Thread: sleep deprivation study

Heh, I've always wanted to find a thread like this and really talk about this, here goes:



(I'm bipolar, and with the manic stage comes sleeplessness, and this was before I was on medicine for it.)



(also, you guys can end your sleep deprivation research whenever you want, I couldn't stop it)



I went ten days with only 30 hours of sleep. And it was about as bad as you can imagine. I too heard voices, but come to find out later, those were my natural hallucinations I have just from being bipolar. I did have slight visual hallucinations too. If I closed my eyes, I could vaguely see stuff, like the corner down the street, some sort of ship flying in the sky. Not completely clear, but kind of.



It was weird, being up when people were up, being up when people went to bed, being up when people were up, being up when people went to bed etc. I'd lay there, and exhaustion would literally rip up my body starting from my toes, my whole body would pound and I'd lay completely still, deathly afraid of making it worse. Eventually it would go away and I would move.



After three solid days of staying up, I passed out from sleep exhaustion. I knew I was about to pass out because it felt like something was trying to jerk something out of my body. I did that another time and I still remember exactly what I dreamed.



The first one was me and a friend playing Mortal Kombat. We were both Shujinko. Apparently, I had frozen him many times before, and he was getting tired of it, because I went to throw my ice ball and he made his character fly backwards, but I caught him while he was doing it so his character was stuck in a flying backwards pose. We looked at each other for a second, then started laughing. Then my head started to pound and I fell off my chair, onto my knees, grabbing my head and the edges of my vision in the dream started to flash red like my brain was dying. Only slept about an hour.



The second one, I was laying in bed in the dream, staring up at the ceiling. My Mom's heater started floating next to my bed. I heard the sound of breaking glass and again, the edges of my vision in the dream started to flash red. Slept about a half hour.



Food didn't even taste good, I had a pizza, and a milkshake, and I might as well have been eating cardboard. My whole head was "soft". I talked to my sister on the phone about it, and I kept zoning in and out. I started developing a massive sleep phobia from that. My Dad managed to get some weak sleeping pills for me, called Walsom. It took me a solid hour to get up the courage to take them. I thought sleep was like death, that I might not wake up if I went to sleep, and the fact that my uncle had just died in his sleep a month or so ago didn't help my thoughts. I eventually took one, and had a miniature panic attack. Started sweating a lot, just waiting to fall asleep. They never worked for me.



I kept looking up sleep phobia online, things that might keep you awake. I even heard a thing called "fatal insomnia" that only like a hundred people in the world can get. I knew I didn't have it though, as it said you flat can't get to sleep at all, and I'd already slept some, just not enough. Thought about trying to get help from the people at CTRN for my phobia.



I actually did manage to calm myself down one night, and get out of my sleep phobia for awhile, by reading two passages from the Bible about sleep. They went:



"I lay down and slept;
I woke again, for the Lord sustained me."



My mind just kept focusing on that one part: "Woke again"



Then this one:



"In peace I will both lie down and sleep;
for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety"



I repeated that over and over again, had it memorized. Finally got my body to stop sweating (which apparently was just a tremor from the bipolar) and got ok with the thought of sleep. I kept getting excited at the thought of waking up and telling everyone I had slept and that it was over. Still didn't sleep.




I brought my pet pigeon into my room, thinking her being there would comfort me in some way. Didn't work. I actually got so desperate, that I thought sleeping with a stuffed animal would help me fall asleep more easily. So I went downstairs to the basement and got a stuffed dog and tried that. Still didn't work. I only slept fitfully during the whole thing, a few hours here, a few hours there. I got 9 hours once, but in sections of sleeping five hours, then sleeping 4 hours in one hour bursts.




Finally, my doctors appointment came up, and I went. He immediately pegged me as being bipolar and that I needed Lithium to help. We went home, I took some and one pill cut right through the sleeplessness. Still took me an hour or two to fall asleep, but I lay awake KNOWING I could fall asleep, and I did. Slept fully, and did so from then on.



Still, that first month was weird, I was so paranoid about sleep still that I actually had dreams about it. Like I had one where I was wondering around the world with a pillow and blanket futilely trying to find rest, but those ended. Whenever I lay in bed, and couldn't fall asleep, I'd develop the sleep phobia again. I eventually got over that though, and don't mind a few extra hours falling asleep. I even stay up 24 a lot of the time, just because I like to. This was all almost a year ago.




Actually, one of the things that helped me really beat the sleep phobia, was dreams. I thought "How can I possibly be afraid of something that gives me something like THAT?" and I got over it eventually.





It all sounds bad, and it was, but I'm not the kind of person who lets outside bad stuff like that really hit me, so in between bouts of trying to sleep, I got on the computer. I found a few of my favorite songs, like "Last Resort" by Papa Roach, David Hasselhoff "Jump in my Car" The Toybox song "Tarzan and Jane" and "Can't Sleep, Clowns will Eat Me" by Alice Cooper by means of youtube.



I actually found a way to get a variation of sleep. I knew about WILDing, and I wanted to try it at first, but the urge to swallow was way too bad, plus, I was afraid of sleep paralysis then so I didn't really want to try, and I still had the sleep phobia anyway. I found that you can let your body fall asleep if you don't move it for awhile. It actually rests you. I did that for about a solid two hours, just listening to Tarzan and Jane over and over again, and when I got up, I actually felt better. I got up, walked around, talked to people, but it doesn't last long.




---------------



Thanks to my bipolar now, I can stay up longer then I usually can because of the manic phases. I stayed up 28 hours and wasn't really tired. I was good enough to beat the hardest mode on RE5.






Anyway, just wanted to get that off my chest, take what you want out of it.