Can someone explain this experience?

First of all, hi, I am a new member here :)
Now, I had this experience last night, and it might be even the wrong forum but I didn't find any other place to post this... here we go :

During the past few months I have much personal problems , which I wouldn't like to discuss. At about 23:00 last night after bringing it all again in my mind I had a shock and broke down crying really really bad.
A few hours later I'm off to bed.
Now, I don't remember the dream content but this is what happened :
I remember waking up in the middle of the night laughing out really loud (probably because of the dream's content) and everything seemed ridiculously funny. this continued the whole night.

I'm looking for an explanation about these two extremes. I wasn't expecting to either dream nor having this kind of experience.From Crying to the point of actually being "detached" from the environment , to laughing out while I'm sleeping. One thing to make note however is that I did NOT laugh IN the dream but in reality.

I hope you can make sense out this and give me some information. Thank you.

Could just be having a nervous breakdown - you said yourself that things aren't going very well for you in life.

One time a friend of mine was under so much stress that he just sort of snapped. For an entire day, he was scarily jolly, walking with a bounce in his step and just seemed deliriously happy for no apparent reason at all. He was literally...and I mean literally...bouncing off the walls. I interrogated him about what could be happening in his life to make him so happy - his replies were something to the effect of "things couldn't be going any worse" and "I've never felt less religious in my entire life", and yet he was totally enraptured. I was pretty spooked, to tell the truth.

And of course, he was back to normal the next day. This suggests to me that there comes a point that when the stress is too much, the body and mind will try to relieve the stress with random outbursts of laughter and feelings of elation and such.

I suggest you take a breather, so to speak, to assess what's going on in your life in order to better cope with it.

thanks for the response. I'm really feeling what you're saying, when everything comes to an extreme they just naturally begin to slow down.
However I read that when we dream the whole body (except eyes and genitals) is shut down to prevent it from acting out the dream.
So if for some reason this didn't happen that night, can it mean that it somehow affected my brain from functioning as it normally should?

Well, it's kind of hard to say. Sleep paralysis isn't that well understood, and neither, for that matter, is laughter.

I wouldn't say anything too abnormal is going on, though. I mean, I saw a thread recently where people were talking about their experiences with waking up crying. Laughter shouldn't be a whole lot different...

But hey. As long as you aren't getting up and sleepwalking, like sleep paralysis is supposed to prevent, I'd say your brain and body are working just fine.

perhaps with all the difficulty.. the laughter is a way of your body trying to rebalance itself