Hello all,
I stumbled upon this website while searching for information about my insomnia/sleep deprivation, which has recently hit new kinds of rock bottom levels. I, of all people, know the importance of sleep, but while I am in an accelerated graduate nursing program at a top 10 school, my sleep is VERY restricted. Often I work into early hours of the morning to finish a paper or study for a test, and it severely cuts into my sleep. Also, despite being exhausted in both my mind and body, my brain often just does not turn off. I spent Dec and Jan being sick on and off from sleep deprivation, but I think it has recently hit a new level as my vision and speech are now affected. My vision is often blurry when I get tired, and I see blotchiness in my visual periphery. When I am most sleep deprived, my speech gets slurred and I am unable to enunciate words, and often spell them incorrectly (like "excitement" becomes "excitedment").
In my search to better understand my problems I found this site. LD has always interested me since a friend of mine informed me about his ability to LD, but I always felt my problem was that I didn't enter REM very long, or at all. I thought this to be the case because I never remember dreams I have (if I have them at all) and even when I sleep for long periods of time, the quality of sleep is VERY poor and I never wake rested. It's been this way for 3 years (long before grad school started), so I know it's not an episodic development.
After spending a few hours reading numerous blogs on this site, I began to "try" to pay more attention to any glimmer of any semblance of a dream and see if there was any common theme or "signature" to my dreams (if I could remember anything at all). A few nights later, I very vaguely remember having a deja vu thought during a half-awake/half-asleep moment that "these dreams area always the same." "These dreams" references the vampire/zombie-filled chasing nightmares I was observing myself to have often. I found this to be somewhat unsettling, as I don't want these things to have a prolonged presence in my subconscious. I also noticed that I woke up drenched in a cold sweat, which is a VERY regular thing. I was tested for sleep apnea (which I don't have) and my endocrinologist ruled out anything hormonal with some bloodwork. If the night sweats I've been experiencing are related to nightmares I am not remembering, then I am having them pretty much every night, some worse than others.
Does anyone with expertise or experience have any meaningful insight to add here?
(Please relocate if I have blogged in the wrong area-thanks!).
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