Night time Psychoses

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Has anyone else had trouble sleeping at night caused by nightmares, hallucinations, noises or voices in your head or just by your brain keeping you awake when you feel tired and want to sleep?

No voices or anything, usually my mind just keeps racing and thinking long after I want to get to sleep.

Thanks God, I don't have any problems now, save for a little bit of trouble falling asleep. However, as a child, I had problems every day. I would take at least an hour to go from wide awake to sleepy, and another hour to actually fall asleep. Then every night, when finally asleep, I'd have a nightmare that either jarred me awake or made me nervous for the entire day.

I don't have hallucinations but I do feel a little paranoia at night that I've tempered with Klonopen (anti-anxiety med) and have to have at least one light on in the house when I'm asleep. Otherwise, I'm rather nocturnal, not going to bed until five in the morning.

Psychosis? No. Perseveration? Yes.

I used to lay awake in bed for hours thinking of all the worst-case scenarios that could possibly happen and feel very freaked-out! I knew it was stupid but I couldn't resist! I overcame this with several methods which I employed simultaneously.

Logic: Could these scenarios happen? Yes. Was it very probable that they would happen? No. If they did happen would not life just continue as if they had never happened? Yes.

Making myself act calm and brave even though I wasn't: I wanted to lie on my side, curled up in a ball with the covers pulled tight around me. Instead, I'd force myself to lie splayed out, on my back with no covers at all. (This took time. At first I layed on my side but not curled up, with all covers. Then I laid on my back, still covered. Then I laid on my back with only sheet; eventually, no covers)

Deep, restful breathing, forcing my heart to slow and my mind to be at peace, not racing.

Think on God. Thinking on the biggest thing in the universe. (bigger than any suicidal, homicidal, perverted chain-saw massacreer!)

Stop reading and viewing things that are creepy, eerie, spooky, perverted, twisted or sickeningly strange. (this was hard for me, but definately was key to cleansing my mind)

After months of making these a nightly routine and practice, things began to be more calm. After a couple of years, I've never had a problem with it again UNLESS I've stayed up too late and am in a "buzzing" state.

The funny thing is, I never was afraid at night until sometime around puberty and this lasted into my young twenties!

I don't have 'night psychosis' or anything like that, but sometimes I'm strangely reluctant to go to sleep and will sit up until the wee hours watching very bad TV or reading books or surfing the web even though I'm tired and have things to do the next day and *know* I should be sleeping. When I'm on vacation or off work for a few days I often end up on a nocturnal schedule, going to sleep at 7AM or later and then waking up at 2 or 3 in the afternoon.

The worst times are when I get hooked on pattern games like Tetris. I'll try to go to sleep but I keep seeing vague puzzle pieces in my head and simply can't "let it go" enough to fall asleep.

I have the same problem with Tetris and my Rubik's Cube. Once I get focused in, I cannot get the pattern out of my head until I quit messing around with it for a day or so. It's very annoying sometimes.

I sleep with a night light. I admit it. If I don't have a little bit of illumination, I have a tendency to get all "I see people" paranoid. I also like to sleep in a sort of tent---I have a bunk bed and sleep on the bottom---behind a wall of blankets. It's a safety thing, I guess, although I've never been given cause to be afraid of the dark.

The biggest problem with trying to sleep is getting my head to stop running so fast, and what's funny is that drinking a Coke or something caffeinated tends to get me to sleep faster than when I don't. I much prefer staying up at night and sleeping in the morning, but oh well.

I'm new here but this post really interested me so I thought I'd de-lurk so I can comment.

*really quick intro* (I'll post a proper introduction the getting to know eachother forum later)
I'm a 25 yr. old undiagnosed aspie guy living in north-western Vermont.

I have on a number of occasions experienced both hallucinations and noises/voices in my head while I've been trying to go to sleep.
Ever since I was about 10 or so I have from time to time experienced something like lilliputian hallucinations or alice in wonderland syndrome. But it's not exactly like the various definitions I've read online. Essentially I'll first get a sense of a rising tension throughout my whole body, after a couple minutes it will reach a peak, and then I'll get a very clear mental picture of a particular stone that I once had (a small round piece of ocean/water smoothed white marble), and I'll feel, in a tactile sense, something which is simultaneously the smoothest and the roughest thing I have ever felt. I don't actually feel it with my fingers or my skin in any way, it's all in my head, and really hard to describe. This tactile sensation is also accompanied by another mental picture which I can't describe very well except to say that it's like yellow and black noise. I'll also feel and intense pressure inside my body, as if all my muscles and vital organs are far too large for my skin and they all want to just explode outward, but at the same time I'll feel very light and empty. Then after that my internal sense of the proportions of things will figuratively fly out the window, I'll try to picture myself lying in bed, but my body could be any size, 3 inches tall or 30 feet, the bed too could be any size, and there is no relation between my body and the bed, it might feel as if I'm a tiny insignificant gnat in an enourmous bed, or the other was around, or even both at the same time. And my mind will start racing trying to call up pictures of anything I can imagine and nothing will have any relative proportions. It's extremely hard to describe, but it's all in my head, and whenever this would happen all I would have to do to make it go away would be to turn on the light, look around, and reassure myself of the proportions of the room around me. I have never really found a good explanation for this, alice in wonderland syndrome is about the closest description I've ever found anywhere else.

I have also (less frequently) experienced noises/voices in my head and other types of hallucinations, but usually in a deeper near-sleep state known as hypnagogia. The few times when I have heard voices/noises it has usually been a loud crack, or people I know speaking total nonsense. The other type of hynagogic hallucinations are usually a little bit like seeing a parallell dimension: though my eyes are closed I can see my surroundings, but I know that what I'm seeing is not exactly the same as what I'd see if I opened my eyes. One time I was napping on the couch and I saw a 2 foot cockaroach crawling up the opposite wall, I jumped up in disgust and then realized that I was really still lying half asleep on the couch.

And twice I've woken up in a state of sourceless panic, both times the world appeared to be composed of small bright blue or bright red dots with circles around them which slowly swirled and flowed while I lay paralyzed in fear (of what I'm not sure). This only ever happened to me twice, and it was while I was taking Prozac and experiencing numerous other negative side-effects from it. [/url]

I regularly think about suicidal, homicidal chain-saw massacreer's of high moral reputation, who are not perverted at all. No i don't but that is a really fun thought.

LygoPhile wrote: I have never really found a good explanation for this, alice in wonderland syndrome is about the closest description I've ever found anywhere else.

Now that's what I call real, nighttime psychosis!! Have you ever considered how closely the mind and body work together? I wonder if your senses and body processes don't "freak out" at night trying to make the transition from wakefulness to restfulness. I think that alot of therapists would be quick to examine your mind when alot of it could be the different way in which your body reacts to stimuli or the lack of it.
You should keep a journal of your experiences with the date, times, and a run-down of what you've done that day, what you've eaten or drank (including meds), and any stresses. You could probably anylize alot that way.

My husband with AS wakes up every morning at 4am, he talks in bed about his worries and things that have happened to him. If I leave him to talk he will continue till it's time to get up around 7:30.
This has happened for nearly 25years. The other morning I let him talk for about 15 minutes then told him to go back to sleep,he did. But he doesn't hear voices.

Urm most of those i think i have had at one point or another, most of them a few years back when i still had insomnia, i suffered with it badly as a kid up until a few years ago. My sleeping is still not brilliant but much better then it was, i know what some of you mean about puzzles though, i have these 2 puzzle games called bejeweled and chuzzle and often get those stuck in my head, it's kind of irratating to be honest. Mind you i was like that with tetris as well

The reason I asked about this, is because my doctor has very little understanding about night time psychoses with people who have AS.
My doctor knows that if I take 25mg of Amitriptyline and 25mg of Diphenhydramine at bed time, I do not have any problems caused by psychoses, I am pleased that I have sorted things out now, but when I was a child the psychoses used to keep me awake most of the night, and I would feel very tired at school the next day.

NIghtmares, sometimes. I had wicked insomnia until I was 13 and put on Zyprexa.

I can be kept awake sometimes by the sound of my own pulse in ym ears, though.

Interestingly I told my therapist about this a while ago, but he was pretty dismissive of it all. He said it sounded like my brain trying to integrate or somehow come to terms with some experiences of childhood abuse. And he may have had a point, but I always felt like there was more to it than that.




That would be interesting, but I actually haven't experienced that particular hallucination in a while (over a year now). I still get flashes from time to time when my sense of proportion goes a little bit "wonky" but I haven't gone through the whole process that I described for a while now. If it starts happening again I'll definitely have to try to keep a journal though. When I was younger I found it both scary and fascinating, I felt like there was some kind of large overriding truth that was waiting to be revealed to me through those experiences, but I never figured out what it was.