Hi Missy,
Great thread. Yes, I am a mess when it comes to sleep disorders.
I was a bed wetter until the age 14 . I sleep walk and talk in my sleep. I also have night terrors occasionally - I know they are more common with children, but I started having them in my early teens - and I still have them. Almost every time, I am dreaming that I am in bed but awake. I usually "wake up" and literally see hundreds/thousands of spiders, worms or other insects, all over my pillow, sheets or the floor around my bed. I jump up, scream sometimes, and depending where the insects are, move away quickly - then I start to wake up. I've woken up finding myself standing by my bedroom window, by the light switch, or even standing on my bed. Sometimes I wake up while I'm moving my pillows trying to find the insects that crawled down between them. It takes a few minutes, and then I realize I was dreaming - but the kicker is the setting of my dream is my bedroom - so it seems totally real. The dreams either involve insects, or strange people in my room - but I'm always in my bed, just waking up.
I've learned that when I have house guests, or when I stay at friends homes, I have to tell them about my little problem and warn them. One of my best friends spent the night over my house when I was living at home, and I had an incident - I woke up screaming and freaked her out. She didn't understand that I was totally asleep and she was having a total conversation with me . . . first she thought someone was breaking into the house, then when she realized nobody was there, she thought the demons had totally posessed me .
Only a couple of times, I have woken up with what I call temporary amnesia. Try to imagine waking up, and literally having no knowledge of who you are, who your friends/family are, where you live, what you do for a living, no point of reference - absolutely nothing is familiar. I've had this last for several minutes - that doesn't sound like a long time - but trust me, it seems like hours when you are going through this. My heart begins to race, I break out in a cold sweat - I am totally freaked out. Then, slowly my memory starts to come back.
When I lived at home, my Mom used to tell me that my incidents coincided with my "time of the month". I thought she was crazy at first - but she would talk with me the next morning and ask me if I was about to start my cycle, and I would say yes, and ask her why . . . and then she would tell me what crazy thing I did the night before. She was right constantly. Can anyone else validate this?
- CF (of the "now I'm scared to go to sleep tonight" class)