Thread: Mindful Dozing Insomnia

The last two nights I have had the following experience:

After waking at around 4am, writing down dreams, going to the toilet then back to bed, I found myself stuck in a sort of 'mindful dozing insomnia'. I was in a state similar to that when you have just woken up in the morning (the hypnopompic) except many times I would nearly fall asleep, then suddenly notice either a hypnogogic hallucination or myself falling asleep and be woken up with a rush of energy, sometimes very mild and sometimes quite intense. The whole time any thoughts that came through my mind were not very engaging, and I naturally was resting in body and breath awareness most of the time. Indeed, It seemed I couldn't actually help this, like I had become 'stuck' in mindfulness! At one point I actually started dreaming (or having a longer hallucination perhaps) which seemed to last about 20 seconds, before feeling again a rush of intense energy and waking up. I didn't feel like I was too bothered at the time and was actually quite curious with what was happening.

It eventually ended this morning at around 7am with me having what seemed to be my first ever WILD (or maybe it was an SSILD?), albeit an accidental one! This began with more waves of energy and a tinnitus like ringing in my ears, with me then finding myself floating in my room without a body. Afterwards I then had a chain of another 3 lucid dreams, where I was fairly consistently needing to do stabilizations to stop the dreams breaking up (this could just be because I'm a beginner, combined with the dreams being around the time I would normally be waking up). Two of the dreams ended with the intense energy sensation again.

Has anyone else experienced anything like this? I was not trying to WILD, yet it seemed the whole time that was what my mind was trying to do without my conscious permission, with it getting getting too excited every time it noticed me starting to fall asleep.

I think some contributing factors are me not getting any exercise for the last 2 weeks (am recovering from an operation) as well as the general anaesthetic from that operation finally leaving my system, which had caused my mind to be more sedate. For the past 2 weeks I had been sleeping for more than usual due to me recovering, so maybe I'm compensating for too much sleep? If that's possible?