At first I used to refer to these things as audio hallucinations, but I've come to think of them more as a kind of mild audio flashback - fragments of memory resurfacing out of context, but without any particular emotional baggage.
The most annoying of these are the alert sounds: phones and doorbells and knocks at the door. The sound of running feet very close to the house. Rarely (fortunately) the sound of breaking glass. These are harder to dismiss because they *might* be real. The others are much weirder and by that measure I'm much less likely to react. If I hear a man's voice directly behind my right ear say "...but the eggs are good" I can safely ignore that as a resurfaced memory of some sort, recorded and played back in high definition, spontaneously, and at random.
I think the increase in these events is related to my insomnia, and specifically my lack of dreaming. I think I might be dreaming when I'm awake, that my brain is trying to process all its memories and make some kind of sense of them. But since I'm not asleep long enough to do that properly at night, my brain sneaks in a bit of attempted dream processing during the day. Since I am awake I don't get the benefit of the narratives invented by the subconscious to give these fragments much sense.
A couple of times in the last few days I've attempted chemical solace at night. Last night it was amitriptyline with the added bonus of pain relief. Unfortunately it let me sleep most of today, and left me feeling flat. It also make me very puffy. And hungry. Blerg. I don't like that stuff.
And now I'm much to tired to write more, but I wanted to get at least some of this down. I'll need to talk to my shrink about it so it helps to try and organise my thoughts a little. A very little.
Damnit, this is the sort of thing I loved talking to Mikey about :-(
I've felt particularly unwell for quite a few weeks now, and I've noticed the increase of one of my more unusual symptoms: audio hallucinations. Sleep has been particularly poor, and I've tried adjusting my agomelatine to compensate. It still does a good job of putting me to sleep, but I can't stay asleep for more than 3 or 4 hours at a stretch, and I think the strain has been showing. My concentration in particular has suffered, and when that goes it is impossible to work.
I've been hearing things. While it's true this has included human voices at times, they haven't been "Voices", if you know what I mean. They don't talk to me and tell me to do things. It's more like snatches from a radio being tuned. At first I used to refer to these things as audio hallucinations, but I've come to think of them more as a kind of mild audio flashback - fragments of memory resurfacing out of context, but without any particular emotional baggage.
The most annoying of these are the alert sounds: phones and doorbells and knocks at the door. The sound of running feet very close to the house. Rarely (fortunately) the sound of breaking glass. These are harder to dismiss because they *might* be real. The others are much weirder and by that measure I'm much less likely to react. If I hear a man's voice directly behind my right ear say "...but the eggs are good" I can safely ignore that as a resurfaced memory of some sort, recorded and played back in high definition, spontaneously, and at random.
I think the increase in these events is related to my insomnia, and specifically my lack of dreaming. I think I might be dreaming when I'm awake, that my brain is trying to process all its memories and make some kind of sense of them. But since I'm not asleep long enough to do that properly at night, my brain sneaks in a bit of attempted dream processing during the day. Since I am awake I don't get the benefit of the narratives invented by the subconscious to give these fragments much sense.
A couple of times in the last few days I've attempted chemical solace at night. Last night it was amitriptyline with the added bonus of pain relief. Unfortunately it let me sleep most of today, and left me feeling flat. It also make me very puffy. And hungry. Blerg. I don't like that stuff.
And now I'm much to tired to write more, but I wanted to get at least some of this down. I'll need to talk to my shrink about it so it helps to try and organise my thoughts a little. A very little.
Damnit, this is the sort of thing I loved talking to Mikey about :-(
