July 13th, 2009 
admin 
Dreaming or not?
Oh, the things medication used to treat bipolar disorder do to your brain. I have had much worse side effects while taking other medications but this is down right annoying. I don’t feel like there is much difference between this and psychosis. Psychosis is when the lines between reality and imagination are blurred and it is difficult or impossible to distinguish between the two. That sums up what my mornings are like now. It’s horrible to wake up and not understand what is going on and sometimes I am not really sure of where I am. It takes me a little while to figure out what is real and what is not. Doesn’t that sound like psychosis to you? I have taken medications before that caused lucid dreams but this is much worse than anything I have ever experienced. Lamictal, or lamotrigine, is what has caused this. Sadly, I need an increase in dosage so I am sure it is only going to get worse. Wow. I have something to look forward to. (Note the sarcasm.) I have these dreams every single night without fail. I have taken Xanax several nights hoping it would make them stop so I could rest but even that doesn’t help much. Most of the time, I am very active in my dream and I wake up feeling like I ran a marathon overnight. Waking up and feeling tired doesn’t help the situation. Let me give you a little taste of what my “night life” is like now. (I feel like Walter Mitty, for crying out loud.) A few nights ago, I went to sleep only to wake up in just a few minutes. I went back to sleep and was in and out for what felt like a few hours. My husband’s phone rang and it woke me up but I laid there with my eyes closed trying to go back to sleep. It only took a minute to realize that he was talking to a woman and the conversation was very vulgar. I felt him get out of bed and turned over to see him walking through the hallway, still talking on the phone. I went back to sleep and it woke me up when he got back into bed. I asked him if he had been talking to a woman. He looked stunned but admitted that he had been. I was livid but refused to talk to him and rolled over and went back to sleep. I woke up around the time he was getting ready for work and told him I wanted a divorce. He called his supervisor and told him he wouldn’t be coming to work. He again tried to talk to me and I told him I was going back to sleep because I was tired and we could talk when I woke up. I turned over and went back to sleep and woke up a few more times. The alarm clock went off at 5 AM and woke me up. I immediately nudged him like I do every morning to get him up for work. I was still angry so I asked him again if his phone had rang during the night. He immediately picked it up to check for a missed call and told me no. I was confused and about to say something when I looked at the window and realized the sun was not yet up. The last time I remembered going to sleep was after the sun was up. I laid there a few minutes and then started putting the pieces together. I went to sleep that night and dreamed that I woke up. I repeated this in my dream for quite some time before the phone rang. The phone never rang. I checked. It was all in my dreams. I asked my husband all of this in my dream and when I asked him again once the alarm clock went off, it was actually the first time I asked him which explained why he checked his phone to see if someone had called. The reason why it was daylight when I went to sleep and then nighttime when I woke up is because I had dreamed I woke up but I was still very asleep. When I woke my husband up for work it was dark out. When I woke up later on, the sun was up and he had left for work hours earlier. He didn’t call in and none if had ever happened. It took over an hour to sort out what was real and what was not. This has happened every night this week and several times a week for about a month now. It’s never the same dream but I always wake up believing everything really happened. If psychosis is defined as being out of touch with reality, then wouldn’t this technically be a form of psychosis? Sleep psychosis, perhaps? It’s new to me and I am trying to figure it out so I can find a way to tell the difference between my dreams and reality. In lucid dreams, you understand that you’re dreaming. This is the opposite of that. I don’t realize that I am asleep and mistake my dreams for reality. Xanax isn’t helping and I feel like I haven’t slept in days even though I really have. Ugh. I have to figure out a way to deal with this.
Related posts:
Posted in 
Tags: 
