I actually blogged about this once. Here’s the entry, dated 28 September 2007:
A little while ago someone on thequestionclub asked if anyone had ever experienced sleep paralysis. I clicked on the wiki link they provided and was very pleased to find that there was actually a name for this phenomenon and I wasn’t a lone weirdo for it happening to me!
Because I find sleep patterns fascinating, I poked around and found articles about other things I frequently experience during sleep or attempts to sleep. Some of these things I know happen to pretty much everyone but they seem to happen more often to me, or perhaps they just seem more problematic to me because I have such a hard time falling and staying asleep:
- Nightmares, which I think you’re all aware I have a lot. I once read that the average person has two or three really serious nightmares a year. Sometimes I have that many in a night.
- Night terrors. As it turns out, I have “nightmares” slightly less often than I thought. At least once or twice a week, this is actually what’s happening to me.
- Exploding head syndrome. Here’s another one that made me go, “Oh my God! It has a name! And it happens to other people!”
- Somniloquy. The fancy word for sleep talking. Mine often comes in the form of word salad as I’m waking. Sometimes as I’m waking up, I hear myself rapidly babbling words that don’t make sense together. If I don’t get freaked out and I try really hard, I can slow myself down and really hear the words. It’s so weird because I don’t know where they’re coming from and they usually make sense grammatically, just not… any other way. Other times I wake up to myself telling stories, or continuing the dialogue in which I was engaged in my dream. I really hate that I do this… I’d probably volunteer to suffer with even worse insomnia if it meant I stopped talking in my sleep.
- False awakening. I’m pretty sure this happens to everyone sometimes.
- Hypnic jerk/myoclonic twitch. Another one that happens to everyone and their mother. It happens to me every single night, though, and is part of what keeps me from being able to fall asleep. And related to that is hypnogogia.