Sweet Dreams

 

           I love my bed. I kind of have an obsession with comforters. I get this extreme urge to buy a new blanket every couple of months. Then, I feel the need to paint my wall color to coordinate with it. I don't know why. Just in case HGTV decides to pop in and visit or something. Currently I'm ridding on the Yellow and Grey theme. Next week, I'm sure it'll change. But, my god I betchya they have a name for this disorder. It definitely hurts my wallet enough. I should own a cotton factory to help a bit. Anyone have any suggestions?

          So most of you that know me, know I can sleep like no other. It's insane. I loooove lala land. It took me a long time to discover my need for sleep was more than just a lazy teen desiring to do nothing all day. I had complained about my drowsiness for years. But, my ability to go days without sleep led me to believe I was closer to insomnia than anything else. I remember reading a study in my Abnormal Psychology Textbook about a boy that went 11 days without sleep. I had made it to 5 days twice in my life. In college, I was a chronic all-nighter. Since college, my dreaming days seem to be just that, a dream/non existent/just a distant memory. My waves of exhaustion and period sof time with no sleep at all perplexed me. I always found this rather odd about myself. However, it wasn't until I had a sleep study done last summer that I discovered it all starting to make sense... well, sort of.

           Summer of 2010, I was diagnosed with having Narcolepcy. This led me into doing some heavy research on the area of study. What I learned was, apparently most Narcoleptic patients believe they have insomnia. Narcoleptic just means random sleep instead of a routine circadian rhythm- a heavy constant need to sleep rather than the normal rhythm of drowsyness you should feel- which is what throws patients off into thinking its insomnia.

           So, my case became a snagled web of discovery. I went to the doctor to be diagnosed with Insomnia and extreme Night Terrors, when in fact i suffer from a rare Nightmare diagnosis that inflicts less that 2% of the population. (There is a significant difference from Night Terrors and Nightmares.) One reason for the frequency of nightmare's is due to sleep deprivation. I was depriving myself of sleep because I felt like I shouldn't be sleeping during the day and not being able to fall asleep at night. It just started a negative routine of habit that became hard to break. As I got older, my fear of going to sleep because of my Nightmares, made me forced to come face to face with my Narcaleptic Disorder. Point of the story is, value your sleep. Because some people, even at their most relaxing periods of their day, can't even enjoy that. haha

          Hope this story encourages you all to tell your little sandman friends to come give me a night full of restful sleep. Maybe if I had one of the beds above, I wouldn't have these kinds of problems.