First Person: Sleep of the Must
Kristin writes in response to my column about wanting to sleep my life away:
Wow! I thought I was the only one. As I lay here writing from: yes, my bed! I wonder how many of my days have been lost to sleep. I have terrible sleep "issues." That's what I call them now. I can't think of a better term. They follow me around and nag at me. They are the biggest reason why I can't have a full-time job and why I consistently underperform in school by missing classes. I sleep a lot, or I don't sleep enough, but I never sleep 8 doctor recommended hours in one night. What I wouldn't give to be able to just sleep and rise like a "normal" person! Today I woke up around 4pm. Class started at 3pm and I was supposed to go to the art museum before that.You're probably thinking about me setting an alarm clock or something. I burned through those years ago. Every loud awful noise you can imagine I have slept through. I turn alarm clocks off in my sleep. I talk to people when I'm sleeping and later have no recollection of whole conversations. My family tries in vain to wake me up. They've tried shaking me, poking me, dripping water on me, calmly saying wake up, loudly telling me to wake up. I still sleep through everything.
But, I also stay up for over 24 hours on a somewhat regular basis. If I don't take my medication at night I won't fall asleep, so sometimes I put it off just so I can meet a deadline or get a project done or get to an exam or work on time. I love and hate sleep. If I could stay at home every day of the year and lounge around between my bed and my computer I probably would. I would take a nap in the middle and sleep soundly at night. Well, except for all those weird nightmares and dreams I have. One time I was in that space between being awake and asleep and I opened my eyes a little and thought I saw a huge foot long spider! I was convinced of it and started screaming, but my mom said: you were asleep. I didn't even realize it. Thank god it was only a dream!
And I hate sleep, because it is my nemesis. I can't control it, no matter how hard I try. People don't understand why I just can't wake up or why I sleep for 14/18/20 hours at a time. No one quite gets why I can't wake up during normal business hours and why I'm awake at 4am most days.
Part of it is probably the psychotropic meds, but even as a kid I had sleep issues. I never had a problem sleeping until noon on the weekends and I always felt half dead when I had to wake up for school at 7am. Getting through grade school and high school was like torture. And, when I was a baby my mother would find me awake in my crib and playing with my toys in the middle of the night!
But, I love it. What kind of a half depressive/half schizophrenic would I be if I didn't love sleeping? Climbing under the covers and cuddling next to my cat is like...better than anything I can think of.
I have no cures for you Liz, because nothing works, but sleep! ;)
Comments
This seems to be more common than I thought it was - (at least based on all of these comments). I've always needed to sleep a little more than average. Not a lot more, but almost always at least nine hours a night.
It's supposed to be some kind of a health risk, I think, because I've read that sleeping more than eight hours a night subtracts two or three years from a person's predicted life expectancy. But what can you do? - if I slept less than what I felt I needed I think it would cause even more of a health risk.
When I was in a privately run psych institution, the staff went to great lengths to stop me from sleeping too much. One time I went down to the main lobby/reception area of the entire facility and tried to sleep on a couch there. After a while I saw the receptionist talking on the phone, and then she came over to me and told me that the people on my ward wanted me to not be doing that. It seemed that maybe they thought excessive sleeping was a cause of my trouble.
All this was in the days and weeks immediately following ECT, so maybe they thought sleeping was somehow a cause of my depression. (I've heard of it being considered a symptom of depression, but never a cause. Maybe they just wanted to make sure I didn't do anything that seemed to be evidence of depression so shortly after having such a drastic procedure to make it go away.)
But it didn't feel like depression at that time. Just like you, Liz, I felt that this particular need for sleep was different than the need for sleep that goes with depression. Maybe it's more like a yearning for a different reality - (maybe it even helps you be able to write better).
Posted by: Kent | April 19, 2007 05:49 PM
It beats not being able to sleep. Due to a hypomania I haven't been able to sleep more than 4 hours - the length of time my Ambien seems to work - for several weeks.
Posted by: Jon | April 21, 2007 04:04 AM