Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Not So Bad

I woke up this morning and thought, hey, that wasn't bad! And then remembered the gorey and slightly disturbing dream I had in which I was a really macho buff guy with lots of tattoos (which is funny because that's like the exact opposite of how I look) who was trying to pretend to be harmless while sneaking past oppressive intelligent dinosaurs who he was supposed to assassinate without getting caught in this weird multi-planet world with Stargates. And this dude/I had a team of people who looked oddly like characters from Ouran High School Host Club. It was frustrating and weird and disturbingly bloody. o.O Well, at least I got to miss the hallucinating. But that probably will happen at some point. I vaguely remember having another dream in there somewhere about figuring out I was in a dream and thinking it was going to get scary, but it never really did. But I was in my old room which is always a bad sign. (Digression time!)

For most of my life, from when I was like 7 to when I was 22, my parents (and me until I went away for college) lived in the same little old house. When I was little I did sometimes have really vivid and awful nightmares, but it got really bad around 12 or 13. I wasn't diagnosed with Narcolepsy until I was- 20? Yes. So my bedroom, for 7ish years, was this place of terror. I had countless terrifying dreams in which I would "wake up" in my bedroom, and then there would be someone moving around in my bathroom or people looking in through my windows or something moving in the shadows. Or there would be cockroaches all over my bed or I would get up and look into the living room and this creepy water would be slowly rising, or I would find skeletons in my closet (that saying has never amused me, thank you very much), or there would be gunmen outside all the windows and if they saw me they would shoot. Or someone would come in and I would have to find a way to hide or sneak away or else I knew they were going to kill me. It almost always started in my room, with me waking up in my bed (because then I would think it was all real- thanks brain -.-) and then eventually I would get so afraid I would suddenly jerk awake, but be paralyzed and hallucinate. So then I would really be seeing my bedroom, but instead of just my room I would see shadow people doing things or looking in or touching me, and I would hear sounds like keys jangling and scratching sounds, creaking, or whispering. And I could feel people touching me, sometimes gently and sometimes violently. This kind of hallucination is called hypnopompic. I've also had the hypnogogic kind, on going to sleep, but those weren't usually as bad for me.

So you can see why being in my old bedroom was potentially a bad sign. The Xyrem usually keeps those things away, which is why I'm not going to give it up if I can possibly avoid it, even though it gives me stomach issues and makes my diet more annoying. Which is yet another long story.

I do seem to be more awake today though. I've decided (since I'm not going back to my doctor for three months) that I might as well take my dose to a halfway point before raising it the rest of the way, just to make it easier on myself. So it'll take a little longer to know what the effects of the maximum dose are, but in the meantime it might screw me up less.

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