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4:14am October 31, 2013

It freaks me out when this happens.

It doesn’t happen often, but yeesh.

I think I’ve been too sleep-deprived recently working on a project.

I finally finished it and I’ve been doing nothing but sleeping.

Anyway.

So earlier today (or technically yesterday by now)

I fell asleep in the afternoon.  Which is sort of normal.

Except I was sleeping so deeply I couldn’t wake myself up.  Any time I tried I just got another dream.  And this even though my brain was sending me the kind of dreams that are usually an attempt to get me to wake up, often associated with breathing problems.  As in, the entire thing was people chasing me with guns.  And if I had a gun to shoot back with, it wouldn’t work or I wouldn’t be able to figure out how to use it.  Meanwhile they had guns that never needed to be reloaded, could shoot around corners, and in general were bizarrely competent at finding me.  Except I had a superpower sometimes where I could move my fingers a certain way and deflect bullets, but only if I knew they were coming ahead of time.  It was all very video game, except I never play that kind of video game or watch that kind of movie or anything, so I don’t know where stuff like this comes from.  Other than that chasing me with people trying to kill me is my brain’s favorite way of telling me to wake up.

So I did wake up a few times and found that I was ridiculously weak, I remember trying to work something mechanical, I forget what, and not being able to because my hands couldn’t grasp tightly enough.  And my eyes were weirdly blurry.  And my lungs felt weird.  Not exactly weak, just weird.  And I felt sort of… gummy… all over, including in my eyes, it felt like my eyes were full of gummy stuff and so was the rest of me.  And the way my eyes were blurred was like looking through some sort of vaguely gummy substance that made everything blurry, except blinking and rubbing my eyes didn’t make it go away.

Blurred vision was not a good thing because I’d dropped something tiny on the floor.  I still found it, thanks to absurdly-honed searching-for-tiny-things skills since a neighbor uses me to search for beads she loses. And I often find beads a few millimeters or less in size.  I’m not good at visual searching for large objects because they visually break up into pieces, but I’m incredibly good at tiny objects.  Which is good for her because she runs a beading business and drops them all the time.

Anyway, after I did wake up, I couldn’t stay awake, and I kept having dreams that merged with reality so much that I couldn’t tell what I’d said to my evening staff person and what I’d dreamed about saying to him.  I’d wake up and he’d be there and I’d try to say something and fall back asleep and that happened a million times.

He was worried enough we both decided not to give me any Benadryl, which I take for nausea but we were afraid of over-sedation.

But after I’d woken up sufficiently, that weird feeling and the weakness started to fade.  And now that I’ve slept a good deal more, I’m feeling fine.

But that was really weird.  And disconcerting, at the time.  I was worried I was sick or something, because that’s not a usual feeling for me even on a really bad day.  I did take extra Mestinon just in case I was running low on acetylcholine, since that could cause weakness.  But this wasn’t just weakness, it was like extremely severe sedation, except for no good reason at all given that I hadn't taken anything sedating before it happened.