Odd Sleep/Awakening Habits/Experiences

[3mnkids]

I have two sleeping positions. one~ Like a dead person in a coffin, on my back with my hands folded on my chest. Two~ on my side with my hands under my armpits, usually in fists... most mornings I wake up and my hands have fallen asleep. I have...issues   

[claws]

I always wear a pair of fresh socks in bed. I've been doing that since I was a kid, and I guess that is why I didn't mention this before because it seems like a normal thing for me to do. So yeah, nobody gets in my bed with dirty naked feet   Seriously, I'm anal about that.

[BTM]

I jerk awake every now and then, as though something I was dreaming about startled me.  Usually don't remember what it was though. 

I usually use three pillows, that might be weird to some people.  One for my head, one between my knees (usually I sleep on my side) and one between my arms. 

[Vik]

Anyone else do the thing where you're sleeping, and you wake up and spaz out and "fall" against the mattress? Almost as if you were hovering over the mattress in your sleep and waking ends the hovering?

Yeah! Also, you flail your legs like crazy!   I know I've kicked the wall before.

I have that too, I once hit the wall really hard.

[Sleepyskull]

I had a dream in which I killed a man and than woke up feeling scared and upset.

It was a brutal death too: I dreamed I was sent to military school and became angry about the fact that I was sent there. In the lunch room I broke the sneeze guard over the food, took a piece of glass, and stabbed my instructor's neck.

I was very sweaty and panting hard when I woke up. It was one of the worst dreams I've ever had.

[Derf]

I wake up very turned on at times...



Too much info ?

Maybe if you took down the posters of Bea Arthur, Betty White, and Amy Winehouse you've got hanging over your bed, you'd wake up a little "calmer." 

As for strange sleep habits, I've been waking up with a sudden jerk lately, and once awake, I find I've (yet again) bitten the side of my tongue, just on the very edge, so that it stings horribly. I've done that five or six times in the last few weeks, and it's getting annoying.

[JaseSF]

Sleep paralysis is way worse when the Old Hag visits you and seems to be trying to smother or choke you alive and you're fighting, fighting, fighting to move, to breathe, to do anything and just when you think you're about to die, you wake up. Has happened to me a few times in the past. Always far more likely if you sleep on your back.

[Flick James]

Boot camp does wierd things to you. You go from whatever was your normal life was to being thrown together with 75 other guys, sleeping in racks(bunks), no privacy, ordered around, lots of rules, and being woken up harshly every morning at 4 am. I would see guys waking up in the middle of the night doing very strange things, thinking, "that's not going to happen to me." Then, one night, I found myself jumping out of my rack at 0100 and throwing on my uniform, thinking I had slept through morning reveille. I woke up literally thinking the barracks were completely empty and everyone had left and I was in deep s**t, when in reality everyone was asleep and I had imagined it. The guy in the rack next to me was saying "you better hurry, man, they're in formation already." Then I realized what was going on and said "you dick," and crawled by in my rack, him cracking up the whole time.

Ah, what a twisted world the military is.

[oxode]

A few years ago I was in my bed. (Now I sleep on the floor. . . You'll see why) My alarm clock rang.  - It was a f***ing loud mechanical one - and I darted up strait from a dream . . . but before I became fully vertical and my eyes open, . . . someone hit me full force on the nose! Sending me right back horizontal. Blinded by tears, punchdrunk, confused and desperate how vulnerable I was, I rolled out of my bunk, to avoid further hits, slashing around to sweep the attacker down. How did he enter my locked flat? What does he want? Would I be able to fight him off?
After a few minutes my eyes stopped watering and I found, that I was alone in my bedroom . . . with a broken nose and a mystery who to blame for it.
Later I found a bloodstain, that told me all.
When I woke up I didn't lie flat on my back as I thought, but on my side. So when the clock alarmed, I didn't bolt up as planed, but trebucheted directly against the wall.
Since this I sleep on the floor in the middle of the room.

[Raffine]

When I was about 8 years old I went through a period of having 'Night Terrors'. This translated to me wandering through the house at two AM and screaming things like "THEY'VE EATEN MY HANDS! THEY'VE EATEN MY HANDS!".

My family still tells those stories...

[Flick James]

Night terrors are an interesting phenomenon, along with others that accompany what is termed "slow wave sleep." This is the truly deep sleep that typically lasts between an hour to two hours in most adults, longer in children and adolescents. Sleep proceed through three stages of "non REM" sleep, the third being that slow wave sleep. This is where night terrors occur, as well as most sleep-walking, and all other sleep phenomena where the person rarely recalls the experience, and upon awakening from this stage can experience hallucinations or difficulty coming back into reality. The poster who talked about waking suddenly and breaking his nose on the wall probably experienced that during this stage. After slow wave sleep is REM sleep, where most dream activity occurs, and the sleeper is making the slow trek to natural awakening.

The experience I had in boot camp that I related in my earlier post was probably during the slow-wave stage.