I am often a restless sleeper and have trouble falling/staying asleep. I deal. Last night, however, was a crazy jam session of exhaustion and insanity. After an unusually long bout of tossing and turning I fell asleep, perhaps around 11:30 or 12....only to be suddenly wide awake, heart pounding, fully of nervy, awful energy and a dire certainty that if I didn't GET UP AND MOVE THIS INSTANT I would most likely throw up and very possibly die. My body somehow decided that wandering over and over in a tight little circle in the middle of my bedroom, very seriously counting each step under my breath would make me feel better (like counting sheep?) I made it to about 100 and wanted to keep going but thought I should try to do something less crazy. I was extremely hungry so I stood in front of my refrigerator in the dark at 2AM eating whatever was available (mostly string cheese - pulling the cheese apart was soothing even though I was doing it extremely fast and ate maybe 3 or 4 of them in under 5 minutes). I got back in bed and read for another hour and a half before (still not tired) I forced myself to turn off the light. When I finally got to sleep I kept waking up from terrible dreams. One was a recurring dream-within-a-dream: I'd hear something in my room and wake up to find that a demon had me by the ankles and was dragging me from my bed into darkness. The only way I could get away was by gnawing through his wrists until his hands came off, but he just kept coming back. It sounds funny, but it was awful - I could FEEL it. Within this dream I knew I was dreaming and was terrified that when I woke up it would turn out that I had really been biting my own wrists and I would have hurt myself, but I also couldn't stop because if the demon was real I HAD to get away from him, I couldn't risk it. I had this dream several times within my dream but finally "woke up" and my sister was there. After I told her what happened she took me to a bar to distract me, but someone was having a baby. Apparently no one had cars and we couldn't call an ambulance, so everyone was trying to MacGyver a car out of our available resources.
At least the ending was funny.
I am currently so exhausted that I feel ill. Two minutes of "thorough" internet research led me to the fact that panic attacks can indeed happen while you're sleeping. They wake you up and don't last more than a few minutes, but it can take a long time to settle down and sleep again. Awesome. Though instant, internet-based self-diagnosis is, of course, shoddy at best, it certainly felt like what you'd call a panic attack. I think I've had maybe one or two others in my life: one in the months before I made the decision to move to Seattle and the other in the spring of my junior year of college, neither of which were very pleasant periods for me. Am I stressed out about something and don't even know it? Or maybe my body just felt like being a bitch for no reason. When I get into bed this evening I better sleep the hell out of the night or I am going to be pissed.
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