I've had a few episodes of hypnagogic paralysis, usually with a strong vibration feeling and usually with a feeling of some "presence" nearby. They didn't spook me out at the time because I already knew a bit about sleep paralysis.
I've had a few episodes of hypnagogic paralysis, usually with a strong vibration feeling and usually with a feeling of some "presence" nearby. They didn't spook me out at the time because I already knew a bit about sleep paralysis.
Good point; about sums it up.
I think "bouncing around" in that regard is usually and probably the worst way to go though. Our bodies don't like their internal clocks, rhythms etc thrown off.
Course I say this as I type away in the middle of the night and I'm inexplicably wide awake even after 3 beers
asthmatic camel
Illuminator
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I frequently experience exactly the same thing and have often wondered what causes the vibration feeling. Anybody know?
Just thinking
Philosopher
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I feel good with 8 or so hours of sleep, but what I have very much difficulty with is early morning activity. My best hours are from about 3 pm to about 3 am. I have never been and will probably never be a morning person -- I'm a late afternoon to late evening person. This was also clearly documented when I worked a 2nd shift for about a month at a job where I usually worked the 1st shift. It was my best month ever.
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calebprime
Penultimate Amazing
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Oh. My. God. 96 hours? Boots are made for wakin'!
At least, it's sufficient by itself. (Anyone seen They Shoot Horses, Don't They??)
Two of them. One not particularly memorable. But the other was the most terror I've ever experienced. It seemed to be a nightmare about bugs, but that doesn't capture the horror. The horror!
ETA: oops. guess I meant sleep paralysis.
Sleep Deprivation:
There was some guy who did bike marathons who had some stories about starting to hallucinate--he had intense alien abduction experiences, even thought that the people minding him were aliens. His name?
Drugs:
Anyone have any experience with Provigil (sp?). Dancing Dave? Boo?
Tried amphetamines maybe twice and they made me feel absolutely awful. No variation in my energies or consciousness. Just an unrelenting verbal babble that wouldn't subside and began to become...nonsensical.
Hard for me to understand the attraction of meth. I mean, how can the high be worth the crash? Plus you *know* you're frying your brain.
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Dogdoctor
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In the past I have had a few sleep paralysis episodes and wasn't too frightened by them. I had one episode of waking up to legs not working, I could not stand or walk or move my legs and had little feeling in them. That was spooky but it wore off in a couple hours (except for being scared). I had gone with about 2 hours of sleep (if you can call it that...I closed my eyes and tried to sleep) in 50 hours of staying awake when I was in vet school. Actually I did it twice, once because I had 3 night duties in a row where I actually had to work and once because I was on emergency duty and worked all night and could not sleep during the day. Both times I was able to function somewhat OK but felt like I was walking in water and also felt like crap and felt like the world was vibrating.
Also in regards to meth use, orally it has quite different effects from smoking it.
Also in regards to meth use, orally it has quite different effects from smoking it.
Dancing David
Penultimate Amazing
Used to have it about once a month until my sleep apnea was treated. My favorite I asked my wife is she was upset and she asked me why, and I said that the was a 'two donut hornswoggler in the corner'. Sometimes my recolection for the arousing and falling asleep events is very clear, other times it is very vauge, much like dreams.
Jeff Corey
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Michael Shermer
I've never heard of such a wide range as this. Really? Your range can either rival Mariah Carey's voice, or that of the weather man's forecast when they say that it is going to be partly sunny tomorrow with a chance of thunderstorms.
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No. But I dreamt a tiger was chasing me once, (when I wasn't dreaming about gorillas after watching the Three Stooges 'shorts' that had a gorilla in it) when I was outside and all alone and the whole neighborhood was on fire and nobody else was around, except me and that tiger. Seriously.
Waking sleep paralysis- yes. That's been discussed here previously. It seems very common, in the sense it happens to nearly everyone at least a couple of times. Seems to be a regular event for some.
I'm another lifelong shift worker. My first fifteen years in my job I was on 24 hour call for 28-35 days at a time, frequently doing twenty hours a day with a number of 48 hour and a couple of 72 hour shifts. I napped a lot- often on my feet and often just for a few minutes. It helps.
There comes a point where you are so tired you get scared to sleep, because you know you'll be woken soon and you will feel far, far worse. Then comes the paranoid bit, when you start listening at doors to see if anyone is talking about you. Then you go numb, head full of cotton wool, eyes aching. You start forgetting how to do things- like put your boots on.
When you do lie down, your head keeps cycling through the worries of the day. As you start to doze, part conscious ideas stream through the mind, mixing concepts;- you have to get up to turn off the pump because the blue smell from the starter switch is fumigating the canteen ...and you sit up, realise this is nonsense, lie back down immediately start worrying that you have to get up to turn off the pump that...
I finally learned how to shut my mind down totally long enough to get to sleep. It's a good trick. Sometimes I wonder if it ever restarted though..
I'm another lifelong shift worker. My first fifteen years in my job I was on 24 hour call for 28-35 days at a time, frequently doing twenty hours a day with a number of 48 hour and a couple of 72 hour shifts. I napped a lot- often on my feet and often just for a few minutes. It helps.
There comes a point where you are so tired you get scared to sleep, because you know you'll be woken soon and you will feel far, far worse. Then comes the paranoid bit, when you start listening at doors to see if anyone is talking about you. Then you go numb, head full of cotton wool, eyes aching. You start forgetting how to do things- like put your boots on.
When you do lie down, your head keeps cycling through the worries of the day. As you start to doze, part conscious ideas stream through the mind, mixing concepts;- you have to get up to turn off the pump because the blue smell from the starter switch is fumigating the canteen ...and you sit up, realise this is nonsense, lie back down immediately start worrying that you have to get up to turn off the pump that...
I finally learned how to shut my mind down totally long enough to get to sleep. It's a good trick. Sometimes I wonder if it ever restarted though..
Vox Humana
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I've wondered this myself. I have found no good explanation of what causes the vibrations, only that they're associated with the transition from wakefulness to sleep, or vice versa.
Of course, I have found plenty of bad explanations, my favorite being that they're indicative of your astral body trying to leave your physical body. I know that's not what's happening in my case, as I haven't seen my astral body since it got out two years ago this May. It seems to be hanging out in Pittsburgh, if the charges on my Visa are any indication.
Hopefully someone else can shed some light?
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SteveGrenard
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On the vibrations, perhaps. Would the folks here who have experienced these "vibrations" consider the possibility that they could be actually be reflexive shivering triggered by the normal drop in body temperature which occurs during sleep? Or just being cold.
Dogdoctor
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In my sleep paralysis episodes I had no vibrations but these episodes happened when I was a teenager. When I suffered from sleep deprivation I was careful to over compensate for the temperature to minimize stress so I generally felt warm and definitely not cold. The vibrations I felt were more like a sensation that the whole world was vibrating and I was only feeling that and not vibrating myself. It could have been from massive doses of caffeine however as I continually drank coffee.
Nucular
Illuminator
Re: hypnopompic/hypnogogic hallucinations, I've had a fair few.
When drifting off to sleep, I quite often hear noises, usually like a distant bustling market and church bells. Presumably from a past life.
But quite often I wake up hallucinating wildly - sometimes these are very real and plausible things; sometimes geometric pattens spreading on the ceiling, as per Aldous Huxley's mescaline experiences; and very often I'll notice with horror that my pillow is crawling with wasps, or that my bed is filled with beetles.
Once I was actually woken (so it appeared to me) by an old lady leaning right over me saying "OoooooOOOOOoooooo". Quite freaky.
I can usually watch them with interest once I've realised what's going on, and see them slowly fade. Sometimes I can sort of keep them going for some minutes by laying very stilly and just watching. However, the insect ones always have me leaping out of bed shouting before I know what's going on.
The thing that makes working late the hardest, I find (and I probably shouldn't share this with people who also have to work strange hours), is the intrusive memory of that Simpsons episode where Bart has to get up in the middle of the night to help Skinner catalogue his stargazing. The radio alarm wakes him up, and says
Gets me every time! I'm yawning now!
When drifting off to sleep, I quite often hear noises, usually like a distant bustling market and church bells. Presumably from a past life.
But quite often I wake up hallucinating wildly - sometimes these are very real and plausible things; sometimes geometric pattens spreading on the ceiling, as per Aldous Huxley's mescaline experiences; and very often I'll notice with horror that my pillow is crawling with wasps, or that my bed is filled with beetles.
Once I was actually woken (so it appeared to me) by an old lady leaning right over me saying "OoooooOOOOOoooooo". Quite freaky.
I can usually watch them with interest once I've realised what's going on, and see them slowly fade. Sometimes I can sort of keep them going for some minutes by laying very stilly and just watching. However, the insect ones always have me leaping out of bed shouting before I know what's going on.
The thing that makes working late the hardest, I find (and I probably shouldn't share this with people who also have to work strange hours), is the intrusive memory of that Simpsons episode where Bart has to get up in the middle of the night to help Skinner catalogue his stargazing. The radio alarm wakes him up, and says
Gets me every time! I'm yawning now!
Nucular
Illuminator
Btw, if anybody has weird sleep stuff going on, here's a link to a questionnaire study going on about it. Nothing to do with me, I just found it online: http://watarts.uwaterloo.ca/~acheyne/spquest01.html
Obsequious
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Does anyone else have problems with regular sleeping cycle that is simply out of phase with the location?
These days, I cannot fall asleep before 2 am on a good night. The times I've gone from my home in the US to visit the UK, it's even worse: once I get there, I have trouble falling asleep before 3 or 4 am. Daylight makes me quite sleepy, to the point I have difficulty staying awake without stimulants (caffeine). I feel like my faculties don't start to really "wake up" until around 10 pm, wherever I am in the world. It takes months of rigid scheduling and outside stimulus to shift this pattern and only one night off the schedule to throw me right back where I started. But when I do sleep on my body's schedule, the sleep is of excellent quality, very restful and pleasing.
Have any of you ever heard of or experienced this? Do you know of any strategies or solutions other than incessant, rigid, anti-social-life scheduling, or any places I could look for more info?
These days, I cannot fall asleep before 2 am on a good night. The times I've gone from my home in the US to visit the UK, it's even worse: once I get there, I have trouble falling asleep before 3 or 4 am. Daylight makes me quite sleepy, to the point I have difficulty staying awake without stimulants (caffeine). I feel like my faculties don't start to really "wake up" until around 10 pm, wherever I am in the world. It takes months of rigid scheduling and outside stimulus to shift this pattern and only one night off the schedule to throw me right back where I started. But when I do sleep on my body's schedule, the sleep is of excellent quality, very restful and pleasing.
Have any of you ever heard of or experienced this? Do you know of any strategies or solutions other than incessant, rigid, anti-social-life scheduling, or any places I could look for more info?
Badger
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Ceritus, your schedule sounds (rule8)'d.
Just so you know, you can't "catch up" on sleep on the weekends. Try the napping thing if you don't have a good few hour chunk in which to sleep. Naps are a good thing. Try and make 'em long enough for 1 sleep cycle (typically 40 minutes).
To help get to sleep faster, try turkey. It's got that L-tryptophan thing, from what I understand. Personally, I find a hot bath/shower/hot tub works better (stay in until you feel hot...like you're sweating or need to sweat) as when I get out, my body temperature drops slightly, triggering a sleep response.
I've done 12 hr shifts for 11 years now, and have learned that marathon numbers of going without sleep are not good. Pay attention to your sleep, and you'll be healthier overall.
Caffine takes about 8 hrs to clear from your body, so no pop, coffee, tea, candy, other stuff with caffine (read the lables) 8 hrs prior to you planning to hit the sack.
Exercise will wake you up for a bit. It takes no time to do 30 pushups or squats, or situps. Those brief spurts of exercise keep me alert for about 45 minutes.
Good luck!
Just so you know, you can't "catch up" on sleep on the weekends. Try the napping thing if you don't have a good few hour chunk in which to sleep. Naps are a good thing. Try and make 'em long enough for 1 sleep cycle (typically 40 minutes).
To help get to sleep faster, try turkey. It's got that L-tryptophan thing, from what I understand. Personally, I find a hot bath/shower/hot tub works better (stay in until you feel hot...like you're sweating or need to sweat) as when I get out, my body temperature drops slightly, triggering a sleep response.
I've done 12 hr shifts for 11 years now, and have learned that marathon numbers of going without sleep are not good. Pay attention to your sleep, and you'll be healthier overall.
Caffine takes about 8 hrs to clear from your body, so no pop, coffee, tea, candy, other stuff with caffine (read the lables) 8 hrs prior to you planning to hit the sack.
Exercise will wake you up for a bit. It takes no time to do 30 pushups or squats, or situps. Those brief spurts of exercise keep me alert for about 45 minutes.
Good luck!
Dancing David
Penultimate Amazing
Well, if you did mental health assesments you might have a wider data base to draw upon, it is not an unusual pattern in the least.