Printable View
2 nights in a row I feel before I fall asleep like I'm about to die....i struggle for breath and my heart rate goes mental.
I'm assuming what's happening is that I'm aware enough to feel what my body goes through during shut down.....im aware of the rapid increase in my breath which causes me to panic? If this is so then.i wish I would know that this is happening as it happens....maybe due to being close to sleep means I'm half unconscious which means my awake logical mind is no longer there?
It sounds like hypnophobia to me. I think sometimes we just fear the worst will happen. I believe the solution is to redirect the focus.
I suggest focusing on relaxing and controlling your breathing. If you cannot do this in bed, get out of bed and practice it while sitting down until you are able to.
When focusing on relaxing and controlling your breathing in bed, do not try to fall asleep or stay awake. Just focus on relaxing and controlling your breathing no matter what happens.
It's happened to me, but is almost always related to sleeping medications, sleeping supplements, various other pharmaceuticals (usually something pertaining to psychotropics that alter mood, namely antidepressants and antipsychotics, although I'm sure anxiety medication can cause it too, I've just never been prescribed any), cessation of said substances, or otherwise weird situations like being ill and having a fever. I know exactly what you're talking about.
If I hadn't had multiple of these experiences I would suggest you're having some sort of weird sleep paralysis type thing, but this is definitely different (although experiencing sleep paralysis or strange semi-lucid states as a result hasn't been uncommon for me). As soon as I get to the point I'm crossing the threshold into sleep, it's like my body and consciousness enters a state of utterly primal fear and dysphoria. I don't often feel like I'm dying, but the situation is wholly unpleasant. I suppose if I wasn't already fairly well versed in altered states of consciousness it would be natural to describe it as feeling like you're dying though. It's like the most menacing, wrong, in your face so fast, oppressive feeling.
When I first experienced this I was almost afraid to go back to sleep, because it would happen multiple times in a night, but it's happened often enough (thankfully not too often) that I just deal with it. It tends to slowly lessen in severity as the night goes on. I stop letting it have a lasting impact on me and just keep trying to sleep, and usually the fact that it happens on the immediate threshold of sleep winds up putting me in some really weird states and getting me rather demonic lucids. Somehow during the lucid dream phase the demonic part doesn't actually bother me. I recognize the content is demonic but it stops actually causing fear or dysphoria, instead giving way to just a bizarre experiences.
Once I had it while lying on my belly after experiencing it several times in a night. I knew I was about to experience it somehow, like my body could sense when it was going to happen, and I used it to get into a weird psuedo-sleep paralysis that phased into a dream. I had my arms crossed holding a pillow with my head face down and I felt myself float through the front of my bed and then the SP lasted for a second and I was floating in a relatively similar position but with my arms fully extended in an expansive room made laid ceiling to wall to floor of dirty bathroom tile, lit only dimly by ambient blue and red lighting. I hit one wall to the left of me and tried kind of phasing through it, and I could to a degree but would encounter resistance that would have me pop back out... for some reason I was only able to move as if floating like a ghost. I looked at the tiles up close and they were deforming and had weird, somewhat menacing fractal geometry and coalescing patterns on them. Normally things like that don't carry a menacing vibe, but these did. I floated back out in the opposite direction and went forward into a wall and some how I could see my reflection in it, and my face was gaunt, pale with all kinds of blue veins in a kind of horror movie way, and my eyes were pitch black with blood running down my face like tears. Some how none of this was scary. It was mildly disturbing at the time but more interesting and bizarre.