weird apnea nightmare?!?

kharyssa · Post by **kharyssa** » Sat Jul 12, 2008 3:51 pm

has anyone experienced this?

I passed out on the couch last night and my BF didn't have the heart to wake me up to move to the bed. So, I spent my first full night without the CPAP. I had a dream that I was being choked - hard - to the point where I was started to lose consciousness. Just before I blacked out in the dream, I woke up panting and gasping for breath!! I had really been choking in my sleep! OMG! I must have stopped breathing for at least 30 seconds.... scary!!

I also feel like crap and have had to drink alot of coke to get through the afternoon blahs.

You won't catch me without my machine ever again!

-kharyssa

NeedinZs · Post by **NeedinZs** » Sat Jul 12, 2008 7:27 pm

kharyssa,

That sounds scary! I hate that you went through that, but I guess it was a great reminder to never be without it again.

I've not had dreams of choking, but have fallen asleep and napped for an hour or so and absolutely could not believe how bad I felt when I woke up,
My lungs felt almost frozen up, and hurt. I felt like I hadn't breathed the whole time, and totally out of it, mentally.

Sweeter dreams tonight!

alnhwrd · Post by **alnhwrd** » Sat Jul 12, 2008 9:31 pm

Yuk! It does sound like some of my pre-cpap dreams. I would be drowning, sinking deeper and deeper, able to see the surface slipping farther and farther away, lungs trying to breath in but knowing there was no air, then waking up with my heart racing and gasping for air. Ugh! I much prefer things as they are now, where I dream, sometimes remember them, sometimes not, but they are no longer disjointed and frantic, and wake up later than I thought I would, and feel OK most of the day. It really makes you appreciate that machine!!

crossfit · Post by **crossfit** » Sat Jul 12, 2008 9:48 pm

I have had many drowning dreams as well. Choking ones seem scary too. I hate these dreams.

Insomniyak · Post by **Insomniyak** » Sat Jul 12, 2008 10:27 pm

That's happened to me already on the couch watching TV and falling asleep, maybe I should get another CPAP to keep in the living room.

crossfit · Post by **crossfit** » Sun Jul 13, 2008 12:33 pm

Okay, that is too wierd. I am not being treated yet, waiting for my titration study. So last night I dreamt that I was drowning then, within in the dream, said, "shit,I am having an apnea, better wake up".

note: I do have lucid dreams often so that part wasn't the odd thing, just that this happened last night the day after this thread.

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Babette · Post by **Babette** » Sun Jul 13, 2008 12:49 pm

I have lucid dreams too - usually a sign that I'm pretty stressed out.

I have falling dreams. I usually jerk awake flailing and feeling like I'm falling from a great height.

Too scared now to sleep without my CPAP.

LOL,
Babs

pjwalman · Post by **pjwalman** » Sun Jul 13, 2008 12:50 pm

Long before I was diagnosed or even had an inkling I might have a problem, I dreamt that I could see my body in front of me with a round glowing circle on it somewhere in the chest area, and as the circle started shrinking, I could literally feel the life being sucked out of me in the dream. When I woke up, I was hysterical, telling my husband, "Now I know what it feels like as you're dying." Once I was diagnosed but before I'd gotten my CPAP, I dreamt I was sleeping and needed to wake up but couldn't move, then suddenly realized I HAD to move or I was going to die. I THREW my body upward in both my dream and in reality, gasping for air, and realized at that point that I must have just had a doozy of an apnea. All I can say is my husband must be a saint to put up with me! (And that probably applies in many more areas than just the B.S. he's had to put up with in the snoring, nightmare, RLS-related twitching/fidgeting, and apnea-prompted middle-of-the-night panic attacks department.)

Peggy

Goofproof · Post by **Goofproof** » Sun Jul 13, 2008 12:57 pm

For years I have had a reocurring dream of being caught on a dark secluded road, and having a truck run me down, I couldn't move out of the way, because I was so weak and tired. (In real life when I was 10, my bike slipped while crossing a diagional rail road track, and I fell in the road. a semi ran on top of me, I was under his motor, bike and all, but never got hurt.)

That's probably what was the trigger for that dream, but I've had it most of my life every now and again. Come to think of it in the two years I've been on XPAP treatment I haven't had that dream, even once.

I still dream now, although before XPAP, I stopped dreaming at all. I now dream in living color again, and XPAP seems to have stopped that scary dream. Jim

pjwalman · Post by **pjwalman** » Sun Jul 13, 2008 1:10 pm

My God, Jim! What a horrible experience to go through when you were a kid!! Thank the Lord you came out of it unscathed, physically at least! What a life-shaping event, though, at that young age. Bet you spent at least a few traumatized months working through that you weren't invincible after all, as kids that age tend to believe. I know my 12-year-old is having some problems dealing with that concept right now, realizing that bad things could happen to tear his happy life apart. He tries not to lay it at my doorstep, but I know seeing his mom suddenly seeming to fall apart in front of his eyes this year has got to have contributed to that reality creeping into his brain. Makes me feel so bad, but it's not like I have any control over it either.

Peggy

crossfit · Post by **crossfit** » Sun Jul 13, 2008 1:18 pm

It is kind of funny in a way. Lucid dreaming is often considered to be something that "spiritually" aware folk do. Now I find that it is often related to simply catching up on REM when your REM deprived. So much for my spiritually advanced state! lol

kharyssa · Post by **kharyssa** » Sun Jul 13, 2008 1:24 pm

Reading everyone's dreams made me think back... before I was diagnosed I had drowning, falling so fast I couldn't catch my breath, and muscular weakness in my dreams regularly. They all started after I had my tonsils and adenoids out when i was 15. They were nightly occurrences, but they don't happen when I'm on the machine. So all that time I thought my subconscious was symbolizing, I was really just in respiratory distress. SCARY! It would sure make a neat study if a sleep doc teamed up with a psych and looked at the connection there.

DreamDiver · Post by **DreamDiver** » Sun Jul 13, 2008 5:35 pm

My dreams are so wierd sometimes, I can scarcely believe that my mind is capable of coming up with the concepts it does. I mean off the wall.

Two nights ago in one dream, I was checking role in class. One of my favorite students had been absent for two days, so I checked his desk.

I found his class journal jammed between the desktop and the bolts that barely held it to the seat armature. (The school was falling apart.) I was startled by a journal entry about "Ten ways to Commit Suicide with a Prison Towel." The writing intimated very subtly that it could be made to look like suicide. The sketches were crystal clear comic-style representations, and the descriptions very graphic in a spiral bound 80 page notebook in pigment pen and colored marker with catchy blood-curdling titles. The kid's writing was obviously brilliant though troubled, even if it was poor handwriting, and he was absent. As a teacher, I didn't know which aspect alarmed me more. I needed a smoke.

In real life, I've never been to a prison. I've never taught high school students. I've never read another person's journal entry. I'm not attracted to, nor have I ever researched methods of suicide or murder. I don't smoke and never could enjoy it, yet I felt the compulsion on my tongue and in my gut.

Where in God's little green earth could I have come up with all of that so vividly? The emotions, understandings and compulsions of a teacher... The first-hand knowledge of a brilliant student with real problems... The prison images...

I didn't get past the first four titles before I woke up. Needless to say, I couldn't sleep after that.

That's a pretty tame dream compared to some.

Another worse kind of dream is the one where the very large and smart dinosaur purposefully flattens my whole body with it's back foot - and I actually feel it when just as I wake up. It feels like the wind got knocked out of me. My body is like jelly on the bed, just from the hit of adrenalin.

About the not-being-able-to-move thing. That's a normal function of REM sleep to keep you from harming yourself in real life as you dream. If you notice this happening and don't get too alarmed, you can actually wake up in your dreams and do whatever you like in the dream - walk through walls, fly, eat things you like that you're allergic to. You also have total control over your breathing at that point. No struggling is necessary. Breathing is one motor function over which you can have total control during REM if you wake in your dream. It just takes practice.

I agree that dreams can be about bodily distress. The body does seem to try to communicate if you know how to listen, and dreams may be one method it uses when others fail. For me, the 'startling, totally-possible' dreams often happen because I have to pee. Recently I've noticed that if I try, I can suggest to myself before sleep that I hear a doorbell or an insistent knocking sound to wake me up instead. It works sometimes. That's another thing that takes practice. It's a lot nicer than imagining the seemier sides of life I've never known.

Babette · Post by **Babette** » Sun Jul 13, 2008 6:04 pm

I've always had amazingly vivid dreams. In color. I am so sad when I wake up. My dreams are so much more interesting than my real life. I often find myself day dreaming about my night dreams.

I have nightmares too. I had a particularly vivid one when I was a child - two in fact - that I remember to this day. Though they don't frighten me now. I just remember them. But at the time they were quite traumatic for me.

One thing I've always been fascinated by is my repeated tendency to build incredibly complex houses in my dreams. I think Mrs. Winchester must be haunting my dreams... I notice that they tend to come when I'm feeling particularly lonely. I seem to be populating my dreams with a fantasy house, and fantasy friends and famiy.

But they are so elaborate! My favorite is the streams that run down the hallways. I can't describe these elaborate houses. I'm not an architect. I just don't have the words for them. But they fascinate me.

Cheers,
Babs

feeling_better · Post by **feeling_better** » Sun Jul 13, 2008 7:51 pm

I think many physical condition that need attention might merge into your dreams if that happens at the right time (of dreaming). For example, the need to go to the bathroom I had felt many times as part of a dream, only to wake up and yes I had to go to the bath room. Feeling the need to wake up merging in with choking sensation or out of breath, might be another. But I had never felt the latter type ever before CPAP, and am too new to say if that will happen now.

weird apnea nightmare?!?

weird apnea nightmare?!?

amazing... so there must be a connection...

Dream Diving

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