Insomnia - Can't sleep!

the Stuff Dreams are made of...
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Out of curiosity, I’d like to know if any other insomniacs experience this when they’re trying to get to sleep, I’ve kinda just started thinking of it as my sleep process. The whole thing happens over a period of about two hours or more on a normal night

-I lie down, try to find a comfortable position, give up and just lie still. Clear my head (Thank you meditation practice) and lie in silence for a bit.
-After some time my body starts feeling extremely heavy, like my tissues are turning into…something rather heavier than they are really. This heavyness spreads usually from distal extremities to the rest of my body.
-After that I start feeling my heartbeat grow stronger and stronger until I can feel every pump throughout my whole body. Every finger, in my arms and legs and my head too. (my old bedframe used to be a bit loose and would click whenever I moved around in bed, but it would also click in rhythm with my heartbeat when this happened)
-Next my limbs start to tingle faintly and lose definition…I start having trouble telling where my hand ends and my bed begins for example, and eventually I start getting sensations from places that I’m not touching. Like say my arm is at a 45degree angle from my torso…eventually I start feeling like I can feel from the space between my arm and torso.
-As this is happening I start getting really mild HI, and I watch very faint twisting shapes from behind my eyelids. Sometimes I’ll even experience some positive myoclonus while this is happening.

Often times I’ll end up losing my willpower after too long and the sensations become so uncomfortable that I shift position, which immediately halts all of the aforementioned effects and causes the whole process to start all over again.

The problem is that I can lie awake in this state for over an hour easy without falling asleep, and it’s getting a bit concerning considering hypnagogia and myoclonic jerks are supposed to be a sign of sleep onset, right? I’ll be going to a sleep specialist sometime in the foreseeable future, but I just would like to know if anyone else gets stuck like this, borderline asleep but still unable to bridge that last gap.

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If you didn’t shift your position but stayed still, you would find yourself entering a WILD.
Have you read up on the WILD topics in here and the big SP as a gateway to WILD in the pathways forum?

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I’ve had two WILDs by not shifting position actually, but I don’t like falling asleep that way (even though I haven’t got a clue as to how else to fall asleep) because it’s just so uncomfortable. I also tend to take longer to fall asleep using that method.(and that’s saying something) I mentioned in my DJ too, but yesterday I missed classes because I did that. Fell asleep at about 3 and woke up an hour and a half late…

I actually don’t know what happens when I fall asleep without WILD-ing through that process. It’s like everything in the half hour leading up to actually falling asleep is erased from my memory :tongue:

er…that was off-topic…Anyway so yeah, I’ve done WILD with that, it’s just a pain I guess.

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I need help on being able to get to sleep quicker… I have to wake up at 6:30am for college almost every day, but I can never get to sleep until early hours of the morning… As a result, i’m incredibly tired all the time. I think it may be affecting my studies.

During one lesson, I remember I was extremely tired, to the point where nothing around me seemed real. I was looking at the point where the wall met the ceiling and was trying to figure out if it was real or not because it didn’t look right. I’ve been hallucinating more, and am also becoming more paranoid than usual.

This is having a major negative effect in WL… I need help to get to sleep earlier. I often try to get to sleep at a more sensible time, sometimes 10pm, but have never been able to get to sleep until 1am at the earliest. Some days i’m going in with maybe 3 hours of sleep!

As I said before, it is affecting my studies badly, and I have almost fainted or went to sleep in lessons a few times, often during something we really need to know. Can anyone help me at all?

:help:

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Two words. Sleep Hygiene. ('I before ‘E’? God I can’t remember)

It has worked incredibly well for me. As long as you stick with it… I have sort of not stuck with it… that is why I am typing this now at 23:45… laughs But when I stick with it, it works brilliantly!

First things first, go to bed and wake up at the same time EVERY day. It’ll be tricky at first as your body has to get used to the new routine. After a few days, a week, you’ll find yourself getting to sleep quicker.

Secondly, avoid stodgy foods for several hours before sleep, but I’ve always found that eating milk and cheese really really helps me sleep. Bananas are also meant to be brilliant

Next up, keep electronics away from your bed. I put a blanket over my laptop to stop any ‘radiation’ leaking out.

Bed is for sleep, make sure you don’t associate it with anything else. This means no reading, going on the computer etc whilst still in bed. Get out of bed straight away in the morning, no faffing about. Again, it’ll take a while for your brain to get used to it, but the benefits are worth it.

Lastly, consider investing in a sound box? My brother got me one for Christmas and I used it last night, well, WOW. It worked brilliantly.
If you don’t want to buy one, any white noise really helps people sleep, whether you put on a fan or the radio down low (this works well for my mum, listening to voices at low volume) can really really help.

Keep your room dark and well ventilated, you can also get special sleep ‘sprays’ to put on your pillow, but bog standard lavender oil also really helps.

Hope this helps! Sweet Dreams! hugs

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‘I before E except after C’…man it’s been a while since I did English

Yeah I used to have similar problems, but I go to college now and my timetable is a lot clearer, especially on mornings.
Can’t wait to start trying this out…I still get angry when I can’t sleep some nights and just go downstairs and drink :grrr:

I’ve read it also helps if you keep the room comfortable to be in (i.e. Tidy and ventilated)

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I normally can fall asleep pretty fast but I an going to try a new LD techneque i get excited and cant fall asleep with usually ruins my plans for the night. :wallhit:

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You might want to try clearing your head completely before going to sleep. I know I can’t sleep when I’m thinking of something interesting, and so meditating or doing any other low-thinking activity before attending bed might help you.

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That is a good idea, if I have gamed much just before going to sleep I cannot sleep at all, as an example. Also a very good movie, homework or things like stress can have very bad effects on sleep. Sometimes I feel like I do not sleep at all at night, it is this state of half-aware snoozing. It is not fun that’s sure. n.n

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If anyone is interested, I have occasional insomnia and found a valerian-hops-skullcap combination (found in any health food store, or grocery store) Works great for temporary conditions. I have tries everything, and some make me groggy, or forget my dreams (which sucks) But these herbs seem to enhance them. Kava works for some people as well, if anxiety is an issue. Believe me, I know anxiety!
But sometimes life just throws us a full mind, and it’s hard to get to sleep.

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Ok, so I’ve made a thread before but I do not wish to dig through the graveyards of these forums. Anyway, I get really bad insomnia and all the suggested techniques that have been said (such as relaxing your body slowly and counting backwards), have not worked. I really don’t want go down the road of drug induced sleep.

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I moved your post into the BIG topic.
This is a split topic, I collected most of the advice from the first part and posted it here click for post … it should make a good starting point.

There is also an insomnia article in the knowledgebase forum.

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My doctor ignored me.

It turns out I had sleep apnea so bad that now I have congestive heart failure and I have to sleep with a c-pap machine and oxygen. I can now sleep and I love my c-pap machine so much that I would marry it if I could.

I didn’t dream for years and now I dream all the time, because I received the proper treatment.

If your insomnia is severe - see a doctor!

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(sorry about the long post)
I’m not sure what kind of sleep disorder this is, but I’m almost positive I have one. Every day, it’s just simply impossible for me to fall asleep until sometime between 2-4 a.m. Even if I’m extremely tired and go to bed at 11 p.m., I still find myself lying in bed for hours. This has happend to me for as long as I can remember, but I’ve found it got worse over the years. When I was in elementary school, everyone I knew had a bed time of 8-10 p.m. or so, and I had a bed time of 12 a.m. That time gradually got later over the years, and unfortunately the time you have to wake up for school gets earlier. The current time I have to get up is 6 a.m., 6:30 at the latest. Falling asleep at 2 every day and getting up at 6 is hardly enough sleep to even keep me functioning. I can’t ever do anything in the morning on weekends because I really need to catch up on sleep and end up sleeping in until 2 p.m.

I’m not sure if this is relevent, but it’s odd how I actually stay awake. I lay there for an hour or so (regardless of what time I go to bed) and I start to see HI, vivid dream scenes, hearing voices, etc., but when I’m on the verge of entering the dream and finally falling asleep, the logical part of my brain turns back on and it makes me realize what I’m seeing, which causes me to wake up. Many people have trouble doing WILD because they cannot keep focused as they fall asleep, but for me it’s quite the opposite. I can lay there for hours without moving or even trying to stay awake, and I won’t fall asleep, but the problem is that it takes forever to enter SP. One time I was sitting there trying WILD for atleast 2 hours and nothing happend. I just decided to give up and let myself fall asleep. I had to fall asleep three times before I was able to stay asleep. The first time I entered a dream in a couple minutes. It made absolutely no sense and within 10 seconds I realized it was a dream and woke up. The second time it happend again, so on the third time I actually used MILD to tell myself to not realize it’s a dream so I could finally just sleep.

Has anyone ever heard of something like this before or had any experiences? It doesn’t really sound like insomnia since I have little trouble falling asleep if I can pick my own sleep schedual. Any ideas?

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Ive been watching meditation, bineral beats, and trance videos allnight, and I feel like Ive took three valums. This stuff realy works try this one, I gurantee you will feel sleepy. I use it when I cant sleep, and it works wonders.

youtube.com/watch?v=xba56LlV … re=related

edited in from next post…
Use headphones

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I’ve stumbled upon the perfect cure for insomnia…start a fight club!!

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Thank you for the link to that video, Kava. It helped me sleep.

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It was happening to me after looong working in front computer, but when I started going out more, everything went back to normal.

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I have some minor problems while falling asleep. I simply can’t find my place in the bed. I start moving around to get comfortable. Because of this I can’t WILD. And it also takes me a while to get back to sleep if I wake up at 3 or 4 in the morning.

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I often have the exact same problem. I usually take a while to fall asleep. HOW do you wake up at night for WILD? I don’t use an alarm clock. I program myself to awaken at a certain time (though usually I’ll wake up on my own after every dream period). Usually if you wake up of your own accord your sleep rhythm doesn’t get disrupted as much as it would have, had you used an alarm clock.

As for finding a place in the bed. What helps is if I just try to WILD in the position I just woke up in. That’s usually comfortable. Other than that, I really have no idea.