Expectations?

[ewoods]

Hey everyone. This is my first post so forgive me if I'm asking questions that others have already asked. I was diagnosed with sleep apnea about a month ago and have been using my Philips System One for eight nights now. I'd really love to find out what I can expect from the treatment and if what I'm experiencing is "normal."

The first three days after using it, I woke up feeling like I was walking through heaven! No headache, no hazy feeling, no nodding off at my desk, no crashing on the couch when I got home. I didn't even fall asleep in the car during the carpool! That feeling sort of tapered off and now I sort of feel tired all the time. It's different than before. Still no headache in the morning, still no hazy feeling, I'm no longer waking up six times a night. I'm not falling asleep all the time anymore, I just feel like I WANT to sleep all the time. Does this go away? Is this just how it is? The doctor said it can take 2-4 weeks for the treatment to really be effective, but what does that mean?

Also, I've stopped dreaming. I used to be an extremely vivid dreamer. I'd have 3-4 dreams (and sometimes nightmares) per night, and I'd remember all of them in detail. Since I started using the machine, I remember having only one dream in the past eight nights, and I didn't remember a single detail about it when I woke up. Just that I had one. Is that normal?

Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide!

[Pugsy]

Also, I've stopped dreaming. I used to be an extremely vivid dreamer. I'd have 3-4 dreams (and sometimes nightmares) per night, and I'd remember all of them in detail. Since I started using the machine, I remember having only one dream in the past eight nights, and I didn't remember a single detail about it when I woke up. Just that I had one. Is that normal?

I have read that we really only remember our dreams when we wake up during one. So unless you are taking some REM suppression drugs or something like that you are probably simply sleeping through the dreams and not waking up. That's actually fairly common what you are experiencing. People with untreated OSA wake up often and sometimes OSA is worse in REM sleep where most (but not all) dreams seem to occur and thus the chance of waking up during a dream is much greater with untreated OSA.
My OSA is really bad in REM sleep. So bad that during the sleep study just about as soon as I went into REM sleep I would get hit with an apnea and an arousal would occur and bam...I was knocked right out of REM sleep...so no time to even get a good dream going.
Pre cpap...I didn't remember any dreams because I was most likely not having a chance to start dreaming.

The fact that you aren't remembering the dreams means that your sleep is much less fragmented and it's fairly common with cpap therapy. I dream a little now..and the night's that I seem to have a rather restless night (usually from non cpap related issues) I seem to remember the dreams a little more often.

Since you aren't feeling as good as you did when you first started therapy and the honeymoon stage seems to be past, maybe need to evaluate your therapy to make sure nothing exciting is going on. Please add your equipment to your profile and hopefully you will be using a machine that gathers useful data so you can monitor therapy effectiveness. If we know which machine you are using we can tell you if you can use the software or not.

If nothing exciting going on with any software reports then maybe time to look at other factors that affect how we sleep and/or feel the next day and that list is extremely long. I normally suggest looking at software reports first..gotta make sure everything looks good there first and then start some detective work.

Couple of questions though.
How many hours of sleep are you getting using the machine on an average?
Are those hours of sleep fragmented for any reason?
and are you cheating and sleeping without the mask and machine ...even for a short time?
Do you take any meds...even OTC stuff?

[chunkyfrog]

ewoods, your symptoms sound exactly like mine.
I had some improvements immediately, (maybe the result of relieving nightly stress)
More improvements were gradual, (I suspect I needed to heal)

[zorki1c]

I dream a lot more now than I did before starting CPAP. I just never got into deep enough sleep to dream before CPAP.

[BlackSpinner]

About a week after I started I slept like the dead for 10 hours a day for a few weeks. It was like my body demanded I sleep so it could repair years of damage. That tapered off and now I sleep 7.5 hours

[Julie]

Consider the possibility that you lose the Cpap air to the breeze if you mouth breathe once asleep... in which case you might need to try a full face mask, chinstrap and/or taping.