-11- SLEEPING, WAKING, AND BRAIN FOG SLEEPY SICKNESS That's right, sleepy sickness and not sleeping sickness. I call it sleepy sickness because quite simply during these episodes I am never anything but sleepy. When the "sleepys" hit, all my body wants to do is to cuddle down into a soft, warm comforter and hibernate. A heavy numbness overtakes both mind and body with a pleasant sense of peace and apathy. The house could burn down around me but I'm too out of it to care. I am stuck in the state between awakening and slumber, floating as if drugged. Some people pay large amounts of money for booze or pills trying to feel the floating sensations which I get for free. I often wish I could simply trade their alertness for my fog, no charge. It is usual for the muscle pains to keep me from sleep when I am here. Sleep brings a refreshing absence of the horrible fibromyalgic pains typical of other times. I do not mean to suggest that I am pain free, I am just blissfully unfocused upon what remains of it. I feel bloated, cocooned. All I want to do is sleep now that I can. Muscle spasms take on a new existence at this time. I can observe them. I can laugh at the flutters and flinging of my limbs. They feel as if butterflies were trapped beneath my skin. It tickles rather than hurts. The drugged feeling of the body is a heady experience after long days and nights of agonizing muscle spasms and burning pain. I have the physical strength of a wet tissue, but really I don't care. I don't need chemicals to maintain this floating feeling, and it will last as long as this bout of sleepy sickness lasts. As long as I don't have to do anything, or manage any set of difficulties, face any crisis, or solve any problems I do just fine. I'm mellow. If I were any more mellow, I'd be comatose... as the old joke goes. I may as well be drunk or high on tranquilizers for the current impaired nature of my perceptions and functions. Coffee and other agents of caffine only serve to make my "drunkenness" worse. I'll just be more mellow ... talk about reverse reactions. Sometimes my mind will go blank again. I sit, staring blankly into space for I don't know how long. Zoned out again. This zoning can happen at any time, but it is most noticeable during the sleepys. My mind goes blank, and if I am moving the motions either become stuck or are repeated. There is a "catch" in my awareness momentarily. These catches are a nuisance. I will lose a train of thought mid word. I won't hear what is being said. A truck could speed towards me and I wouldn't know it, let alone be able to get out of the way. That means it is safer for me to just follow the hibernation instinct and cocoon myself until the sleepys pass. For all intensive purposes I am drunk, drugged, or otherwise intoxicated. I've got no choice in the matter. I didn't ask for this to happen, and my perfectionist instincts hate it. I am in a suspended animation of sorts and there is no way to get out of it before my body is good and ready for it. When I can access the humor, I can cope quite well with the body stone sensations the sleepys provides. Humor is easy if there is no crisis to deal with, no demands to be functional. Demands to be decisive lead to confusion and panic attacks, even over the most minor things like deciding what's for dinner. It can also lead to small seizures, catches where the body feels like I've been plugged into a light socket. Shocking experiences no less. The harder I push myself the larger the jolts in strength and the more frequent in occurrence. Sometimes it feels like a giant claw has been stuck into the back of my neck and up into the base of my brain. My entire body jerks in one huge, agonizing spasm. Every muscle is left feeling abused and torn. My insides ache. All senses are overloaded. I cannot move. I cannot call out. I can only lie there and wait for it to end. The sleepys can be a result of over doing things during good periods, or I can just have it dropped upon me seemingly without cause. The spell may last for a day, a week, or more before lifting. When life allows for me to float with the flow, I can cope just fine. If not, I can't cope at all. I become depressed once more. ----- INSOMNIA Wide awake, alert of mind : Exhausted of body. Drop dead tired, mind obsessively in a whirl with distressing thoughts and painful memories. Wide awake but exhausted of mind and body, craving sleep. Ready and willing to collapse but tortured by physical pain. Drowsy and tired but startled awake and disturbed easily. Variations on a theme... results the same... more physical pain and emotional distress. Sleep is truly the orb around which my world revolves. Sometimes sleep is easy to get. Sometimes not. Nothing is ever really constant about my sleep problems. Just when I think that I may have an idea of how to compensate for one variation, it mutates into another strain. A different set of symptoms resulting in the same problem... the inability to get sufficient amounts of restful sleep. I get overdrawn at the sleep bank. My body refuses to do overdrafts anymore. The result of this lack of sleep is a flaring of the levels of physical pain that plague me. This pain in turn interferes with sleep. The fatigue is enhanced, depression increased, and the entire cycle of fatigue and pain spirals on. I am sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. ----- BRAINFOG I sit, staring... My mind gone blank.. Nothingness is my thoughts My eyes see but do not.. I see through a camera lens Remote and removed from me. I see but do not see... all is surreal, all is distorted. The act of thought is difficult, slow and painful. Pain throbs inside my skull as I reach for a word.. an understanding. Memory is buried, disjointed, inaccessable. Language pauses and retreats. To see is not to comprehend. Vision distorts as if by the very act of concentration energy is diverted, circuits disrupted. Blinding flashes explode in my brain, in my mind. Pain blinds me. Sounds confuse me, startle me. Vision and thought are interrupted.. disrupted.. A jolt of lightning unleashed, body fibers erupt in pain. I must retreat into silence. I sit, unmoving... My body is on slow motion mode. To force motion hurts... muscles resist, tremble, jerk and spasm.. or go limp and useless. I must think first, then do... without direction, without focus the body sits... sluggish, unresponsive from within. I operate my body by remote. P. Griffiths, 1997