Conking out for 10 hours after one meets for consultation in a sleep study clinic isn't just irony, it's sorcery. >=l Pretty sure they sprinkled some kind of essence or dust on me when my back was turned. I think 10 hours is like a once in 5 years phenomenon for me.
That being said, I can barely move or think. Sorcery. It's like witch potion in minecraft.
I asked about and was told there are 2 main kinds of apnea, one does affect REM (vivid dream recall) and starts in the brain, so you can imagine I'm extremely curious to see whether they can catch that happening since I've been doing this since I was a small child with the dream recall, and going through entire years being terrified of sleeping, so I pushed my insomnia to the limits by remaining awake and alert at all costs even to the point of drinking other people under the table or being medicated out my eyeballs. This last couple of years are the first I've SLEPT consistently and fairly well in nearly my whole life.
That being said-
Last night I was an aging kitchen and laundry (it felt like) overseer in a large gentleman's Chinese brothel, and I'm not talking like in the movies. This was real grunge behind the scenes stuff, very realistic. I knew the entire building inside and out, I knew all the people who worked there, and even though I wasn't a boss, I was respected because I kept order.
But this evening there wasn't order. A recently gone famous pop artist had just walked into the restaurant area with his new very young model bride, and one of the slightly aging performers (background dancer/singer type) in really pretty costuming suddenly threw an absolute fit, screaming how could he, how could he turn to someone else after all the nasty kinds of sex he had made her do with him (during which she evidently must've fallen in love with him), and since I was walking through checking table setting perfection and closest to her, I walked up to where she was nearly now screaming in the pop star's face (everyone's eyes were really big, bad public behavior, bad taste, bad luck all around, no one had ever gunned the place up but didn't mean it wouldn't happen) and put my arm around her waist and then walked between them turning her around. I didn't even look at anyone else, just her like she was the only one in the world and guided her away sobbing, sweetly reminding her that we don't break the rules here, and it's ok if clients do what they want, got her escorted into another area and handed her off, all the while she's having this emotional breakdown and I knew she was ruined now, and they'd either kill her or finish breaking her for some other kind of work. The best I could do was remove her from my floor before I would get in trouble, too, just being in her vicinity.
And then I woke up.
My psychologist is concerned that I might have some kind of REM apnea. I'm concerned about a side article called Is Brain Injury in Obstructive Sleep Apnea Reversible? My worst brain fail came during 6 horrible weeks of NOT sleeping during the worst headache I ever had in my life (nothing shows up on CT or MRI), and then 'all' that happened was bell's palsy and all that got blown off. I've been recovering from particular function glitches ever since, like being able to do simple math. Incidentally, several brain scans over time have only ever showed natural aging. Absolutely nothing else. (:edit: Forgot about empty sella, but that was present at birth.) Since my mom had hundreds of TIAs before she started having the really big strokes (she was an insomniac, too), you can imagine my interest in all this.
Back to the dream! Srsly, another seemingly 'not me' experience out of the blue, like I was somewhere else being someone else with no other connection that I can see to real life, TV, minecraft, reading something, overhearing convos, nothing. I guess the experiment will be to 1- confirm REM disruption, 2- attempt to treat, 3- see if I stop remembering dreams. My sleep study is set up for October. Sadly, no one cares about studying whether I'm actually experiencing someone else in another time and place. We're supposed to stay in our own quantum localities, after all, right? It's not unusual for us to fuzz out and be somewhere else, apparently. The problem is tuning our brains back to ourselves. We need to be here and now. We need to learn to be holistically healthy individuals while we are here on this earth in these lives because we have things to do here and now that only we can do.
REM Sleep Behavior Disorder
Study: Interrupted Sleep May Be as Harmful as No Sleep at All
I've been able to go through deeper sleeping more in the last 2 years than in many years before, cumulatively speaking. I know it's possible for humans to survive severe sleep deprivation, because I've done it, but I'm a mess. However it started and whatever the underlying cause (brain wave disruption is the likeliest for long term, plus now probably aging into regular apnea), I have never been able to sleep normally like I'm supposed to, and because of that I've successfully learned other coping mechanisms, like positive imaging, self hypnotic meditation, free associating (very necessary to 'let go' so the brain can mimic the dream cycle while awake), lucid dreaming (different from free associating), stuff like that. But as I'm getting older, it's getting harder to control this so that I don't wind up 'spacing out' so hard like when I'm driving, because that's way too dangerous. I arrive places and have no memory of how I even got there, sometimes no clue what day it is or why I'm even there in the first place.
I have a feeling I'm not at all alone, and stuff like this could probably explain numerous traffic accidents that people have. Since I've already rolled a car and experienced the brutal pain and have spent my life recovering and in pain, I'm probably more aggressively alert than a lot of drivers out there, and I very seriously do NOT ever want to feel that kind of experience again, so I think my brain gets stuck in the hyper vigilant part of fight or flight, and that's probably where my anxiety attacks in traffic come from, major PTSD stuff.
Anyway, they splashed some kind of potion on me or something yesterday, and now it's taking me 2 hours already to deal with getting my brain on and my body flexible enough to do a few things. I really don't like sleeping hard...
Music like this helps. Sometimes it's about the only way to calm my mind down. I might play this on my phone at the sleep clinic while I'm going to sleep.
