[Adventure] in Sleeping - or Not

[Adventure 4] 

I don't sleep. I do something that looks like sleep, but doesn't feel like sleep. 

On an average 8 hours of "sleep" night, I spend three of those hours, broken up into smaller amounts of time, fully awake. That's around 30 percent of my night compared to a normal person's 0-1%. Before beginning a medication designed for Parkinson's patients, I experienced an average of six leg movements an hour and was fully wakened by three of those leg movements every hour.

A normal person shifts between the stages of sleep around 40 times. I shift between stages of sleep over 300 times. A normal person spends 20-25% or their night in REM sleep. Me? A little over one percent. In a recent sleep study, I was in REM sleep for 6 total minutes, broken up into 6 different occurrences. I'm in and out of deep sleep around five times, and my deep sleep only accounts for less than a half hour of my sleep - less than 6% of my night's sleep rather than the 15-25% norm.

Sleep doesn't feel like sleep to me. Most nights it feels like being awake all night and dozing off every once in a while. Some nights it's absolutely torturous. There have been nights were I know I've awoken twenty times and look at the clock and only an hour has passed. 

And then, every once in a while, I'll have a night where I fall asleep and don't remember waking up until morning. It's completely disorienting. It takes me a while to comprehend that it's truly morning and that I actually slept. 

And the dreams! I'm on two different medications that can cause vivid dreams. In my case, they are both vivid and strange. Most have to do with what I was watching or doing before bed - Dungeons & Dragons combined with cheesy Christmas movies makes for quite an interesting storyline. And I have the ability to continue a dream where I left off or interrupt a scary dream to alter its course if I so choose, so that makes the dreaming part of my night all the more entertaining. And because I am often awakened during my REM stages - and have more than the average number of REM stages, as short as they are - I am more likely to remember said dreams.

So although what I do at night may not qualify as sleep, at least I get some interesting dreams as a consolation prize.