Feeling tired within a dream

**cece23** · 09-01-2017 03:24 PM

This topic has been mentioned a couple of times in the past without there being any conclusion as to what is happening, but I am wondering if I have the answer..

Ok, so what has happened a few times to me is that I dream I am so sleepy in my dream that my eyes cannot stay open, no matter how hard I keep trying. Yet how can this be as I am asleep and dreaming?

Firstly, in my case I have sleep apnea, which means that I stop breathing in my sleep several times an hour. The brain wakes the sufferer up to start breathing, but one is not aware of this happening. However they say that you don't experience as much deep sleep (ie non REM sleep) in the night (explaining why I so often have to have extra sleep during the day).

So what I think happens is that the body is trying to get some deep sleep but the breathing issues prevents it, so during REM sleep you feel tired because you actually are and dont want all the brain activity of REM sleep.

I am very curious of other people's experiences and whether or not they have sleep apnea or any other sleep disturbances that they know of. I personally dont think these dreams are just the result of daytime tiredness.

**TravisE** · 09-06-2017 12:29 AM

I've had this happen on occasion, but not often. I don't have known sleep apnea or similar issues. In my case, it just seems that I happened to have dreams about being sleepy. Dreams can be about anything that we experience in waking life, including sleep itself, so dreams about this may or may not have anything to do with daytime sleepiness or sleep apnea. They could come about by any number of factors, such as thinking about sleep during the day, or they could just seem to come from nowhere and perhaps mean nothing at all. I once even had a brief dream about being sleepy simply because I happened to read a post here the day before about someone experiencing something similar in a dream.

**appdirect** · 09-06-2017 08:12 PM

I've had this happen to me and affects the dream, in a way the dream characters wonder why I'm so sleepy. It was probably cause by sleep medication.

**LabyrinthDreams** · 09-12-2017 02:43 PM

Originally Posted by cece23

Ok, so what has happened a few times to me is that I dream I am so sleepy in my dream that my eyes cannot stay open, no matter how hard I keep trying. Yet how can this be as I am asleep and dreaming?

Well a few nights ago I was dreaming that I saw a corn-maze. But how could that be, since I was asleep and in my bed??

If we can accept that we can see and hear things that aren't actually happening to us while we dream, why couldn't we experience sensations, like fatigue, that aren't actually happening to us??