[Hedwig]

Hi everyone…

I was just wondering if anyone here has suffered from this aspect to their insomnia…I have suffered for many years with anxiety related issues which have affeceted many areas of my daily living, and occasionally, I seem to get this overwhelming and somewhat irrational fear of actually falling asleep or even going to bed….

This affected me so badly last year that for several moonths I was unable to sleep in my bed at all as everytime I went up to it, sleep never happened and I began to worry about all the things I would miss if I eventually slept and then slept late or worse…as a result I used to sleep on the sofa as it got so bad that I began to think if I went up to bed then I auomatically wouldn't sleep and so I never attempted it…

It has taken me some time and I am now able to sleep in bed again…but this phase lasted for almost 7 months of last year…but my 'fear' of sleeping or oversleeping still remains….even when I don't sleep I have this irrational fera that I have a set time in which to get sleep after a certain time then t is not allowed…does this sound weird to anyone else apart from me… 😮

I am aware of the condition know as Somniphobia, but I don't fear sleep because I think I'm going to die or something like that…but occasionally I have awoken in the grip of a panic attack, which I do not understand at all…

Anyway, I would be interested in hearing your comments….

🙂 🙂 🙂

[seenafterscene]

I don't think my similarity is anything as awful as yours (I feel for ya)…but I suffer from something pretty comparable, but different, even somewhat opposite.

I will often force myself to “stay up” even when sleep deprived not to do anything constructive, but simply my mind won't let me. (There is more to this, but I'm trying not to be too wordy.) Often it is time specific. It usually has nothing to do with the usual “force” yourself up for something fun or work or school.

But the anxiety aspect def. extends to my sleep life–ranging from much of what you described, to my persistant love-hate relationship with nightmares. I don't even think I could really share any of them without severely censoring it, but they are pretty awful. Because I often lucid dream, I can control certain things, but there is much I can't control, and recently (in the past few years) I have lost what used to be my saving grace of having the ability to “force myself awake” since I am usually aware that I'm asleep. It gets very scary to the point that I will deny myself desparately needed sleep if/when I do wake up.

My brain also has gotten very tricky on me, I will through the course of any given nightmare (for lack of a more specific word) my brain will convince me I am awake, by allowing me to wake up in the dream–usually several times as I try and try to actually wake up, because my brain keeps trying to convince me that I already have woken up (environment, recreation of literally waking up, having long conversations with people in my dream about whether I am awake or asleep, etc.) So when I'm in a phase where I'm experiencing this I am severely afraid of going to sleep or back to sleep.

It is also highly common for me to wake up (sans bad dreams) in full on panic attack.

[Mike Hooker]

For the first fifteen years of my insomnia life I most certainly had a fear of not being able to go to sleep when I went to bed. It's a horrible feeling. I hated to see bedtime come around.

It's a fright unlike any other, for me. I know I need to go to sleep, but what if I can't? And each night's fear builds on top of the previous night's insomnia–a snowball effect that's difficult to overcome. The fear of not sleeping creates insecurity. The insecurity itself then adds to the fear; it's a never-ending cycle: Insomnia feeds on itself!

A manager where I work is going through this very fear right now. Since he discovered that I have insomnia, he talks to me every day, telling me about his previous night's sleep or lack thereof and asking me lots of questions about how I cope with it. We've talked about the fear of going to bed, and how the fear makes the chances of falling asleep even more improbable.

[Author]

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